Lui Labas

type 4 Homo sapiens: defier of deities

2012-01-14T04:53:00.000-08:00

Throw me a firestorm Master of the Universe; face me down with a devil army; sick upon me your hyenas and from the sky your carrion birds. I will not budge for any overlord, potentate, president or hog-boss. And I will not budge for you. Look me in the eye and you will see. I am no baboon or lowly form from your cast of creatures. You may throw me up thirty thousand feet; roll me through the muck at the bottom of the ocean; defy me, Gentleman of All Times. You may bare your universal teeth, your sharpened fangs; you may do with me as you wish. I stand unperturbed. I revere you, but I stand as I stand, where I stand. If you are dismayed, if you are indignant, if you think me just another recalcitrant ape, Oh Masterful One, chastise me, cast me into distant space and I shall join the orbital debris without a whimper. I am a little man, but I am my own little man, Oh Great One, and I will not be constantly reminded how devastatingly immense you are and I comparatively microscopic. I did not tail my way past a million competitors, I did not inch my way to that glowing ovum against all odds to be constantly told what to do, to be demeaned by invisible forces, and to be subjected to undue scrutiny by an infinite and omniscient being.

Please remember that little men are forced to be smart in this vast world of mystery and deception. Our powers are faint, so they must be acute and accurate instead. Though we are all entranced by your game of mirrors and mystifications, we are also all just human beings. I know you are omniscient, but perhaps you have not always been paying attention, so let me make you aware of something we all share: we accept to be toyed with, we accept deprivation and indignity of all kind, and we all stand in awe before your Infinite Universe, but the fact remains, everyone here has his limits.

2012

2012-01-07T03:04:00.000-08:00

If you watched five seasons of 24 in a single sitting and it made you proud, get out. If a day’s work, in your book, is filling out government forms, get out. If you need permission or approval to hold an opinion or make an original statement, get out.

This year is not for the piss-ant, the pansy, the pushover. If you are any one or a combination of the above, get out. You will be just another jackass tripping over himself and you will waste twelve months of everybody’s time.

To a grizzly I would recommend extended hibernation. But if you are not of the hibernating class, just get out.

This is the year it all comes together. The dilettante and the doorknob have had their time. This is the year of the professional, the perfectionist, the “perseverer”, the artisan, the artist.

War looms in the Middle East. The dollar and the euro wobble in the ring. The Mayans predicted… what they predicted.

But I digress because I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about you.

If you want to participate, if you want to be more than a twiddling little figurine in a landscape of like-minded figurines. If you’re tired of being a a paper-pusher or a peon, if you want to rise up and do something, and if you want it badly, then sit up straight, get your hand out of your pants, switch off your phone and begin.

Begin by observing what you have bottled up in your heart. Observe it. Then take it out and lay it on the table and observe it some more. That’s the first thing you do.

But if you are not prepared to take this thing with both hands and wrap you fingers around it like you fully own it, like it’s the only thing you have in the world – that and the clothes on your back– if you are not prepared to do that as a minimum, soldier... get out.

You are a warthog desirous of fame and fortune

2011-12-24T08:18:00.000-08:00

You are a warthog desirous of fame and fortune. You have not the physique for the former nor the acumen for the later, but you know an opportunity when you smell one. There are in your professional circle a number of gentlemen no longer fit to take on the challenges of international business. You have noted in their deportment a laxness and in their judgment no longer the sharpness of their early years. You have decided that now is the time to undermine these sonofabitches. Room needs to be made for the underprivileged.

A warthog such as yourself must fare cautiously in all events, but in the corridors of power, quadrupeds are few and far between. You are alone eating from a trough, alone defecating on the lawn, alone in most matters except one: greed. There you are joined by many. Bankers, lawyers, brokers, councilmen, all bipeds perhaps, but all deceitful in their own right.

From the moment you rise in the morning, having removed the gunk from between your hooves and the crusts from your scratchy skin, the moment you enter the lobby of headquarters, you are on the alert, your ears perked up for whispers and your snout on the scent of rats and other vermin that gather in these parts. Sharpened by years of observation, serving under the most treacherous management class your company has seen since its founding, you have learned to turn a blind eye when a matter doesn’t concern you, to swallow your pride when it does, and to take a beating on some else’s behalf if required.

All of this you have mastered well and quickly. But there is one act of submission you have not and will never learn. You just don’t know how to give up. These sonsabitches have been trying to teach you for years. When they put out their cigarettes on those strange tusks that protrude from your snout, what do you think they’re telling you? They're saying, listen Warthog, you are a mere curiosity here, something to differentiate us from our competitors; you are here so that we may say, between deals, “we have among our senior staff a Nolan Warthog from Guinea-Bissau”.

I recognize that the alternative for you is bleak: you may try to flee, but eventually we all know you will end up as sausage on a German Christmas market, your tusks discarded and your hooves turned to Pritt Stick Glue. So I understand that you must play the game, and I understand that you must play it hard. And I know that, in essence, you are not greedy – I mean, you are just a Nolan Warthog – but none of us are really greedy, in essence, it’s just that along the way, warthog, something went wrong, terribly wrong, and now – God help us – we just don’t know how to get back.

here we go (pt.2)

2011-12-03T05:23:00.001-08:00

(pt 1)

Don’t underestimate the value of pain: the sting of urine on your butt cheeks or that choking feeling when milk runs down the wrong tube. Drink it. It’s valid. Any experience, even irritation at unknown folk fondling your feet or breathing into your face, is valid.

When you have none, experience is worth more than your weight in gold. Some you’ll have to go out and get, some you’ll receive free of charge, and some – alas – will be inflicted on you. In all events, be patient, it comes slowly (at least it will seem that way until you realize it has all come too fast). A spit bubble is experience; laughter is experience; but so is chickenpox or gonorrhea.

(Later in life when a security agent performs on you an internal cavity search for no justifiable reason, that too will be experience. But I digress…)

Anyway, congratulations, you are now no longer a complete sitting duck. You have started on your way to actually know something; you have started to experience knowledge, and with that first taste, your appetite will become insatiable. Thankfully, nature has so rigged things that it is also around this time that your eyes will clear up from the amphibian fog that has been with you for over nine months.

Open sesame. Behold the wonders of the world: cumulus clouds, primary colors, the Big Dipper, and so on and so forth.

You will be peering through these peepholes a damn awful lot, only closing them to sleep or shut-out insects and incoming particles. You will be amazed a thousand-fold before you become blasé. You will not comprehend what you have just tapped into. You will feel exalted, if not all-out Godly.

These will be your wonder years. Enjoy them because they are relatively short. Before you know it will commence six years of state-mandated training in reading, writing, arithmetic (for purposes of testing) and social exclusion, compliance and class-warfare ( purposes of… I don’t know).

Anyway, you will suffer major indignities before the age of ten. You will contract coodies and other imaginary diseases, and you will be put without your consent (or even knowledge) into any one of a number of categories, ranging from GEEK, DORK, JERK, JOCK, NERD, PERV and so on. There will be no disabusing anyone of this as there will be no proof for or against it. You will be tried and convicted by a jury of your own peers in a court that makes up laws as it goes along.

Just get through this is all I have to say.

In Phase 3 (Erections and the Enticements of Lust, so termed in the literature) you will be up late many nights doing fuck all with a gang of “dickwads” you will call your "friends". All of you – yourself included – will be under fierce hormonal attack, and often in varying stages of inebriation. Believe it or not, but you will learn a lot from these fools. Not directly – you will learn nothing from them directly – but from the experience as a whole. This is when your voice will start to break, your body will throw shit at you and your mind will become obsessed with one and one thing only. If at some stage you find yourself crying for help from the bottom of shallow ditch called teenage love, forgive me if I don’t come to the rescue. That too is part of your “experience”*.

(… to be continued)

* “Experience” may take on an altogether difference meaning at this stage if you decide that your skin, eyes, nose, tongue and ears are inadequate tools of perception and that they need to be "enhanced". Go down this road at your own peril.

here we go (pt.1)

2011-11-11T06:20:00.000-08:00

Here we go.

You’ll emerge headfirst, your skull still loose tectonic plates and your eyes almost useless. You’ll have no hand-to-eye coordination, no motor skills and not a balanced bone in your body. So forget trying to find your bearings or doing any kind of reconnaissance. You won't have time for that anyway: as soon as you’re out, a fucker in a white coat will cut you loose and you will be transferred to an adult-sized woman on a bed, the same woman – by the way – who hosted you, fed you, and kept you warm for nine months consecutive. So BE NICE! If she weeps on your face, if she cuts the flow of air to your lungs, take it. That's love.

Now. Make a fist - go on - just do it. It’ll be the size of a plum and about that soft, but it doesn’t matter, it’s symbolic, it’ll feel good. Once you’ve done that, push out a long, sharp cry; just shriek your little lungs out. With all these giants manhandling you, you'll need to put your foot down one way or the other. Besides, your voice will fill the surrounding void and it will give you a sense of the dimensions and emptiness of this place, your new home.

At this stage, if you are anything like me, you will feel a strange mixture of joy and consternation. You will feel free and liberated - somehow - but at the same time, all of this will seem just too freaky and mysterious. And that’s ok, because it is.

Finally, at the end of this long day, you will be put in a caged enclosure for the night. To rest. Don’t worry if this makes you feel like an animal; this will not last for very long, only the first few years of your life, and not (with a little luck) the remaining seventy five.

(...to be continued)

take a straight line

2011-10-16T04:07:00.000-07:00

Take a straight line, vertical. Follow it one light year. Up.

Stop. Take a rest. Then go another two.

You will be three light years from home now, if my math is right. At this point – because this is not in your hands – the content of your bladder will be sloshing around your underpants. There is no gravity, so it will stay there.

Meanwhile, you will have become aware that matters are out of the ordinary, and you will seek something familiar, something to reassure you. First urgently, then DESPERATELY. In the end you will seek ANYTHING to rest your eyes on. But you will see only blackness.

This observation will be accurate because, indeed, there will be ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FOR SEVERAL MILLION MILES IN ANY DIRECTION, not a speck of dust, not a twinkle of light.

Time will elapse. The piss in your pants you will have forgotten; likewise that morning’s scheduled PowerPoint presentation on debt guarantees. All this stuff will be far removed from your mind. And the nameless woman you left in your bedroom that morning: a mental artifact.

Having struggled outwardly, now your thoughts will scramble for a foothold, but they will be in a quagmire of their own.

However.,

Suddenly, for reasons I will not share with you, you will think that all of this has to do with the fact that too many times in your life – a disproportionate number given your age – you have been insensitive, callous, and even – let us be plain– an ASSHOLE.

Perhaps you will be right in thinking so. Who is to say. I am not here to judge, even if I hold pinpoint-specific opinions about everything in the KNOWABLE universe. Even if I was instrumental in its creation.

You will cogitate on this briefly, but before you come to any conclusion you will begin to feel EXTRAORDINARILY SMALL – microscopic – but you will ascribed this to the immensity of space and the utter soundlessness in your ears. You will NOT consider that there may be other reasons you feel this way, reasons that are, let us say, more personal or metaphorical. I posit this is not because you are unsophisticated or unliterary, but because having been an asshole so long, so consistently –

Anyway, I will not pretend to know how you feel or what motivates a person such as yourself. I will only describe the events in a kind of journalistic fashion for the purpose of general edification, since it is easy for me to see what is going on in time and space in a way that you (plural) are not able to.

True, in the early days I played a role in your affairs, but now with all this mythology surrounding my capabilities and general attitude, not to mention all of the terrible shenanigans you've participated in these past few millennia, I have washed my hands of you. So I am here as an impartial observer, an occasional commentator, but certainly not as a fan.

Back to you.

You are suspended, your pants filled with urine; in your mind, that inkling that you have been an ASSHOLE just too many times. (It gnaws at me. This word means too many things these days: interpersonal, anatomical, and so on. In French it would be trou du cul which has more edge than the American asshole, but it is not used in this context even if it is more trenchant – also French… but I digress).

First you will think of karma, but realizing you do not know exactly what it means you will become distressed and quickly move onto more familiar western tradition, in particular, all those half-way stops like purgatory, anything as long as it is not everlasting. Forgive me here if I can no longer hold back an ironic grin that will have been pressing for some time.

Anyway, at the thought that you can now somehow “make good” you will feel briefly religious and an appropriate soul-nettling torment will follow. But nothing compared to what you will experience next.

Not right away, but it will come eventually. Like a train.

TIME

Unannounced, it will penetrate your core. You will be as if impaled! It will rip right through your being. So overwhelming will be this feeling that your sense of your own body will be completely eclipsed. Eternity and endlessness will fill your center and you will feel euphoric, but at the same “time”, so to speak, you will be drenched in terror.

As with any experience (rather than state) eventually it will come to an end. And when it does you will find that morning’s breakfast, partly digested, floating before your eyes. Finally, as more fluids continue to flow from every orifice of you body, you will attempt a devastating, existential roar which will go no further than the confines of your skull, there being no gas around to transport it.

As for me, from my vantage point over here, I will take note and perhaps do a little cogitating of my own. If it takes an awfully long time, perhaps I will toy with this phrase trou du cul a little longer as I am very interested in terminology as a field of study. In all events, rest assured, I will not tarry to bring all of this to an end at the earliest opportunity

(True, I am not completely uninvolved. But that’s also a matter of perspective).

OK. Take a straight line. Vertical. Three light years the other way. You may stop at your own discretion, you know the routine now.

If you see yourself on the way down it is because you exceeded the speed of light on the way up.

If you see yourself on arrival it is because you are back where you started, in the bathroom, in front of the mirror.

type 3 Homo sapiens: old-school buckeroo

2011-09-24T04:52:00.000-07:00

Roust him outta bed, chuck him his boots and something to chomp on, get him goin’ but don’t let the sonofagun speak up, not ‘til he’s all sweated over and caked with grime, you hear. You let a gunner like that open his pie-hole befor he’s well and tired, you let him expose partions of his mind too early in the day, mark my words, soon all manner of pretense and frill ‘ll come apparent. Soon he’ll think himself a goddamn gentleman and no more lift a finger for his pops than wipe his hind-end with his own sleeve.

I says there aint no need to go about inneractin' and innerchangin’ ideas and esperiences all the goddamn time. That only stir up complications and relativizations and so forth, and no good ever come of that.

Likewise the ladies, nowadays so generally accustomated to courtesy and such hogwash that every conversation soon become a goddamn spectacle a’ feelin’ and sentimentality. A man want to recline quiet and listen to the crickets. A man want to enjoy a jug a’ ale on his lonesome. No sir. The missus have some injury must be redressed right this goddamn minute, and all heavens stop gyratin’ before she git back quiet to business as usual.

Aint nothin’ to be done about it neither. What with the innernets now and those goddamn pocket telephones they be fingerin' day long, everybody's a know-it-all but nobody look you straight in the eye no more. The world just aint what it used to be and if you think it's all goddamn magic and wonder, I got a chopped finger and a whistlin’ lung says otherwise.

day of pardon

2011-09-01T13:51:00.000-07:00

Criminal vermin, gangster overlord - thug of every stripe - whatever your position in the constellation of assholes, today I extend my hand to you in salutation. Take it. It will not happen again. Ordinarily I would arrange for you only a firing squad, but today, in a gesture of magnanimity, I salute you human to human. I say to you: how do you do? How is business? How was it beating the crap out of that teenager you sold on to become the plaything of a sheik or drug-lord?

On a regular day I would devise ways to set your ass on a spike, like in Spartacus (the-movie), and I would think how best to rally a rabble of townsmen to bombard you with rocks and leftovers. And in the evening, because I am studious, I would consult reference books at the public library to draw inspiration from the Middle Ages and the great “practitioners” of the Inquisition. But on this exceptional day of pardon, I find it in myself to commend you as an entrepreneur and a risk-taker in times of economic hardship.

Likewise, to the crack-dealing mutherfucker, I extend a kind hand of brotherhood and I say to him: How fare you gentleman? How is business in this underprivileged neighborhood? And I ask the toothless junky slobbering on himself behind me if he would please wait his turn so that I may take my time to bid this crack-dealing mutherfucker farewell.

Perhaps I will not sustain this magnanimity an entire day. Perhaps even as I take leave of this crack-dealing entrepreneur, I might already be devising ingenious ways to give him a taste of his own medicine: a slow-release, salami-sized butt-plug filled with his own product, so that this gentleman may feel in a single “sitting” the combined experience of a thousand of his loyal customers.

But no, you see, today I salute this mutherfucker, as I salute the politician and his slut, the backroom-banker (one to wage war under false pretenses so the other may kill for profit). To such kleptomaniac gangster assholes I extend a salutatory hand, knowing full well I am looking at a diseased soul with a God-complex; knowing full well that I will be scrubbing this hand with soap and hard bristles at home. You see, pressing the flesh with such a man is like clutching a hand-shaped volume of vomit. But this he will never know, nor will he know that the smile on my face is not real, just a great feat of dissimulation and self-control.

I will do my utmost, you understand. Even the most dastardly mutherfucker in the great constellation of assholes will be greeted cordially. Today.

I, dog

2011-08-16T07:03:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed this day among you, ambling down your lanes, and I take some pride in telling you that while every impulse prompted me so, I did not piss on your flower beds and pick-nick zones. I also hope you noted how quickly I refocused away from those flying objects, and how I abstained from nuzzling that Terrier's hind-end, even while it was presented to me – so to speak – on a silver platter.

Of course, I will not pretend it was easy. The smells were strong, they were alluring, and they were everywhere. Some were rancid, others were the very stench of copulation, and thus practically irresistible. But even so, I held steady and merely observed while my peers pissed on just about everything that protruded from the ground. I watched as they yelped and barked and rolled over each other to catch various objects in motion. And I watched their members swell and their tongues drip with saliva as they mounted bitches they had never laid eyes on before. I watched it all, but did not move.

On one occasion, I'll admit, I was overwhelmed and I found myself suddenly – my hind leg hiked up – releasing a few drops of urine on a telephone pole that was plastered with the stench of others. But I became aware as soon as I did it and ceased forthwith.

You see, that’s what it's all about: awareness! You have to become aware, otherwise you’re just a creature out there, chasing everything that moves and pissing on everything that doesn't.

type 2 Homo sapiens: the fashion-conscious being

2011-07-22T05:27:00.000-07:00

I would never powder my face as they did in courtly circles, but I exfoliate and moisturize, and here and there I dab a special rejuvenating ointment that costs several hundred dollars a deciliter. I would not say that I am ready to use all available modern techniques, but I do what must be done.

I am no longer what you would call “young”. This is a disadvantage in every regard except one: my wardrobe has matured with me. It spans the shoulder-padded jackets of the early eighties, to the skinny jeans and décolleté t-shirts of today. Whatever is suddenly “retro” or “vintage” I generally already own. There I have an advantage over the young man who must go out and find that item of clothing that is no longer being produced, but that everyone is looking for.

In the days of Cocktail my hair was combed back with mouse and a touch of brilliantine. Today it is longish and finger-brushed across my eyes in a style I have dubbed: windswept. It is fashionable, but difficult to maintain. I am told I am often touching it – my hair – probably for this reason, but this is not something I am ever fully aware of.

On a regular day I'll be wearing my black Ray Ban Wayfarers – I do not believe in all these new colors – and a cute little gillet cardigan I’ve owned for fifteen years. For a long time I wore only black Converse All Stars, but recently, from one day to the next, I switched to Vans and I haven’t looked back since.

Overall, I am friendly, well informed and anxious [sic] to learn about new cultures. I am ready to talk about most things, but I will not waste my time speculating on what cannot be proven one way or the other. Extraterrestrials, ESP, the Great Yeti. I will not waste my time and I will not waste yours. And please do not suggest, as others have done, that the ointment I use on my face is such a “speculative” subject.

the Great Picture Show

2011-07-10T04:18:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, boors and sophisticates, see the falling stars, see the crescent moon, see the coyotes in the desert, see the brute slap his wife, see the bimbo bop her boobs, see the cop chomp on tacos and the statesman pick is nose. See the great orchestrations, scientific, musical, sociological; see the machinations, ladies and gentlemen, political, psychological, military. See them in vivid color. See them with your nose right up against them. See them sitting down, on your feet or crouched strangely, clothed or naked. See them as you wish. And reach in with your hands like in a grab-bag and feel. You may grunt, roar and express all that you experience (Note: in most venues you will be free to do so; in others there are specific prohibitions. Please read the fine print). You will see a thousand men in bullet trains, you will see a thousand elderly sequestered, you will see a million lights blinking, and you will see darkness too. You can become a star-player, a man or woman of repute, performing great feats, physical and mental. But you can also crawl the gutter like a cockroach and taste only the most extreme and gut-wrenching sensations for which you need no qualifications at all except the blood in your veins and skin on your back. All free of charge, ladies and gentlemen. And it makes no difference to me whether you fuck yourself up completely, whether you piss on this great stage, do cartwheels or wax lyrical in the throes of love: it’s The Great Picture Show for this reason, great because it can accommodate you, me, the rat, the ruler, the rake, the great magistrate, the man with four wives, the man with one, the clerk, the laborer, the asshole, the courtesan, the monk, the dancer, the breast- and bottle-fed, the daring and the cowardly. Do as you wish. Do everything you wish, but do something. One thing you cannot do is just watch. You can try, it’s not forbidden, but… you will see.

elements of manhood

2011-07-01T11:47:00.000-07:00

First I drop a fist down on that psychotic little gadget that lets you snooze for ten minutes at a time. But the damage is done. I am awake, which means, gentlemen, that as we speak, a trillion plus brain cells are scrambling off their skinny hind-ends to serve their master.

In the meantime, I’ve opened my eyes and I am looking out across the expanse of a king-size bed. And I am dumbfounded! It seems I am ALONE, gentlemen. How the heck can this be? Is she being coy under the duvet? I thrust out my arm to inspect, but right and left is all empty space.

We skip forward.

I'm on my feet now, on a tiled floor, thrusting croutons, bacon, egg, and dairy product into my open mouth. My manhood is pendulous, but this is not unusual when I’m eating early in the morning.

We skip forward.

I’m dressed, on a sidewalk, thrusting quarters into a machine so that I may be permitted to park my three thousand-plus pounds of vehicle in this goddamn fiefdom they call a free country. I drop my fist down on this slotted machine, thinking that if I had a club or a bat I’d knock quarters out a hundred miles wide.

Instead, I draw back to deliver a headbutt that would do honor even to the great Zinedine Zidane, but a breeze hits me in the neck and I sneeze!

Hatchoum!

A completely involuntary reaction leaves me folded in two and not quite in control. I look around to see if anyone has witnessed this spasm, especially – God forbid – a woman.

We skip forward.

Near a cafe I thrust my hand into the pocket nearest my manhood. Out comes a second gadget. I press numbers. A female voice answers the call. We communicate is sparse terms: desires, options, locales. She is not coy. We agree to meet.

We skip forward.

I thrust my…

We skip forward.

Back home I thrust the remote control between the seat pillow and the armrest so that I can operate it without holding it in my hands, which are otherwise occupied. Until I fall asleep.

We skip forward.

I drop a fist down on that psychotic little gadget that lets you snooze…

aspiring tyrant, despot or autocrat

2011-06-25T08:50:00.000-07:00

Six thousand baboons on horseback, half-starved and crazy-eyed. The smell of blood and horse manure. Those were the days. I could thunder across the plains in a long beard and these apes would piss their saddles. Not anymore. Tyrannies are a dull electronic affair now, no longer hard-fought, but creeping, established by stealth and subterfuge.

So sheathe you sword, stranger, you will not need it. You will see no blood, no plunder, no rape. You will see the images - lots of them - but that's all. The images are all that matter these days. They can be disseminated to baboons worldwide almost instantaneously, but usually they are touched-up in studio first, enhanced and then narrated by “experts”, political idols and other baboons of repute.

Your tyranny will not by like mine, stranger. It will be more complex. In my day, we adhered to simple, time-honored precepts from wiser men than ourselves. Me, I followed only one: men must be either pampered or crushed because they can get revenge for small injuries, but not grievous ones*.

I feared only the dagger and the phial of arsenic, and to protect myself from both I had a fortress of men that I maintained and – it follows – pampered.

You, stranger, you will fear extradition, infamy, courts of law and complicated jurisdictions. Your enemy will be the emboldened baboon with a keyboard. Your path will be riddled with sycophants, bureaucrats and do-gooders, and behind them will be an army of baboons afflicted with the sickness of this modern age: self-importance.

I pity you, stranger.

You want my advice? Drop it. It isn’t much fun anymore. Buy a yacht. Go sailing.

…mmm, but I see you’re determined.

Well, you have money, yes, but no territory and no man to rule over. You can’t conquer land these days, not successfully, not like we used to. Some territories can be bought, but these are intemperate, depopulated zones; you could rule there in peace, but I trust this does not interest a man such as yourself.

To rule in this day age – to really rule – there is only one territory of any significance. It holds within itself all territories: it is the baboon’s mind. You rule there, stranger, and you can control the baboon without force, like magic.

An old-timer like me cannot tell you how to do this, not in this modern age, but I can tell you what you must achieve, that has not changed and it never will.

It is very simple, stranger: YOU must tell the baboon who he is; you must never permit the baboon to discover this for himself.

*Machiavelli, The Prince

letter from the galaxy (flats and tubulars IV)

2011-06-02T07:05:00.000-07:00

(flats and tubulars I) (flats and tubulars II) (flats and tubulars III)

Thank you for the footage of life where you are. I enjoyed it, but this mister sir attenboro narrates like he is pacifying a crowd of children. I silenced him mostly, except for the section on so called “primates”. There I wanted to know what he had to say because they reminded me much of your descriptions of “flats and tubulars”, and I had to wonder to what extent the two are related, if they are not one and the same

So, yes, it was interesting, but it did not help me to find you on a map, you bozo! Your so called “Terra” is just a speck of dust in a swath of stars. And this “Sun” you speak of, the star you say you are orbiting, no one has ever heard of it. Not here at least. I’m not saying you lied, Lui, maybe you got the name wrong, maybe you weren’t paying attention again. And perhaps it is not clearly visible in the sky, so just ask someone, don’t be embarrassed; they won’t expect you to know that as a foreigner.

Anyway, I hope it was worth it. I hope you’re not now asking yourself why you consented to be frozen to absolute zero, why you consented to 3450 days of capsule-sleep, and why you consented to leave behind everything you love. Do they have that where you are, Lui, love? It is possible under twice the gravitational pull and with all these aggressive quadrupeds in your midst?

I really hope you don’t regret it. I really I hope you’re not constantly asking yourself how our weekly game of Quadboard went (Gaorman and Storm are still upset with you, by the way), and I also hope these so called “flats” you couldn’t stop talking about are as “stimulating” and “fascinating” as you pronounced them. I’ll be honest, if they are at all like these primates on the footage you sent me, well, was it really worth it?

Look, let me just let it out, ok: Damn you, Lui! You’re a real jerk, you know that. I have NO idea where you are, and did you bother to send me even a few words to let me know you’re ok? No. Just some footage of creatures croaking and furry quadrupeds who do nothing but eat, sleep and attack each other in broad daylight. In the footage I watched five spotted quadrupeds attack a clayish giant with a flexible pipe hanging off his face, the “elephant” so called. They clambered onto its back, they tore at its flesh. It was horrible.

I hope you can deal, Lui, because let's be honest, you’re not exactly an adventurer. It worries me. You have to be quick on your feet with all these predators. And with twice the gravitational pull out there, compared to these quadrupeds you must be something like a tranquilized “baboon”.

I don’t hate you. I don’t envy you - god knows! - I just miss you, Lui. That’s all.

From afar, yours always,

Ps- Storm won the Quad in three

the sun

2011-04-22T06:31:00.000-07:00

I pity creatures underground. I pity the prisoner, the kidnapped man in a sack. The blind, I pity. And those peoples up North who eat seal and live out their days in obscurity, I pity them too. I pity unborn children and the pale-skinned hermit who lives holed-up. I pity schmucks with small windows and file-clerks in cubicles. Night watchmen, I pity, and conductors of the wagons-lits. I pity them all. I pity Australians too during the day; and at night, I pity me. But most of all (in increasing order), I pity the mole, the albino, the vampire.

piscine olympique

2011-04-15T10:42:00.000-07:00

HA! I’m in a pool, gentlemen. Water right and left. I splash, I gurgle, I spit water at my fellow bathers. Twice, thrice I spit. I do not hesitate just because they are elderly, and even when they call to the "bathmaster" (what do you call such a man?) I do not hesitate to do it again. And when the "bathmaster" shakes his finger, I do not flinch, gentlemen. And when I note the tremor in his voice, the consternation in his face, gentlemen, I spit and gurgle much the same. In their minds they are in the midst of a psychopath, but am I concerned, gentlemen? Am I worried what they will think of me? (the elderly quickly breaststroke to the pool’s edge) No, gentlemen, because I do not question such things, much as I do not question that so many miles beneath us, under the Earth's crust, is a creeping hellfire; much as I do not question that “galacticly”, so to speak, we are on the back-end of a dirtball, gentlemen, wafted about in deep space. No, gentlemen, I do not care to ponder such matters. Why? Because I’m in a goddamn pool, gentlemen, and because I came here to hit the diving boards, that's why!

Yes, of course, sometimes I adapt my attitude to circumstances. Sometimes, like the old savants of the east, I take the path of least resistance. Sometimes I choose not to confront the adversary frontally, sometimes I opt to ignore him instead, like with this so called "bathmaster”, who has disrobed – Speedo-ready – and who is now fretting on the pool’s edge as if attempting to expel from his anus a rubber plug. He may be an adversary, gentlemen, but do I hate this man? No, gentlemen, and nor should you. He is a fearful man and he should be pitied.

So when this so called "bathmaster" calls for reinforcement, what do I do, gentlemen?... Gentlemen! What do I do? I walk, gentlemen. I walk to the diving board, I mind my own goddamn business, gentlemen. I do not run, I walk calmly. But when I reach the ladder, I climb up lithely like a cat, all the way up to the top, to the elevation marked OLYMPIQUE (that's “olympic” for the unschooled gentlemen among you).

Come, come now, what did you think, that I would stop at the lower boards to “test the waters”, so to speak? No, gentlemen. And at such heights as these, gentlemen, do you see me diddling about? Do you see me clutching my toes on the edge, testing the bounce of the plank and such things, like these so called “professionals”. No, gentlemen! No, goddamn it, I plunge, gentlemen. I plunge in a kind of magnificent arc, spitting out spray-water on my way up and then twisting into a double corkscrew on my way down. Gentlemen, are you picturing this, gentlemen! And when I meet the surface of the water, gentlemen, and receive across my face and chest a Poseidon-smack as unholy as any, am I deterred, gentlemen? Do I back down, gentlemen? Do I really need to answer this question for you, gentlemen.

And so it is that I climb to the high diving board once again (on the ground, the "bathmaster" is still expelling his plug; reinforcement has arrived; the elderly are still paralytic on the water’s edge). You see, I have no esteem for so called “preparation", gentlemen. Preparation is for the fearful, like this fretting “bathmaster” – this man lives in fear, gentlemen! Do you wish to live in fear? I will answer that for you: you do not! – I do not fear and I do not just proceed, I venture gentlemen! you understand, exactly as I am now, twisting my flank once more into an elegant double corkscrew. And even as I do this, gentlemen, even as I descend at great speed, I am fully aware and I am able to catch sight of the elderly man and his wife looking in horror at the "psychopath" in flight. But still I am not bothered by this, nor by the fretting "bathmaster", nor by the OVERWHELMING FORCE with which I am met on the surface of the water, and which briefly shatters my consciousness and knocks every ounce of air out of my lungs. But even then, even as I sink, gentlemen – awed by my performance and suffering perhaps a little too – my mind is already preparing to do it again.

type 1 Homo sapiens: well-meaning, but crazy

2011-04-08T02:32:00.001-07:00

I had this job welding in brackets down in a ship hold. Ten hours a day breathing in oxy-acetylene. Then one night I lost my temper. One night a foul-mouth Filipino gave me lip and I punched him in the face, knocked his teeth out. They fired me on the spot.

Good riddance, right? Ten hours a day lying on your back with a welding torch. Not so, my friend. I spent the next six weeks wandering the dockyards in desolation. You can only sleep so many hours, Labas, you can only consume so much, and even porn, end of the day, gets boring... You follow? ... So what do you do? What does a man do?

In three months, I drank a sea of liquor in half-liter installments, and every hooker in a hundred mile radius knew me by name. I partook, Labas, as if womankind was on the brink of extinction. My pecker was in flames, my pockets empty, and my brain – God forgive me – a bundle of scar-tissue. Still now my eye twitches.

Christ, Rico!

Naaah. Not to worry, Labas. Don’t use it much – my brain – and my pecker’s still good.

You’re a desperate man, Rico.

You’re a keen observer, Labas… You see this?

Your hands.

There’s callus here a quarter inch thick. This is my legacy. A quarter inch of bone-hard skin. I can’t feel a goddamn thing with these claws, but it’s all written here. Twenty years worth.

No palm readings for you then, Rico.

Don’t need ‘em. The future's set for me.

Nothing’s set Rico.

I’m a welder, Labas. I weld. But you wouldn’t understand that, you probably never worked a day in your life.

Not true!! I must have worked five, six, at least.

Ha ha. I like you, Labas, I like you. Think of that, us meeting in a place like this.

I was hungry. You were here. Simple physics, Rico.

You’re pretty goddamn prosaic for a nomad, Labas.

And you're pretty goddamn literate for a dockworker, Rico. Prosaic! Christ. Pass the salt, will ye.

emotions (flats and tubulars III)

2011-03-12T14:49:00.001-08:00

(flats and tubulars I) (flats and tubulars II)

This here – you see – that’s your heart. You don’t fool around with this thing. This is your engine, this is where life is automated, where it begins and ends. Its status is unrivaled. There is even mythology amongst humans that it is the main transport hub of emotions.

Of what?

e-MO-tions. We’ll get to that, sergeant...

Now, this here, your liver, it’s an unseemly thing – it looks a lot like some of our waterborne entities back home, don’t you think? – but it does critical work. It extracts substances from the body, substances that, if accumulated, would kill you deader than a hammer. It’s not the heart – in the hierarchy of organs – but it’s damn important anyway –

Wow, what was that!?

That, sergeant, is just one of many fluid discharges. This one you saw is the most regular but perhaps the least important, even if its yellow color and spray-arc are impressive. There are many more fluids secreted, ejaculated, expelled, and so forth; and there are also some fluids better kept in the body. This red stuff, for instance, you lose too much of that and – again – kill you deader than a hammer.

You like that expression, don’t you sir?

I do. Now, before I forget, there may be an occasion when you receive a secretion from this, your pineal gland – right here, in the center of your head. It is possible you will experience this as a rush of godliness, of transcendence, but I must remind you – firmly, sergeant – that you are not a god, not here, not amongst these Men. You must not forget that. It is perhaps the most important information I give you today. You are not a god. Is that understood, sergeant?

Yes.

Yes, what?

Yes, sir.

Good. OK. Now, except for visits to the lavatory, which I showed you how to carry out, you will not have to worry your head too much about these secretions and all this hydrology. It is all self-regulating. This means you can spend all your time, all your waking hours, in the business of being conscious, of being self-aware… Sergeant! Sergeant, wipe that smile off your face. Sergeant! Do you imagine, sergeant, this will be recreational in nature, sergeant? Do you expect to be entertained, sergeant? Do you expect sergeant, that all of this is for the sergeant’s personal amusement?

No, sir!

Good! Now listen to me carefully. Listen to me very carefully. You are, for all practical purposes, unschooled; your training is, I’m sorry to say, laughable – a one day excursion to an uninhabited Pacific isle. For this reason, sergeant, mark my words, your experience will be as follows: you will be treading a tight rope; on your right will be self-indulgence, self-aggrandizement, self-glorification, complete delusion, sergeant; and gaping to your left – equally abysmal – self-abasement, self-nullification – the opposite; everything will be paired, you’ll see. And, even if you make it, sergeant, the risk that you will degenerate in some fashion is high. These – all that I am telling you – these are the base writhings of Man. No matter if you are male or female, you’ll have no recourse but to deal with this... And all of it will begin right… here.

WOOOW!

Did you feel that, sergeant?

YES!

And that, did you feel that, sergeant?

Yes.. YES SIR!

These, sergeant, these are sensations. You will receive these practically in a continuous stream. There is no way to switch this off. You’ll have to manage five channels every waking moment of the day. These signals do not stop, it’s a goddamn carnival. It drove me practically crazy. Sound – this one here – you will find especially disturbing. Its persistence. Dogs will bark, infants will cry, machinery will rattle, and all of it will be sensed by you whether you like it or not.

But it will be the least of your troubles, sergeant. The real trouble lies elsewhere. The real trouble is non-material, its source uncertain, and yet it is all pervasive, like an overlay on all human life. At times it will force cries of joy from your mouth, at others, water will stream down your face inexplicably. These, sergeant, these are emotions.

Ah, you mentioned those earlier sir, you said –

Shut up, sergeant. Shut up and feel… this!

Holy God! STOP!

Sergeant. This is your heaviest baggage. Correction: it is not heavy, and nor is it light. It is both. It can be weightless or heavy as lead. You will be mystified by the vastness this pallet. There are not five, there are hundreds, thousands; they twin up in pairs and triplets, they wrap themselves around kin-sensations to form permutations; they command not by word, but by intensity alone, so the gradation is endless. You will not comprehend the multi-layered and at times seeming deceitfulness of these, but you will understand why some humans are governed by their emotions, completely and utterly, and why some keep them tight in an iron grip of will. But none are immune. And nor will you be.

As I mentioned, there is mythology that emotions are connected in some way to the heart. But between you and me, sergeant, this is propaganda; an effort to ennoble the emotion, to give it a cachet it does not always deserve. In truth, these emotions seem to originate in a part of the body much uglier even than the liver: the stomach, sergeant. Right here.

I thought this was a digestive pouch?

It is. But it makes sense. You will understand.

Now sergeant, I cannot guarantee that these emotions will not sometimes get the better of you. In fact, it is almost certain that they will. All I can hope for is that you will be able to exercise enough self-control, because if you do not, you will fall… at first only on a personal level, but eventually you will fall publicly, shamefully, and, in the worst case, into the hands of the law. And then, sergeant, if this happens, I will not be able to do anything for you. Their system of justice is opaque and their enforcers maniacal. I do not wish to scare you sergeant, but you must go easy the first few weeks, that’s all. Go easy.

To conclude. I’m sure you are anxious to know what you will be. I will tell you now. You will be a male, a tubular as we call them. We deliberated at length and we decided you will be safer as a tubular. Tubulars are less impulsive – so they say – and physically stronger, albeit at times rather stupid. As for the tubular itself – this appendage here – I must ask you to keep your hands off of it for a while, at least until you have understood the mores of the land. If you don’t, if you insist on acting out every goddamn impulse, as some have done, you will not last. I guarantee it. Is that understood?

Yes sir.

Ok. Now, one last thing. These sensations, these emotions, together, they will envelop you, enthrall you, send you up in a whirlwind. You will be enchanted and you will feel godly in a way that you have never experienced before. It will seem easy and, in some respect, more authentic. You will see. I will not be able to restrain this in you, but I do ask this: never allow yourself to forget who you are or where you came from, sergeant. Do not ever forget. We do not want to lose you. We have lost one already, and even one is too much.

You mean, Lui.

Yes, sergeant, Lui Labas.

technocrat in hiding

2011-02-11T00:42:00.000-08:00

The best is to drill straight down with a diamond-core drill bit. Get a roughneck to handle the pipe lengths and maybe a works manager to supervise. About 30,000 feet should be enough. You’ll hit alluvial sands first, then some sandstone deposits, and in these parts you could hit pockets of methane, so unless you want your house blown to kingdom come, get yourself a geologist too so you know where the hell you’re going.

Also, I would advise you to do your drilling after midnight, or you’re going to have every pee-brain peeping-tom in your neighborhood noseying in on you. You don’t want that. Don’t worry about the noise, just run the generator out of your kitchen. Good ones will sound like washing machines. Besides, it will only take a couple of days anyway.

Now, you won’t have to do much in the way of manual labor yourself, which is good because you’ll need some time to prepare mentally. I don’t need to tell you that this guy is a mean motherfucker, and he doesn’t take to being barged in on by commoners like you an me. He’ll humor you; maybe tell you you haven’t made an appointment and all that jazz, but don’t be fooled.

Oh and forget all this talk about fire and brimstone. Think of him as a technocrat. They say he runs most of his operation off a drafting board, with a ruler and a mechanical pencil. You will not be impressed by his quarters either. They are functional and bare. Sure, it’s hot down there, but not excessively. Your preparation will be mental, like I said, not physical.

I’m going to be honest with you now, you might be dead before you get a hundred feet below ground. Or he might decide to kill you after he’s shaken your hand. Who knows. It will depend on his disposition and whether his playthings above ground are working efficiently enough to bring his plan to fruition. It’s really a matter of odds. There’s no way of telling beforehand. But I should warn you, all this stuff going on in Egypt is probably trying patience, so… well, let’s just say I would be betting against you right now.

I still don’t understand why you are so keen to do this. Bare minimum you’re going to fuck up the floor beams in your kitchen, not to mention what you might unleash on a grander scale. He’s the inventor of mayhem, the predecessor to all things evil, remember. And you can't do anything to him anyway. The gun you bought for this expedition will melt in your hands, mark my words.

I appreciate the concern, but I’m going down there precisely because I don’t think there’s anyone down there at all. That’s why. Because I think it's all a joke.

A joke. You're probably right. But why the gun then?

The gun? Well… I mean… just in case he’s down there after all – that infinitesimal chance – and if he’s there, I want to be the guy who sabotaged – the guy who tried to sabotage his masterplan.

Yeah, the thing is, man, how will you know you aren’t part of it? That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. That's what he's so good at.

basic instructions

2011-01-23T02:43:00.000-08:00

It will take a little getting used to, I realize that, but after a while you’ll get into it – trust me – and soon, it’ll just take over. That’s actually the trick, to let it take over. Once you do that, it’s plain sailing, my friend. Resources will be freed up to satisfy your needs, entertainment offered up on a platter. You won’t have to do a thing. All your communications will be cellular; your contacts will never inconvenience you – unless you want them to – they will appear only as a scattering of one-liners across the web. In fact, there will be nothing physical for you to bother about. Your health will be an obscure mechanism in the hands of savant chemists from industry. If neurons misfire in your brain or your heart skips a beat, they’ll have chemicals for that. But you will have no time to question any of this anyway because your entire being will be absorbed by a comprehensive schedule of activities.

At 7 AM a siren will rip apart your dream state – perhaps the only downside in this arrangement – but soon you will be soothed again, naked under a fountain of warm water (by the way, take note, this might be the only time you have for yourself, I mean the only time to reflect. Use it wisely. Some people sing, others touch themselves and whatnot; whatever’s your bag, my friend).

We move forward.

Perhaps you will own a cat. So now you will apportion it a ration of food, scooped out of a tin can. Meanwhile – because there is no time to waste – coffee will be pressed through a funnel into a receptacle, and shortly it will enter your body as the only source of nutrients probably for the next three to four hours. But not to worry, nothing you will be doing will require much in the way of calories.

Now the day begins in earnest. (If it seems a little rushed, believe me, it will slow down from this point forward).

Immediately on arrival at your place of business, your attention will be drawn and then fixed on a luminous screen about two feet from your face, and it will be maintained in a semi-hypnotic focus probably for the rest of the day.

The whole day?

Yes. Well, perhaps you will be distracted on occasion by colleagues, women especially. You will notice, for instance, that her blouse is open down to the foot of her cleavage, which you will be able to see when she bends forward. This will occupy your mind. Perhaps it will even prompt some reflection, and perhaps you will be inspired to jot down your thoughts succinctly on the web for all the world to read: we are separated by a chasm that seem unbridgeable, something light. But after that, you will resume your work.

You see, there’s nothing to it. You'll do fine. The only thing is the siren in the morning. For the rest, like I said, it's plain sailing.

Oh, before I forget, one more thing. Just a friendly piece of advice: update your status once in a while, every week or so, or people might think you’re dead.

100th post

2011-01-06T10:31:00.000-08:00

HA! THUS I ENTER COMPADRES! With puffed chest, ballyhooing into the New Year! I come chanting and cheering, trailing mud and confetti! Why? Because I’m a guy with panache and joie de vivre you dirtwad! I’m the guy you want at your party, the guy with the cool hair and the fast repartee, I’m the dude everyone talks about, the guy living the life. That’s me. I’m the 100th post on Lui Labas’ blog. The guy with panache, the guy throwing confetti in your face, the guy who knows how to have good time, fuckers! Yeah!! I’m the dude you wish you were, with the life you wised you had. As for the mud on your rug, that’s because I’m a free spirit you jerk-off. I live in the real word, I live with my boots to the ground, not pent up in an apartment like you. I live the life. And guess what, I even come bearing gifts, you cheapskate: a cheese grater – didn’t have one of these, did ya? – and a jar of goddamn pickles. Oh, and for your kid, here, a box of raisins you little snotface. I’m the 100th goddamn post on Lui Labas’ blog. I’m the guy with panache. I’m the guy, thirty years from now you’re gonna look back and think to yourself, fuck me, why wasn’t I more like 100th-post-guy on Lui Labas’ blog. The guy with the confetti, bearing gifts. WHY? WHY? WHY? Such panache, such joie de vivre!

[CUUUUUUUUUUUUT!]

Jesus Christ! I’m so sorry. I’m soooo sorry. They warned me about him – it’s me, it’s Lui Labas – they warned me about 100th-post-guy. They said he would come. They warned me about his “panache” too. But Jesus, I didn’t know he would be so obnoxious. I’m really sorry about the rug. You can vacuum the confetti. But I’m really sorry about the mud.

Anyway, for what it's worth, happy new year.

Lui

Ps- One more thing, don’t eat the pickles, they’re not edible, I don’t even think it’s food.

School for Authoritarian Morons

2010-12-17T02:57:00.000-08:00

Before a hound was sent to sniff out the scent of explosives near my crotch, a qualified moron pawed my body for weapons. Then, a station further, a second moron flashed his badge and waxed authoritarian while he scrutinized my papers. He took his time this man, asked me a lot of questions, but he never looked at me directly. I suspect this was nothing personal, just basic training from the School for Authoritarian Morons. Finally, this same moronic gentleman brought down a fist-sized stamp on my papers and waved me through.

It did startle me a little – the stamp – I think it startled sniffer-dog too; I noticed his tongue began to water immediately when the stamp hit the table – thud – straight out of the Pavlov playbook.

So yes, a little startled, but overall I was pleased. I thought it most correct that the eight-year old with the water-gun in front of me should be pulled aside, his weapon confiscated, and his parents separated for interrogation. And I felt comforted by the panoramic eye looking down at all of us, safely corralled below; and by the knowledge that somewhere, at a monitoring station behind the scenes, we were being watched by yet more able graduates from the prestigious School for Authoritarian Morons.

In my socks, holding up my beltless pants, I felt – how shall I say – a sense of safety. I thought of the bombings Pavlov-the-hound must have foiled, and I thought of all the dastardly jackals that had been apprehended at this very gateway, by these very moronic gentlemen, and I was just so grateful for the School for Authoritarian Morons and its able alumni.

Was I inconvenienced? Perhaps a little. But I considered I had not been unduly detained, only long enough to explain that the "suspicious hard spots" Moron One had flagged were in fact merely bones from my skeleton – skinny as I am – and not deadly weapons concealed under my skin. But once all this was cleared up, I was permitted to put my shoes back on and walk straight through, no questions asked.

Think what peace of mind! My concern was no longer being blown to smithereens at thirty-five thousand feet, just the Athlete’s foot I was probably contracting walking in socks where millions of slobs had stood before me, awaiting Pavlov’s muzzle and the able hands of an elite graduate from the School for Authoritarian Morons.

Bee, it’s your birthday!

2010-12-05T04:16:00.000-08:00

Little sister, you are probably in Milan skipping presto across a piazza, humming out of the Hank Williams songbook. Me, I’m in a goddamn snowstorm, so pick up your phone, will ye. My fingers are stalagmites as is, and if you don’t hurry up, these little tweety birds pecking crumbs at my feet’ll get me so soft hearted, I may go all Holden Caulfield on you again.

Voicemail

Ok then. Here goes: Joyeux Anniversaaaire ♪♫♫♫ hmm mm mm hmm hm mm ♪♫♫ joyeux AAAnIIIversairUUh ♪♪♪♫♫ ♪♪ joyeux AAAnIIversaaaaaaaire ♫♫

Happy birthday, little sister. Happy birthday.

I still remember with fondness your birthday party way back, how you sent that clod from Belgrade running with a projectile-to-crotch. I believe it was your clog that time, but you were just as precise with bottines, flip-flops or velcro sneaks. I also remember with fondness – when it was not turned on me – your evil eye, that laser-dart from your pupils, feared across Zagreb by all youths under ten. So be careful, Don Juans on the piazza, she’s a feisty little miss, my sister.

And I am most fond of her. Especially when her laser is turned off and she is humming tunes like now. Then she a spark of light in this great dust cloud we inhabit, and which – to your great annoyance , I know, little sis – we must share with just too many darned dullards, weasels and clods. Aren’t you lucky to have a brother like me then, huh? Ha!

Happy birthday.

Your brother,

Lui

flats and tubulars II

2010-11-28T04:30:00.000-08:00

(flats and tubulars I) (enter Shitbird)

I roll out of bed and slip into knee-high socks just before my feet hit the floor, a mixture of rock, gravel and earth, a reminder that I am below ground. I ignore the cross-border shelling on the radio and the sniveling little smart-ass from the BBC reporting on it. I slap some jam on butterless toast and hum Boys of Summer, and I scratch myself just above that useless piece of bone at the bottom of your spine – a reminder that once, a long time ago, we had tails.

Then, for reasons only I am aware of, I think of that snotty squirt I punched in the nose that summer down in Dubrovnik, and I stop what I’m doing, what with all that blood running down his face. But Boys of Summer cuts in and I am humming again, chewing toast as North Korea threatens the South with total annihilation.

The guy with jam on his face, the guy humming Boys of Summer, that’s Lui Labas, and we are inside his head. You should not be asking yourself whether a young man like Lui ought to be humming such a tune at daybreak wearing y-fronts and socks, and what kind of message that sends. Instead, you should be asking yourself about the guy sitting across from him, the guy in the suit scribbling numbers in a notebook – that would be Shitbird – scribbling and shaking his fountain pen that is threatening to dry up in his hand as he prepares to sum the Grand Total of his and Lui’s spectacular financial straits. And you should be concerned with the Yak-haired Yeti, three heads taller than either of them, standing at the stove preparing oeuf-au-plat for his guests.

These should be your concerns. Plus, above ground, hovering in the ionosphere in a small carbon-molecule craft are two guys you should also be concerned with; two guys typing up a report about their observations on the ground and the best way to impress their sergeant-superior. Especially how to sell to him that the footage they hold in their hands, showing flats and tubulars in a ritual interlocking of limbs, was indeed recorded live by them, and is not part of an elaborate montage recorded – typically – on the Golden Coast of the Americas, and sold as compact discs at refueling posts along transport corridors, so called, highways.

Why can’t we just tell him we recorded it ourselves?

Because he’ll know we’re lying.

Why? He’d have to track down the flats in question?

Oh yeah, and when he asks you how you managed to get right up against that flat, right in the middle of the action, without being seen, what are you going to tell him then, you dipstick?

No, no, we just tell him we were PART of the action.

in your heart, a kamikaze

2010-11-13T01:32:00.000-08:00

I am told we are not bushfires, but human beings. We congregate and interact peaceably; we shake hands and rub elbows. On occasion we binge on substance and fill our bellies to sickness with foodstuff. On occasion we vomit in corridors and fire off guns at passersby. On occasion we penetrate damsels and tear clothes from their bodies – the vicious among us, without permission. On occasion we wear our hatred as a badge of honor and rampage without restraint – the Kazakhs were Huns once; the Swedes Visigoths – but all in all, history aside, we are a kindly folk when we snicker at the lamentations of housewives on the tube. We are a kindly folk when we prepare macaroni and wonder about boiling points and condensation in the fridge. We are a kindly folk when we pick up dog turds with plastic gloves. Kindly, when amazed at the size of this orbiting landmass that houses our skinny asses. Kindly even when we grovel, when we look like shit, and when we suck in a big way.

But don't be fooled. In your heart is a wiry, short-legged kamikaze. He has no name (unless you have given him one). He does not fuss over he-said-she-said, and he does not give two turds about what is cool and what is not. But he will, at the drop of a hat, throw himself unarmed at an enemy barrage; and we will, with his bare fists, fight off an angry mob of humans to save your skinny ass.

Yes, he’s Japanese, yes, he doesn’t speak a word of English, yes, yes, yes. So what! He may look a bit funny and “old world”, he may be impetuous and unkindly at times, and he won't pick up dog turds, but he’s your kamikaze, and at the end of the day he’s also your man against conquering Huns and Visigoths, not the he nor she in he-said-she-said. So when he shows his face in your heart of hearts, when he gets up to show himself, DO NOT act like you don’t know him! Put down your i-phone, get off your skinny ass and show him some respect.

Don't be a pansy.

enter Shitbird

2010-11-04T14:41:00.001-07:00

[Aloysius Constantine Shitbird: 5ft 4. Colorblind. Cyprio-Montenegrin. Scorpio. Skeptic. Pain-in-the-ass]

We have been traversing the European continent without respite for well-nigh two months now, laying bricks in Bratislava, groveling for food in Dortmunt, and from Lille , escaping by the skin of our teeth.

It has been a lively peregrination, without a doubt, but crisscrossing thus has left us stranded on German soil, currently near Frankfurt, out of funds, out of food, and looking for a way home.

We spent most of yesterday debating what home is, exactly – not a simple matter – and it might have been shortened considerably were it not for Lui’s obsession of late with an alleged encounter on a rooftop two weeks ago.

I was out taking a piss, Shitbird, when these two wraithy dudes in uniform come down from the heavens. Barely had time to tuck in my prick and these guys were huddled around me looking quizzical and scientific. Plus, no gunboat overhead – no flashing saucers, nothing – so how these yoyos alighted on that rooftops, Shitbird, is a mystery, ungodly and unprovable.

Exactly my point.

What do you mean?

Never mind.

Anyway, one guy had a notepad, some kind of little back-lit clipboard, and a scribbler to hand. Oh, and guess what... are you listening?

All ears, Labas.

Guess what else they had? Both of them... Opposable thumbs, Shitbird. Opposable freakin' thumbs.

I did not wish to enter into a discussion that would surely escalate into an argument about APES. Neither of us knows goddamn thing about apes, so I insisted we not discuss the opposable thumb, but use it, by the side of the fucking road, with a cardboard sign that reads ROTTERDAM CITY, which we had decided by unanimous vote would be “home” for the next couple weeks (Lui knows a place “underground” where we can crash).

Another thing, it was dark, but I coulda sworn I saw a zipper on that sucker. Horizontal, round his crotch

So what?

Think for a minute, Shitbird. Who do you think came up with the zipper? The guys with the backlit clipboard, or the guy with his pants down? What does that tell you?

What it tells me Lui, is that we are sitting here on the outskirts of Frankfurt wasting precious time. When this nut-bread you are chewing on is finished, we will be eating grass, you piss-ant. So stop your bullshit about alien technology.

Look, I'm telling you what I saw.

I was there, don’t you think I would have seen these little green men?

Nope. Beyond your capabilities my friend.

And why the hell is that?

Because you’re colorblind, Aloysius.

flats and tubulars

2010-10-25T07:41:00.000-07:00

There are two types: one has a “tubular” appendage suspended between the legs; as distinguished by the “flat” surface in the same area of the other. Interaction between them is erratic, often volatile, at times deadly. But in all cases the types interlock limbs at one point and do a kind dance that ends in a crescendo of cries and leaves both entities defunct for up to several minutes depending on the stamina and age of the entities. This interlocking is rarely discussed, which is curious because it is encouraged broadly: there are visuals everywhere, sir, on billboards and monitors, on street corners and transit corridors. I must add – as a medical curiosity, sir – that I experienced uncommon titillations once or twice in the presence of a flat. The tubulars somehow leave me cold.

Enough. Case-specifics, sergeant!

The entity in question goes by the appellation Lui Labas. He is below average in weight and muscle mass. We were not able to gauge his intellectual capacity.

Why not?

In the absence of specific testing, sir, we are unable to determine whether he is a genius or a driveling retard. We suspect the latter. We caught him on a rooftop, pissing down a drainpipe downtown Frankfurt – that’s Germany, sir, the theater of that bestial war I mentioned last time.

Oh yes, the sputtering officer with the moustache.

Correct.

Sir, I think I should tell you, we may be wasting our time. The spectrum among these entities is wide. I’m not sure this Labas is representative material.

What makes you think so?

His displacements seem completely aimless – he behaves like a decoy – and more to the point, it seems his utterances are aimless too. We have noted frequent rolling of eye-orbs in his interlocutors, and our sources have told us that this is a way to indicate that what is being said is “total fucking nonsense” and “to cease forthwith”.

Circumstantial, sergeant. Get more evidence. Now, what of his companion?

Entity Labas has been in the company of a tubular who goes by the appellation Shitbird – not a name, as such, but a compound of terms. To wit: “excrement” and “winged creature of flight”.

They have animals that fly?

Correct.

His companion can fly?

No sir, he is named after such a creature.

What of this “excrement” business, then?

Unclear, sir.

Strange fucking peoples.

Agreed.

Come back when you know more… Oh, and sergeant, get some footage on this “interlocking of limbs” – flats and tubulars – I am curious as to these titillations.

you and me in a capsule skyward

2010-09-10T05:05:00.000-07:00

forgot I had this Bic in my back pocket when I up and ran, when I ditched this land of snickering schnooks, when I left these human squirts to their jeering and shit-talking and two-bit games, when I grabbed you by the hand, grabbed my courage by the balls and pressed this button here that says DON’T TOUCH – whip whap! – and in a flash upped this craft to near the speed of light.

You and me in a capsule skyward, two peas in a pod blasting into the unknown. Through the porthole left, a billion cubic feet of nothing. Through the rear the Pacific, a pissy puddle on a ball. And yonder, just out, my sweet, swishing clouds of dust and incalculable space.

No snickering schnooks here… nope.

I jest. But in truth I am scared shitless. I squeeze your hand and call you sweet things mon amour, mon lapin and hope for a godly figure to press a finger on this jangling box of gears to slow it the fuck down. This speed of light's no good when a man’s got eyes and YOU, mon amour, to behold.

Everything is vortex and spiraling tunnels. Everything is speed and accelerations off-the-chart. We are a speck in the infinite, but we are together a speck. Our system none can fathom – not even I – it fits in a capsule skyward, it fits in a hand, it fits right here, between this thought and the next.

Speed of snail, speed of sound, speed of light – it matters not – because you and me, we are the system.

Lui

ps- mon cœur, do not pull the lever under the stock of canned beans if you want to stay in once piece, i.e. retain your current incarnation, love, which I am fondly touching.

way of the world

2010-08-18T13:30:00.001-07:00

The way I see it, you don’t got a platter of choices, compadre. This is it. Take it or leave it. But why the sour face? You’re a young man. Plenty a’ merriment in store for you. You can bed dames half a lifetime yet. My advice, ‘f I may, try to turn a decent buck early on, and safeguard your golden years. This is the way of the world. This is how it’s done. Score a dame, build a fort, push out progeny and safeguard your golden years. Way of the world. Don’t be a lonely bastard. You roam this earth a lonely bastard, down the road you’ll be an undeserving sucker astraddle your own sorrows, buckeroo. Way of the world. That's how it is. But for now, just enjoy the dames and the myriad gadgetries on offer. Hell, these modern times is full of such contraptions, all for your goddamn entertainment. Me, alls we had was chewin’ tobacco and the pictures back when I was your age. So stop holding out for somethin' better. Alls this thinking’s like sand in the cogs ‘ll jam the whole kit and caboodle.

I know, I know, every now and then you get a sense of grander things and whatnot, maybe a goddamn illumination, and you tear yourself up, Christ Lord, I sold myself short. But fret no more friend, I’m twice your age – Whatsit yall youngsters say: been there, done that – and as sure as I’m standing here, this is all ye gonna get. Mark my words. Good as gold. So go ‘head. Stand in line with the rest, have no shame. Sure, these bozos don’t know their buttholes from the back of their hand. So you’re as little smarter, so you're a little wiser. So what. Dismount that high-horse forthwith amigo, it’s a goddamn cripple, take you nowhere. And hey, don’t think these dames want ‘ny better. Don’t think these dames are lookin’ out for a greater scheme but a few young’uns to push about and a bit one-two in the sack when the moon’s right. Way of the world, compadre. You’re looking for lightness of spirit? I’ve reached down panties in my day – extra-marital, extra-curricular, all colors and flavors – look no further, there’s your goddamn lightness of spirit. But no need for such chicanery in this day and age – remember alls we had was chewin’ tobacco and the pictures – you got gadgets and contraptions as far as the eye can see… all for your goddamn entertainment.

keywords in the electronic age

2010-07-24T03:56:00.000-07:00

Maybe if you were able to give me your undivided attention for one minute we could have some kind of conversation, but I see that I’ve lost it already. So I guess I can say pretty much whatever is on my mind while you rearrange that lock of hair that has come out of position.

Do I envy you your self-involvement? At times, yes. How uncomplicated it must be to confine your attention solely to the twitches of your own body and the stimulus-response pulses of its centerpiece, your pampered, oft fondled and needlessly scratched genitalia. So… yes.

But the outside world is worth a glance too. Just last week I was on the ocean floor. I played with razor clams and built small forts from dead plankton. I walked over sandwaves and listened for the ultrasound that – it is said – large sea mammals can hear from hundreds of miles off. I imagine that in my absence you had those highlights done, and that the girl who did them spoke seamlessly, but that you listened, as you are now, alert only to key words and phrases. Words like this one: mutherfucker!

Sorry, what dyou say?

That was a little strong, and I doubt your hairdresser squeezed that one in, but it illustrates my point: briefly your head was extracted out of the long A-hole of self-absorption and entertainment you spend most of your time in, your own body, conveniently, as your principal point of entry.

Keywords. You want to reach your fellow man, then you need to get his attention, and without keywords, in this day and age, you are nowhere.

Now – I agree – most of these words are not in themselves very special, and usually they are bandied about without purpose. Choosing them, arranging them, that is where skill enters in. I make no claims of mastery here; I am an apprentice and I wish to be no more. It is a means to me, not an end. (Point of information: when applied to whole populations, it is called advertising or propaganda and we are not interested in that here.)

Of course, it goes without saying that some words are more powerful than others; some words have a greater or lesser degree of impingement. You have to be aware of that. This is key. This one for instance, pussy!

Woaah Labas, what the fuck, what’s on your mind little man?

is a powerful word. But rather a wild card for it can elicit hostility as easily as it can subjugation, and just as quickly it can put a grown man to sleep. It is not a terribly useful word. It is powerful, but unpredictable, and thus – for our purposes – useless.

When you speak to a man, you want to sting lightly like nettle. You mustn’t wish to excite his emotions in any significant way. Some argue that it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you get his sorry head out of his ass; call him a cocksucker, knock him in the fucking face if you have. But I am not of this opinion. No, surprise him, be ingenious, juggle keywords and nettle lightly because, remember, down the line – and maybe faster than you think – you will be speaking to him spirit to spirit, and I think at this point he will remember that you called him a cocksucker, and I just think that is no way to start a conversation.

bottom of the ocean

2010-06-17T06:51:00.000-07:00

Bottom of the ocean, thirty leagues down a canyon, a spindly glowworm glows in the water. In my descent I chance upon this glowworm – by the way, it’s me, in case you’re wondering, it’s Lui – I chance upon this glowworm and I note how opportune is this encounter, for it has been a lonely trek down, and more to the point, there has been no light anywhere for days. I have seen nothing and heard only odd gurgles and pings from the darkness below.

Solitary and without occupation, my mind, thankfully, has a raft of distractions to keep itself afloat: pictures of people, unfinished dialogues, special girls from the past, but also, the more rudimentary, time.

So it is with some excitement that I stretch out my arm now and catch the glow on my wristwatch to read that it is precisely two o’clock!

In a place like this, it is a treasure of knowledge to know even as little as that: on what side of noon or midnight the journey's made.

In my excitement, I attempt to be my own clock for a while and count down seconds as I descend, but I lose track quickly and get flustered and out of breath for all this concentration.

So I turn again to what is real and physical and simple.

Pressure has increased all along – such is water at depths – and yet my limbs feel almost like air. For some time I have felt close to weightless – cold, but weightless – and with no light anywhere and practically no sound but those gurgles and pings, it is easy to question whether one exists at all.

But I do not question… I continue my descent, my mind clinging to its raft, the glowworm like a lone-star above me.

woodwork

2010-06-06T01:52:00.000-07:00

You’re birthed, toweled down, hung by your feet, butt slapped, breastfed, schooled, issued credit and put to work for thirty years. You get ledger and file, wife and kid, whisky and decanter, and for Christmas – half-drunk and rotten – you a cut a tree and carve a chicken.

It’s knife-sets and cufflinks now. It’s looking at the haze off your kid’s ipad and the guilt scurrying in your wife’s eye. It’s alarm clocks and medication, paid holiday and fighting fights in your brain, no longer down low and rough on the pavement.

So you get crazy. You shut the door – you slam that fucker shut – curse all and sundry in your mother tongue – tvoja majka je bolesno majmuna – pull your toolkit down from the attic, your bag of files, rasps, and jigsaws, and you build a fucking boat the size of a shoe, then a royal scepter from a log, and from that man-sized trunk in the yard, that crazy stump of oak, a human face.

Pheeeeeeew! Man! Christ that feels good.
And you look with satisfaction at the face.

But time elapses and you get lazy. You turn into a lazy fucker once more, you forget, you ignore, you seek distraction, you take up smoking, dump your wife, get a girl, screw around, pay up lawyers, buy a hammock, ditch shoes for slippers, meals for beer, drink no end and bray in the streets, 'til at last you throw up your hands at the heavens. What the fuck? WHAT THE HECK IS THIS!!?? WHAT THE FUH!

But the Lord is silent or is himself distracted. Either way, you get no answer.

So you lose yourself in woodwork once more. You lose yourself, and you ask yourself, you turn a question, like a lunatic, in your brain: would wood-work work? Would it work, this woodwork? Would woodwork work? And you file and you rasp and you drill, first a house, then a man, a woman, a breastfeeder, a cufflink, a royal scepter, but it brings no solace as before. And you file and you rasp and you drill some more, until you are covered in sawdust head to toe and your whole house, your whole fucking house is strewn and there is nothing more in life, not a single object left to replicate…

So now you have no choice, but finally, at long last, to CREATE!

And goddamn it that feels good.

Pheeeeeeeeeeeeew!

Paris

2010-05-22T06:03:00.000-07:00

There used to be nothing else to do but eyeball each other in deep space. This was the dawn of time – don't forget – when thermonuclear explosions and flashing nebulae were the order of the day. But people were spoilt brats then too – people haven’t changed – and all that stuff got boring. The wonders of the universe ceased to arouse any interest in anyone anywhere. People just wanted to eyeball each other, they wanted to stare out and see if there was someone on the other side of space. No one gave a rat’s turd about galactic explosions and sun flares – Lui, are you listening to me?

Yeah, yeah.

Why are you looking away then?

There’s a bird.

Forget the bird, Lui, you’re not a cat, you can ignore birds when you want to.

Ok.

Alright, where was I? Yes. Anyway, the problem is, after a while, even this eyeballing got boring. There was the odd wink and staring contest, sure, but nothing of real substance. But then someone had this brilliant idea. Someone said, you know what, screw this, I’m gonna to stop eyeballing everyone around here, I’m gonna turn my back on these shmucks and I’m going to eyeball this, this thing here, this beautiful, glistening, shimmering object I’ve just called into being, this radiant – this… this iridescent thing of beauty and I’m going to stare at it until everybody else stares at it too, until eyeballs in the furthest reaches of space can’t help but stretch out fingers of some kind to touch this ruby bijou I hold my hands.

It was a ruby?

Like the color ruby, Lui. Just run with it. So... what we have now is the onset of desire, of want, of need, and now things start to really change. Now eyeballs don’t just stare out anymore, now they start to look askance, and in some cases tears flow from them for days on end. Eventually – I mean in the long run – you get love, deceit, economics, and you get facebook and that sort of thing, but not for a while. First there is a another major milestone, the greatest I'd say – but I’m biased – first there's the woman!

That would be you?

Yes.

And the man, right? They’re simultaneous.

Maybe… perhaps. In any case, there’s certainly the woman. And it is for the woman that land masses would be brutally partitioned, epic battles fought in rivers of blood, whole kingdoms ripped asunder for gems to bestow up her and so on and so forth. And this is why you want to kiss me so bad, Lui. I’m your ruby…

mmmm... ok, but we’re also in Paris.

[smile]

[smile]

[We eyeball each other for a while. A bird flutters overhead...]

[...until it gets boring, and then… ]

why we stick to sandcastles

2010-05-09T08:28:00.000-07:00

Say you take a grain of sand, that poetic grain of sand and you toss it up in the air, and then you toss another and another until you’ve cleared the Riviera, Copacabana and all of Huntington beach, until chicks in bikinis are stretched out on bedrock, and sandcastles on the shoreline are no more. Say you keep casting up sand like that and say you do this feverishly, though on a mission from God, say you spend most of your adolescence casting up sand in this fashion in vast swirls up into the sky, and say you manage somehow – by sheer force of will, by voodoo and telekinesis – say you manage to keep these vast swaths of seaside sand in suspension just out of gravity’s filthy reach, and say you keep them turning and swirling, spreading out further and further, expanding until the extremities gather into packets, like planetoids turning on their own axes, and say you keep doing this until the entire array pushes further upwards and outwards, higher and higher, so high the whole experiment becomes – how shall I say – practically a mirage, something indistinct but still visible like a whirlwind of interstellar locusts, a meteoric dust-storm, expanding in vast multiplying swirls of sand; and say that now and again – because maybe it gets boring after a few years – say that now and again you cast into this sandy mix the odd salvo: a stone, a dead crab, a can of sunblock – just for kicks, just to see the unholy chain of explosions it sets in motion, and say that – being a guy after all – you can’t help but check askance the gorgeous chicks on the Riviera and the volleyball babes in shades down on Huntington beach, say you just glance over to see if they’re impressed at all you can do with a dead crab, yeah, and say that indeed they are impressed, and say that right then you start to get all satisfied with yourself for being such a clever little thinker, such smart-ass little thinker– how macroscopic and genius, how boundless my imagination, how vast my scope.

But now you’ve stopped thinking about the swirls of sand completely, now you’ve totally taken your eye off the ball, and thus, at the height of your self-applaudisment (even inventing new words derived from French), brisk and adolescent though you may be, genius and philosophic though your thinking, the swirls of sand start coming down: first the Riviera in soft showers, then Copacabana and finally, raining down hard as hail, the courser grain off Huntington Beach.

A genius little prick you feel now, smothered thus in your own universe.

what I got

2010-04-29T01:05:00.000-07:00

I got five bucks in my back pocket, a gold-coin hundred in my wallet and a quartz wristwatch worth ten. I got a belly full of goulash, a heart thirty years a’tickin’, and skull-load of ideas good to go. Yeah, these I got!

Plus, my friend, I got this body: I got these legs I can cross in tight seats, kick out in a squabble or scramble like mad when my life is under threat. I got two arms, two hands, two feet – feel that –I got those. And these little gems, my friend, I got them too, eyes to gaze at lush damsels in the spring and leer when I’m feeling dark & ghetto.

Yeah, these are mine: my dimpled cheeks, my busted molar, even this rogue lock of hair I’ve battled in earnest for years. Mine! I own this body. I don’t rent, it’s not on loan, it’s mine to do with as I may, to thrust at this world – helter-skelter – to thrust at this world with the fervor of a kamikaze, to throw into the air, to hurtle into space or drop into the fray.

I light a cigarette…

So now, my friend, I must tell you this:

This is my last cup of coffee in this great city. This rampart of the common. And I will miss it. I damn well will!

I will miss bigman under the brickwork; I'll miss the brigand gang of Kurds with their brass spittoons and mustaches. And I will miss the warm summer nights when the sky comes down in pellets of water and starlight. I’ll miss that. I'll miss you, Rotterdam City.

But I take what I’ve got now.
I take it all bundled up like this, like I said...

and I go.

chartreuse and jungle-green

2010-04-18T03:09:00.000-07:00

Before I could walk I wove through legs – human and table legs – I gripped adult fingers and scraped along floors on my hands and knees. I was six months old, pretty anxious for the most part, but never disheartened with life because I knew only one fear and it had a specific and identifiable location: my stomach. Plus, when the enemy emerged, I knew what to do: I just shrieked like my life was damn near its end, and since I still remembered how life felt when it began – birth fresh in my memory – I just assumed its end must be similarly excruciating. So I just shrieked and shrieked like a f*!#&ing maniac… and I waited. And this was life.

My eyes and mind at this stage were still in apprenticeship and not much good to anyone. Nuance? Forget it. Man and woman, for instance, they were just Man. Chartreuse and jungle-green, that was just Green. But I understood even then that I must shriek some considerable length before that milky breast would be thrust into my face and the enemy inside placated. I understood that. I understood very quickly – stinky-shrieky Croat, six months of age – I understood the rudiments of time.

But when I began to understand time, right then, at that instant, a new danger arose, a danger I would come to experience in depth, a danger without bounds: boredom.

I got bored. And this – after existence itself – was my first true condition. And it sucked.

When you get bored, you start to think needlessly. You think too far and too deep until your thoughts become more real to you than even the crap in your own diapers.

Deep inside my tiny body – even as I appeared busily crawling about – I felt something was wrong, something beyond the enemy-stomach. I intuited it, I sensed it, and, of course, I thought about it. But for a long time it remained non-specific. It was still, you might say, just green.

Now, moving on…

The other night I was downtown Bruges at a place that serves steak, beer and pretty much nothing else. Opposite me was a Belgian man in his forties: glassy eyes, piss-blond whiskers and teeth approximately the same color. (Note for travelers: Belgians are a charitable folk; a tad medieval in more ways than just that one, but overall, a pretty friendly, unassuming folk.) So there I was: cozy corner, three-square-feet of oak, steak-frites and a pint of Chimay. And there he was: cheery man from West Flanderen downing his fifth pint on an empty stomach. He spoke most of the time and I could see in his face and how he clutched his glass – much like I gripped fingers back in the days – that most likely this guy was still fully battling the enemy-stomach. So, I just let him speak and only once did I interupt to mention what a nice necktie he had, dotted red on jungle-green..

this world of thugs

2010-04-08T08:46:00.000-07:00

Half the street was hookers; the other half: Bulgarians fondling their belt buckles, fatso German truckers on the prowl and dwarfish men from the Belgian countryside. It was a shithole, the greatest darned shithole you will find. You will find such a place! Every major city has one.

There was crap in the gutter, wafts of urine all about and pigeons pecking squashed fries off the cobbles. The smell was human, but barely. I tell you, I was not here by choice. I took no pleasure watching spindly girls from Belaruse struggle on lacquered heels. I took no pleasure.

Rage is what I felt. I thought to grab some piece of piping off the ground and club these trolls, a hundred strokes each, then calmly straighten my cuffs and jacket like a made man… take that, you bonbon eating piece of... (to the Belgian dwarf ). And then with the same piece of piping, shatter the red-lit cages of glass, all of them, and release their thin-armed inmates to freedom.

I thought to myself, they'll run like gazelles through the streets.

But then I thought again. In every doorway a greasy ape fingered a cellphone. In every doorway such a man leered at his clientele – Bulgarian, German, Belgian – calculating in his oily skull the monies each will part with once they have partaken. You screw with these greaseballs and they don't hesitate, they snap your fingers back and smash your teeth with gold rings and Zippo-hardened fists. Make no mistake.

And so I thought again.

This place is a shithole, it is a well of shit, a fount! Nothing on Earth would have made me happier than to see these twenty gazelles leap to freedom on their lacquered heels. Nothing.

But freedom where? Freedom what? There are apes in doorways in every city. Here, in Bucharest, Bombay, even – yes – even Zagreb. No matter where, they are there.

Then the rage in my stomach became a firestorm and my mind turned into a blaze of nun-chukkas breaking every bone in this stinking alley – Man and ape alike – every bone like kindling wood.

HIIIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAAAAARHG!
SWOOSH SWOOSH!
TAK!
SWOOOSH SWOOSH!

A dizzying wheel of strokes!!

TAK TAK TAK!!

CRAKX!!!

SWOOSH SWOOSH!

[German truckers in a heap; Belgian leches in the gutter; Bulgarians in a bulge before me; and all the greasy apes, all of them, begging, BEGGING for mercy.]

HIIIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAAAAARHG!

SWOOSH SWOOSH!

CRAKX!!!

Meanwhile, there I was, pulling my trolley bag forward over the cobbles, minding the pigeons, minding my own business. And at the end of the street – nun-chukkas still in full swing – I thought of Bigman. I thought of him for a while because he calms me down.

***

Bigman, I thought, I understand why you only come out at night, why you are so careful to reveal yourself, why you smile but do not speak, and why you live so deep, deep underground. I understand.

The wells of shit, they are above ground.

ordinary lil' fauntleroys

2010-03-27T09:51:00.000-07:00

After my body was scanned, my bag gutted for contraband and my person patted down; after baboons with badges cornered, tricked and questioned me, I was released with all my effects into the arrivals hall where lil' lord fauntleroys waved balloons on sticks and mothers heaved their heavy breasts looking flustered at all and sundry. After I’d woven through this crowd of luckies and the row of drivers behind them – J.R. Dental; Pierce Longsword; Hopkinson Smith on their placards – after I’d trolleyed my bag into the clear, after the waving, beaming faction was behind me, I realized – good heavens – how happy I was to be home.

I thought about the French fries I would thrust down my throat, the Doobie Brothers that soon would blast symphonic across my quarters; I thought on the joys of Mica’s calves, cheeks and bellybutton; I thought – Yes! – without shame or reservation– what a joyous, wondrous day.

And so I pardoned with a wave of the hand the fiddling fauntleroys for being such little twerps, and I forgave their bovine mothers too for being so flustered at all and sundry. And I thought to myself, let me resume my life here among you with a kind-hearted gesture.

After the fries had gone in a dozen a pop, after the quart of ginger-ale and the clutch of toffees at the duty free; after satisfying my most commanding Earthly needs, I ventured down into the bowels of Amsterdam International Airport and waited on the platform with the ordinary-Man, the pig in uniform, the hack in a suit. I waited for the bullet-train back to Rotterdam City.

Understand, dear reader, this may seem utterly ordinary to you, but understand that “ordinary” - for me - had just been stripped and skinny dipped into a tub of vitriol. Recall the eyeless gentlemen, recall the stack of biscuits breakfast-lunch-and-dinner, recall the sheer horror of wall-crossings and telekinesis. So forgive me if I enjoyed (more than is appropriate) the chocolate skinned starlets who sat across from me in the bullet-train home. Forgive the rapt expression on my face as I beheld the gold amulets at the foot of their heaving breasts – Shantala, Serena – in bubbly golden script. Indeed, forgive me all these heaving breasts, but I was beside myself with joy in this bullet-train, on this day, in the bowels of Amsterdam International Airport.

letter from the vortex

2010-03-21T05:00:00.000-07:00

LISTEN CLOSELY.

I am served by two eyeless gentlemen – the same stack of biscuits, breakfast, lunch and dinner – and since my stunt the other night I’ve been observed by two other gentlemen, also eyeless. In truth, JK, I am also observing myself because my stunt – I crossed a solid wall of brick– was not deliberate and by no means expected. I am – praise all things holy! – shaken, JK.

In case you haven’t figured it out, it’s me, it’s Lui. And in case you are asking yourself where the hell I am, carry on because I can’t tell you, I have no fucking clue. Excuse my language JK – I know where you stand on obscenities – but I am uncomfortable here in every way conceivable. Forget the biscuits and eyeless gentlemen, this place – will you believe it – is stranger even than your evaporation chamber, your plasma tank, it is stranger, JK, than any locale or contraption you have ever conceived. I ask you, I beg you, JK, command one of your machines, materialize me, rub together your magnetizers, do what you do, but do it!

JK, I write to you because you are best versed in these matters. If I were trying to get laid I would seek counsel with Brendan Benchpress; if I were merely irked or vexed, I would turn to my heart, my Mica Spirelli, but as it happens, JK, I am out of Time – literally out of time – so it is your help I seek.

Something happened when I last awoke. Usually Time rolls out its carpet for me as a matter of course– flap flap flap – the days shines, twilights and then goes dark and my life transpires like clockwork. But on this day, JK, it’s as if the carpet did not fully unfurl, and I tripped over the fucking thing, tripped and found myself here. Found myself thus, JK.

I have been told a number of things, but all in a language as yet unintelligible, so forgive me if I omit to relay some critical details. I have not seen a single ray of natural light since my arrival, and all food has been, as I said, biscuits. But I have been informed by these gentlemen that all is well and that I needn’t worry about a single solitary thing.

HAHAHAHAHA HAAAAAAAAAAAA HAHAHAHHAAAA HAHAHAHAHAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAA HAHAHA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HAAA HA!

Excuse me if I find some of this amusing, but if you don’t mind – as a substitute for the terrific grief that rips through me – I laugh with all my teeth, all my tongue, until my gut is purged, and then I laugh again:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA AHAHAAAAA AHAAHA HAHAAAAAAAAAAAA HAHAH AAHA HAHA

And when I’ve had quite enough I become angry, terrifically angry and vent forth as follows:

Listen, you eyeless TURDS! My name is Lui Labas. Allies beyond this shithole will cast terror upon your hairless skulls – I wage my life on it – but that aside, think a moment on this: if I can cross partitions and walls of brick without a scratch, what barrier of any consequence can you erect? THINK for a moment!

But to you JK, I confide: I have crossed all walls but one, the last wall, not even the biggest nor thickest, but I am terrified, JK … for God only knows what lies behind it! God only knows!

Yours,

Lui Labas

Ps- I send this, as agreed, by emergency protocol, but my mind is jittery and unstable so the words above may reach you diminished of sense or perhaps altered completely. Make of them what you can, JK. What you can. Lastly…

...

2010-03-14T04:42:00.000-07:00

…red or dark red, sir. It’s a fluid, sir. They’re full of this fluid. Anything happens to them – you rough them up, sir, and they spill this fluid from their skin and orifices. It’s very messy, sir.

So they say… so who do we have here?

His name is Lui Labas, sir. We picked him up off the street. There was a big tall guy with him too, a big hairy guy, but he looked irregular; we thought he’d be too much trouble, sir.

What’s he doing now?

He’s pacing up and down, sir.

Has he eaten anything?

Sir, he said today was “toosdae” sir, and on “toosdae” he says he’s supposed to have “waffls” with his sister, sir.

That does not answer my question.

No, sir.

Well get him some of those blasted “waffls” then.

He won’t eat them, sir.

And why the hell not!?

Sir, his sister, sir, Bee Labas. He won’t –

Shut up! Enough. You’re dismissed! Get out my sight.

Sir, one more thing, sir.

Quickly.

Sir, we found him in the hall last night, sir. He was –

Which one of you God-blasted incompetents forgot to lock his door?

Sir, that’s just it, sir… Sir, his door was locked, sir.

sex when it's dark

2010-02-25T02:44:00.000-08:00

I couldn’t see a thing – the power was down, the whole block was down – and the moon that night (when you need her!) was a pale piece of crescent.

But Lui, reaching down panties, you can do that in the dark, man. Or is it brassier clips you struggle with?

Quit giggling Brendan. No clip ever held back an able-bodied Croat, and I can make my way one hand tied behind my back. But that’s not the point. The point is you want to see stuff, you wanna look down, you wanna – anyway, let me finish. It was dark. On the groundfloor under a flimsy duvet there was me and Mica. Two floors up JK was kick-starting his back-up generator, and outside on the streets there was rumbling going on, maybe Kurds battling Turks, maybe the pulse pushing up out of the underground. Who knows, but I wasn’t about to get out of bed , no sirree. And like I said, it was pitch dark and when it’s pitch dark strange things happen. Very strange things… or maybe it’s pitch dark because strange things happen, ever thought about that?

Christ, Lui, you’re about to have sex, man. Who cares!

Right! But, for your information, as my hand was moving down along Mica’s belly – soft as peach, my friend – as my hand was moving down her belly, at that particular instant, somewhere way out – I mean WAY OUT, Bren – some an unholy chasm ripped through space like a massive blackhole shuddering, and every piece of matter this side of the universe was under its spell!

What the -

That means me, Bren, that means Mica Spirelli, that means -

When did that happen? I didn’t feel anything. You're confusing things Labas. Remember, you're about to have s-

I’m getting to that, let me finish. So -bang- huge blackhole, everything shuddering, my hand roving down in the dark, Mica reaching up, JK’s gennie rattling upstairs -

Alright, go go!

Yeah, so it being pitch dark and all, I’m going by cues now , Bren, and these little cues from Mica they just keep coming, you see, and she’s soft as peach all over, and despite all that rattling and rumbling upstairs, and that shuddering in space, despite all that, when we made the climb completely in the dark, and when we slipped off the edge and cascaded down together, there was that moment – no cues, nothing– there was that moment when everything stood completely still.

… yes?

That’s it.

That's it!? Labas! Details, man, DETAILS!

the order of things

2010-02-16T01:05:00.000-08:00

On January 28, 1975, Zagreb, Croatia, I slinked into the world at last, a tethered bundle of bone and fatty tissue. It is said I screamed for over an hour, but what do you expect, entered thus into the human race – an adversarial race for the most part; predators, backbiters, double-crossers – entered thus: empty handed, skin-naked, bewildered and thoroughly unmanly despite the disproportionate nutsack that comes part and parcel with male natal garb. And – note – defenseless: no teeth, no knuckles, no nails, nuthin’. A couple of clear-cut shapes like a wrist or a collar bone would have set me apart. Instead, I emerged pouffy, a blotchy neck-pillow, with zero motor skills and no clue about anything at all: not the light that flashed EVERYWHERE, not the rubbery hand that cupped my skull, and not the knife that clipped the cord that’d kept me alive and kicking for nine glorious months of relaxation and water sport.

How can I say…. I was pissed off.

One thing I had going for me though – one thing I’ve lost since – a setv of vocal cords so badass and shreaky I silenced mother, father and attendant staff for fifteen minutes. My first fifteen minutes I owned. This was my guitar solo, and I let loose! A good thing too because for the first fifteen minutes at least, I was nameless.

Eventually, it came: Lui Antun Labas.

Understand my frustration, though, I came from a very simple place: temperature regulated, sound muted, light unnecessary, food channeled in, and me all padded out in my little my capsule, proof against impact of all sorts, doorknobs, broom handles etc. And most importantly, my thoughts reigned supreme. I crossed deserts on foot, floated weightless through the void and threw javelins at meteorites. Now and then, for sport, I kicked my mom in the gut, but mostly I was adrift in realms of my own.

Right…

Now jump thirty-five years forward… watch your step.

What do you get?

I’ll tell you, my friend. You look here. I’ll tell you what you get. A whole bunch of crap you get. Crap-you-don’t-need carefully collected. Bric-a-brac, cardboard boxes, books I’ve never read, books I’ll never read, almanacs, wristwatches ticking and defunct, maps of the world, maps of Crete, maps of Rotterdam, folders of miscellany, bits and pieces, chips off chandeliers; I have bundles of letters, letters from Leticia, shit she wrote way back when she put her hand down my pants for “feels”; I have chessboards – I have three – I have shoulder bags with leather pouches! Belts in abundance; I have scarves, my friend, long, short, fagggot-ass, you name it. Christ so much shit. Do you have all this shit? Do you have all this crap down there Bigman? Corkscrews, shower mats? You have that shit in your burrow? I’ll tell you what, don’t you envy us, my friend, don’t you envy us. You see this silky thread here – feel that. You feel that? – between me and each thing here there is such a thread. A tether, Bigman. A silky tether.

Ever heard of Gulliver? You know Gulliver, right?

eating quiche doing squat all

2010-02-05T14:34:00.000-08:00

I cut my quiche in eighths and think of fractions like back in the day when I did math puzzles for kicks. Also, a pint of Ribbenstock cider fizzes on the table – best shit in the world – waiting to come in and ferret out bits of salad and rhubarb caught between my teeth…that is, before I funnel it round into my waiting gullet.

Niiiiiiiiiice!

Little touch of alcohol back of my throat and Drago comes to mind: his belt-flask, his schnappsy breath and the string of fucks he used to weave in and out of his language like points de soutures (fucking happy to see you my friend. You are my fucking friend!).

In goes an eighth of quiche… the crust… the crumbs…. then an olive, a wrinkly, slippery little sucker I balance on my tongue, then waterpolo around my mouth for sport before I gut it of its seed.

Another gulp of Ribbenstock. A big foamy gulp I slosh around like it’s Biaritz all up and down my molars so the undertow can wash out the eggy-paste that comes with the territory quiche Lorraine.

All sounds good and fun, you say: Lui Labas sitting around eating quiche doing squat all; 7/8th left; crazy olives in a jar; Ribbenstock cider in abundance. My friend, I can’t complain.... except for outside temperatures which have stooped to new lows; the enemy creeps in with icicles through the cracks, my toes are curled up cold, my neck is cramped and my prick has retreated –

Hatchoum!

In my bathrobe borrowed from the Belgrade Intercontinental I sit for a moment with my Ribbenstock cider. Every now and then I pop an olive, but mostly I think of what I was thinking yesterday when I was babysitting JK’s mammoth cat… It went something like this,

Sometimes there’s just nothing going on. Sometimes there’s only what you’re doing right this minute! Heck, not even what you’ve done because nothing you’ve done was really lasting. You do this, you do that, you loll about, you slumber and life does that hopscotch over your butt, skipping you in its round of rewards. Like a cat on a couch... like you my friend, bewhiskered thing-with-claws...

But thinking all this doesn’t stop me from grabbing another eighth of quiche. So that’s what I do. 6/8ths and counting...

the A list

2010-01-23T05:02:00.000-08:00

Give me a yard of yarn and a diabolo and I’ll amuse myself; I’ll dick around for a while, I’ll even try to catch that spinny sucker behind my back – chuck it up whoop and catch that thing like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Absolutely. And yes, it could be fun, I don’t deny it. Or show up at my house around dinnertime and feed me lamb chops and couscous with some of that fire-hot harisa sauce – same thing – I’ll eat, I’ll relish. No doubt about it. All true, all true, but none of this makes the cut, the diabolo, the couscous, not by a long shot.

At the end of the day – I’ll tell you – all stacked up, it’s people I love! Warm-bodied bipeds with nerves, knots in their stomachs, blushy faces, jittery hands and above all! stuff to say: Lui, my man, what goes in a bouillabaisse? A conversation about clams, for instance. Cleavage, Labas, on older women, what do you think? (Brendan) not my favorite, but beats a diabolo hands down.

In short: long-haired, short haired, male or female, people. It’s with people I live, people I mingle, converse, interact, intercour–

CUT!

(um… I hold a special and particular fondness for females– this is true – and a few even ignite fires in my groin and lower abdomen: redheads, girls from Split and Dubrovnik, classy chicks from Belgrade and so on, but this has been documented and is not the subject of this present exposé)

Where was I? People, yes, but not all people. We have here vast populations and among them, to be sure, there are some monstrosities too: six-hundred-pounders that can barely move (I speak not of the professionals that wrestle Sumo; they are incredibly agile). And there are people who are monstrous in a less visible, but equally disturbing way: some have demonic breath, others sweat like hogs. And there are even those that are monstrous in a way that is practically invisible, that can go undetected for years, but is deadly nevertheless. I speak of men and women who seed your thoughts with nettle and thorn-bush, who plant seedling quips and jibes until your mind is crawling with fucking brush and thorn, and you can’t see jack shit anymore for all the undergrowth, let alone move without scratching yourself bloody –

CUT!

My list… I was going to give you my list. My list of people hand picked out of a population of 6.692 billion and counting (I just checked). Some are alive, some are dead, some I don’t know, but all are class-A, stand-up, league-of-their-own types. Clams, cleavage, stock-chit-chat, anything goes with this band of greats. Here they are, in no special order, my people:

Labas, Bee: Sister. Dome-haired semi-professional bowler. Winner of “Best Sister” and “Best Sister… Ever” National and Hemispheric. Famous words: hit me with that little rake again little brother and you lose your balls.

Benchpress, Brendan: muscle-bound macho-man. Conspiracy theorist and philandering rake (other rake). Famous words: drop the brain Labas; it draws blood from where it is needed most.

Bigman: Creature of the burrows. Holder-down of the fort and gentleman of the night. Famous words: [none in known language].

Spirelli, Mica: Au-pair extraodinaire. Lithe-limbed princess of Ljubljana. Wearer of fleecy wool and sayer of sweet-somethings. Famous words: hold my hand you baboon.

Gonzaga, Luigi: Predecessor. Barefoot soldier of the spirit. Winner of “Coolest Medieval man-of-faith” and features in “Best Haircuts of the Sixteenth Century”. Famous words: keep your word and the path will clear itself.

Stanic, Drago: Serbian. Numerate gangster. Disembodied spirit. Holder of hotdog stand on galaxy rim. Famous words: Ignore the gun please, just give me the money.

Labas, Lui: Croat. Once-in-a-while nuisance. Land animal and ocean-faring spirit. Professional. Amateur. Admirer and defamer. “Best Brother” Hemispheric bronze medalist. Famous words: I’ll just show up if your turn me away.

meeting your maker

2010-01-17T06:47:00.000-08:00

Sittin’ on my stoop – glass of pretzels – nice easy little day. A Turk or two puffing smoke and a bum on a scooter. Easy going. Ladeeda. Scratchy-scratch. Flick a bugger. Kick up dirt and check a cat make a run for it. All’s well this corner of the universe. All’s well. Dealt a comfy hand today. Yes siree! Comfy little hand. Sit down, have a pretzel…

Thus was my ease on this quiet afternoon… Thus was my ease when the shit came down.

Holy mother of God! Umpire of the infinite! Shit-kicker Galactic! What in Jesus H –

It came down on my skull like a godly jack handle, so hard, so fast I spit pretzels in a cone-shaped spray. My hands seized what they could. My bare feet jostled. My eyes did crazy laps in their sockets.

Fast I scrambled to adjust, but Time – rascally-ticker – pulled a Houdini on my butt and double-quick tied past, present and future in a smartass little knot I could not for the life of me unravel. And thus I stood, Lui Labas, a timeless figurine completely helpless to understand what the fuck just hit me, what needle, what ballpoint pen, what crayon came down from God-knows where to probe me in the skull, here on my own square of ground!

Then – in the flash that followed– Time pressed on. Pretzels dropped like Mikado to the ground. I sprang to my feet, I reached for the doorknob and with my other hand lassoed my scarf around my neck (my faggot-ass scarf, correct, but this is not apropos right this minute), with grace I lassoed that sucker as I spun, pretzels crunching underfoot.

Meanwhile, overhead, the sky crackled like fruit-de-mer on a grill, and on the ground Turks scuttled for shelter. THEN, just before the sky turned black, just before sound vanished fully from my ears, I managed a final leap to safety, into my cube.

As I arced over the threshold – frame by frame –I felt my body’s utter tinyness, utter fragility, as if my limbs could snap like balsa wood and my skull crushed like a tortoise egg.

I landed a finger-snap later, and that’s when I heard something behind me. The sound of feet and the fresh crunch of pretzels.

I was terrified. Utterly terrified. I dared not look. I could not. I stood completely motionless, pillar-of-salt, balsa wood and eggshell...

Lui? HELLOOO. Are you in there? My man! It’s me, it’s Louis. Sorry to barge in like this. I was in the area and I thought –

Jesus Christ LOUIS!! What did I tell you about this! Send me a text for God’s sake! I told you, this biblical shit pisses me off!

merging, in a fashion

2010-01-07T12:04:00.000-08:00

I have a sleeveless sweater (or sweater vest) that I wear most days when the weather is on the fence. I wear it with my fence-corduroys which are corduroy everywhere except the knees and butt where they are worn practically to canvas. For these occasions I have a scarf too that Brendan calls (and I quote) my faggot-ass scarf because it is small and made of cotton… maybe muslin. Regardless, I do not take advice from Bren about clothes. About this I am categorical. Brendan rips the collars off his workout-t-shirts, he wears merino v-necks on bare skin and he pulls his trousers up around his waist like Jean-Claude van Damme. I’ve told him that his crotch bulges and that on most days the lay of his manhood is in the public domain. His response: “Yes… and?”

There are all kinds of reasons I don’t take advice from Brendan, but these are primary: ripped collar, v-neck on skin, muscles-from-Brussels. All three are cardinally wrong. If you have any one of these whatever else you do is irrelevant… to wit: Brendan’s belt has two sets of holes and thus two belt “forks” of stainless steel; the wallpaper on Bren’s phone is a picture of Chuck Norris kicking a giant Asian man in the face. You see where I’m going here?

But I digress.

I bring this up because the other day I wandered off into a conversation about the oneness-of-everything, that in fact we are all one, and that one day in the distant future we will all merge into a single consciousness… in a fashion.

I rejected this. I mean, I rejected it as a notion and as a possibility. The notion because it bugged me as a sentient being. The possibility because it will not happen. Why? Because I will fight it to the death, that’s why.

You have to understand that at the end of the day things could stack up terribly wrong. For instance – and this is real possibility – things could go the way of Brendan Benchpress. I cannot speak for you of course, but I will say this: I will not under any circumstance, cosmic or otherwise, wear my pants like Bren – God bless his soul – not here and not yonder in the oneness-of-light. And I encourage you to resist with me or we will all be ridiculous for rest of time.

Now, I mention this because I know how it’ll play out. First they’ll distract you, they’ll say, aaah, look here, a SUPERNOVA, a collapsing STAR – and then bang! they’ll pull a fast one on you. Your shirt will be shorn of its collar and your pecker pressed into a pant-leg, and that will be that. We will be One.

Not on my watch.

On my watch there will be differences and distinctions, there will be sleevless sweaters, sweeties and assholes. And if I merge into this oneness despite myself, if I am coerced or bamboozled, then I will go in kicking and screaming. I will bark across the galaxy into the face of this consciousness, vast and all-encompassing, and I will say to it (and thus to you!):

I am a Croat.
Yes!
But above all
(You listen)
I am Lui Labas,
An inalienable spirit!

the last tin box

2009-12-25T01:49:00.000-08:00

When I was ten I stuck a tin box in the ground under the shrubs outside Stacić’s in Zagreb. I planted it down deep in the roots. I put my valuables in this box. A box of matches, a wad of prints, a shake-me-snowglobe. And in this tin box was another box – another tin box – and inside that one, another one, and so on, you see, like a Russian doll. But with each box things grew more valuable. From book of matches, to compass, to amber stone. Extrapolate on and… catch my drift? Box upon box until the last tin box.

So I stuck it under the shrubs for none to find. But the problem is, the whole neighborhood was crawling with thieving little runts, looking out for anything they could get their filthy fingers on. So I stuck it in the ground, deep down in the shrub roots and I packed it hard with earth and gravel because there was something in that last box. That last box, you understand, was the point of all this. Without the last box none of this would’ve been necessary.

Well, what was in it?

I spilt blood for that fucking box. I dug my nails into those marauders. I pulled out hairs and kicked groins for that last tin box. As a ten year old, Mica, I went to war.

My God, Lui.

You see here, Meek, my chin, you see this scar?

Yes.

These pillaging runts, ten, eleven, twelve year old, they went around with spiked sticks, probing the ground, spiking the shrubbery for my tin box. Every day, a band of these rovers. So I went after them. I threw myself at them. I fought them tooth and nail until one day, one of their spiked sticks was planted in my chin. Right here, you see... I bled profusely, but this goes without saying.

Lui!

A Montenegrin, a ten year old named Mulović. A beady-eyed worm of a human being. I wanted nothing more than to roast him on the spit he used to probe the grounds around my shrubs. He was obsessed. I was obsessed. All I could think of was that last box. I didn’t care about the crap in all the other boxes. It was the last box, Mica, to preserve the last tin box.

Well, why didn’t you just move it inside, Lui.

I couldn’t. Someone would see me. They were all over the place. They were my neighbors and their neighbors and so on. A ratbag of runts. A hundred eyes and spiked sticks, Mica. There was nothing I could do. And the thing is, after a while, I forgot exactly where I buried it.

Damn it, Lui, what was in the box?

That’s the thing, I don’t know anymore. I don’t remember.

How can you not remember - you’re lying - how can you not remember the content of the last tin box!

Really, I don’t know.

WHAT WAS IN THE BOX LUI? TELL ME!!

Mica, calm down.

TELL ME!!

Ooouuww! Meek, jeeeeeeez. Let go of my arm. Your nails! What’s the matter with you? Why are you so angry?

Why did you bring this up then if you don't remember?

Because, with all these shiny boxes under the tree, Mica, I remembered something today. Not what was in it, but where I put it. I know where to find it now. I know where it is!

minus twenty

2009-12-19T08:56:00.000-08:00

There were no Turks in sight and no beast showed its hairy face. Not in this fucking weather. It was minus twenty. Easy.

I was on the corner with Mica Spirelli (Mica wrapped in woolly layers). She kept whispering vapory Lui's in my ear – Lui, lets go, Lui – until her teeth chattered and she fell silent again.

Minus twenty. The pavement hard as steel. The sky solid blue. Even the pigeons slowed their pecking. For a second I though of those yellow-eyed hares that’d eyed me underground, how they must be freezing their little rabbit butts now; and that demonic pulse further down – that crazy, maniacal pulse – I figured it too must slow its beat in this glacial cold (not so scary now, are we?!)

Mica whispered more vapor – Lui-Lui – and then off we went, through the salt-slush, through icy air, through the glare of snow downtown Rotterdam. We didn’t stop until we hit the river, and there we stood as still as stalagmites. It was frozen solid – the river – a beam of ice miles in length.

In the distance a man on skates slid towards us. A crazy bastard in a linen suit. It was JK. Of course it was JK. His jacket fluttered. His cigarette smoked and his body fumed with vapor.

Your lips are blue, JK! Put on a jacket jesus christ!

I’m wearing one, he said as he turned a ¼ pirouette.

That’s linen. That’s a summer jacket.

You mean this old thing, and he thumbed the lapels as if complimented.

Then I noticed his crotch-zipper wide open and my balls made a painful fist as I imagined his manhood chilled by these glacial winds. I was gonna say something , but he turned to Mica and cut me off:

You look beautiful in red wool Ms. Spirelli. Your eyes especially.

And you in linen JK.

He puffed smoke, finished his pirouette and skated off, unaware - this crazy bastard - that it was minus twenty and that as he puffed and sweated, most of Rotterdam stood completely still.

riveting jobs

2009-12-08T02:04:00.000-08:00

There are jobs out there that are unbelievable. There are things people do that are unbelievable. Pedicurists chip at toes, they pick out deposit and gunk that is hard to get at, but this is a useful profession in my book. I’m talking about the millions – correct that – hundreds of millions who face monitors the better part of the day, who enter figures; figures which get transferred to different departments where they are reviewed by like-minded but “superior” beings, who in turn call meetings to discussed these figures in plenary sessions. So now we have ten, twenty people in a poorly ventilated room. Coffee is circulated and guys touch girls to pass the cream, thank you. Everyone watches one another until a visual is projected on a wall where the abovementioned figures are displayed. Blah blah blah blah blaaaah bleeuh and so on until an underling from the monitor-class interjects a comment about a pie-chart on the wall. Finally, a man at the head of the table projects authority and makes a “strategic” decision. Then coffee is circulated once more and guys touch girls for cream.

Meanwhile, from the bowels of space, a thousand trollish thugs thrust forward at just under the speed of light in an armada of gunships that rips through space-time as a single vanishing line. These thousand "men" – let’s call them that – are partly naked and have nails that need care. But they are not concerned. They are armed to the teeth. Some also face monitors, but most are in the mess hall dicking around, cleaning their guns. They are scheduled to land on or near the Arabian peninsula (not because it’s Muslim territory, but because it's flat and there’s lots of space) and from there they will disperse.

Senior-troll (taller than the rest and fully naked) rises and projects authority as he makes a strategic decision to increase the speed to just over the speed of light. Pressure suits are circulated, a button is pressed, a lever pulled and the armada and its thousand trollish men fold up in space somewhere, approaching in the skies yonder...

I’m kidding.

But – you know – who knows.

Ok, back to work.

Pie charts, people!

building a human being

2009-11-28T03:49:00.000-08:00

You take the periodic table, Labas, you take the elements, yeah, you take zinc and nitrogen and carbon – you need carbon – and you throw an atom at it from the top of the table, a lighter one. Bang you got a compound. Then you stick this little baby in a vat of hydrogen and you spin the shit out of it in a centrifuge. You gotta pump out the debris you see – I’m talking rogue electrons, quark bits ripped off the nucleus and so on – and you hang this thing in a vacuum and you shake it, you shake it, you understand; don’t dillydally here Labas, you shake it hard – this can take years; you need a shitload of patience, I’m warning you. And when you’ve got a couple of these puppies lined up, you’ll see, they’ll come at each other, cling to each other like lovers – they do that, they love each other, all their electrons close and intertwined. So now you keep doing this until you got a cluster and the little dirtbag starts to move all by itself, kind of like a cell. Basically Labas, if you can pull out a paper, read all the op-eds and come back and it’s still moving, you’re good to go. Got it?

Yes. Ok.

Alright, now here’s the thing. Listen up, now you have to get off your butt and leap a few million years forward. So you just take giant-boot strides across time, Labas; don’t be sparing here, you just go; you just jump like a crazy-man, you don’t come back until you’ve put a couple of million between you. Ok? And when you come back –when you come back to the same place, guess what? Lookee-what-we-have-here, a hairy thing with arms – dumb as a box of rocks, but mobile and with eyeballs, a sentient thing with long limbs and big teeth. Don’t be afraid though, Lui, this guy doesn’t know right from left. You can screw him with your eyes closed and half your brain defunct. Alright?

Yes.

Ok, now comes the tricky part… Labas, are you taking notes?

No, I’m listening. I’m not going to do this myself JK.

Sure you are. Take notes. Alright listen up because now you have to throw some voodoo at it, now you have to get this dirtbag to talk, you understand, so you hit him with it, you do your thing, you throw the book at this sucker, you do what you have to, I have no rules here. Your guess is as good as mine. You invoke gods my friend, you invoke gods, you do what you have to do, but sooner or later – if you do it right – he’s going to talk back. They all do. Stop bustin’ my balls he said to me. They can be nice, but they can be pesky too. Either way, don’t complain because next thing you know – guess what? – he’s ignoring you. He’s sitting around, he’s got bouncy fluorescent things on his feet with a swooshy stripe and he’s fingering a cell phone sending text messages. Suddenly he’s talking shit Labas, spending money, screwing girls, getting in your face. Some are nice, but not all. You understand?

Wow. I guess so. That’s a lot of information JK.

I’ll help if you want. The hydrogen vat part is tricky. I’ll help you out. And I have space upstairs.

But JK, after the hairy arm phase, can you cool them down – I mean, get ‘em to talk nice?

I told you Labas, that’s the hard part, that’s the mysterious part. I do my voodoo on these suckers, but you get what you get. They’re their own man then. They plunge into the universe. They go their own ways. They are who they are. You have no say, you got it? You have no say.

Can’t you at least get them to be female and very tall, like three meters, and can’t you get them to stay hairy?

What the hell are you talking about Labas? You want a monster?

No, no, it’s for bigman.

Who the hell is bigman!!?!

on the bridge

2009-11-22T03:45:00.000-08:00

Mica and I met on the Erasmus bridge down where it hits the south side of the city. There was tons of wind and her spiky hair was all over the place. You’re a funny human being Mica Spirelli, I said, and she dropped her hands which were up to shield her face from the wind, and she laughed. Mica Spirelli, au pair extraordinaire, bird of flight and princess of Ljubljana. When I was done saying her name to myself my knees turned to goulash, my eyes watered and I wondered in a flash what mysterious vibration emanated from inside this girl and whether it had anything to do with the spark in her eyes, the bounce of her body and the way her words shot out to targets I was scarcely aware of.

I wanted to hold her hand on the way to the Balkan restaurant, but she kept messing around, eating pistachio nuts, throwing the shells over the bridge and poking in me in the arm. When she stopped for a moment to get oriented, I grabbed her hand and then she stood still.

You vanished Lui, she said, you just disappeared.

Didn’t you get my message?

What message?

I sent you a message Mica.

I didn’t get it.

Didn’t you feel it?

… that was you?

That was me.

Wow Lui.

You liked it?

I loved it. But what were you doing down there… in the dark with all those hares?

I… I was trying to get to the bottom of things.

Very funny. Ha-ha-ha. No, seriously.

I am serious.

Well, did you?

I would have – maybe – but I got pulled up.

Huh?

Come Mica, Let’s get those lamb chops. Bulgadov is grill master tonight. He’s extraordinary. He does magic with mint. I told him we’re coming.

So there we were, above ground, the wind on our cheeks, her hand in mine, and all around – everywhere – her frequency, her vibration, traveling out in waves… beyond this bridge, beyond Rotterdam, and even beyond – I’ve no doubt – this enormous galaxy.

the pulse

2009-11-07T01:46:00.000-08:00

I saw a string of light and then the ground shook beneath me. Chunks of earth dropped down from the burrow walls. There was earth in my hair, in my pockets, in my teeth. I felt lucky for a moment with my mouthwash and toothpicks, but when I was gurgling and spitting and cleaning out my gums, suddenly I felt something near, not a hare with yellow eyes, not another creature-subterranean… something else. It was like a tap on the shoulder at first, but quickly it became all encompassing, like a pulse from a groundswell deep inside these burrows. The toothpick dropped out of my mouth; the mouthwash out of my hands.

It was a dark pulse – dark not in color but in substance. It made my whole body shudder and my mouth run with saliva. My immediate reaction was to wish for JK and his contraptions to flash a gigawatt of charge at this mutherfucker – woooooooaaaaaaarghhh – but instead, uncontrollably, I went towards it, down.

I could not see my own hands, I could hear nothing of this soundless pulse, and my only active sense was the taste of earth between teeth. But so I went, down into the ground; here and there a set of yellow eyes stared out at me. In flashes I remembered who I was, and once the thought of Mica Spirelli fizzled through, and I murmured her name in full as I carried on… mica spirelli , au pair extraordinaire, bird-of-flight and princess of Ljubljana…

I would have gone much further towards the heart of this thing had a hand not appeared out of nowhere and pulled at me with a force that was not quite human. My arm was nearly wrenched out of its socket, and I was dragged up, down, round, over roots and rubble, down dirt chutes and funnels. I lost a shoe and everything else that was loose on my body. Dragged, pulled, thrust, pushed, until suddenly cold air washed over me and I emerged out of a spray of sand and brickwork… on my corner. My corner.

Against the back wall of the grillroom was a Turk drinking coffee. He did not seem surprised at the ruckus, or the pile of brick, or the man standing beside me, a man twice my size holding me by the arm. Yes, bigman.

We sat on the curb for about thirty minutes, and I wondered then whether Clay Dove and his men were after this; not a cache of gold bullion nestled somewhere in this maze, but this. This thing down there. Maybe this was it, this dark pulse that practically lifted me off my feet, cleared my brain and ran me like a puppet.

The pulse lingered like a strange atmospheric pressure. It took me two days to get a train of thought going again. Two days for a spark to come at the thought of Mica Spirelli. Two days to find my way. And two days more to decide what to do next.

Bigman didn’t say anything that night, but his hand on my shoulder spoke volumes: stay above ground my friend, and deal with what you know. I’m sure it was kindly meant but something inside me yearned to go back and get to the heart of this thing – this dark pulse – to get at it, to conquer it!

love-words to Mica Spirelli

2009-10-30T06:10:00.000-07:00

Mica Spirelli – au pair extraordinaire, bird-of-flight and princess of Ljubljana – I bring you words of apology. I am underground, you see, and was not able reach you in time to let you know that our “date” could not transpire. If I had enough room here in these burrows I would kick myself, but I am cramped so I cannot. Forgive me, Mica, I punish myself enough and to console me I have only toothpicks and mouthwash.

Mica Spirelli – au pair extraordinaire, bird-of-flight and princess of Ljubljana – please carry on au-pairing for a few days more, time for me to wind out of this earthy maze.

I send these words as vibrations through the ground as I have no other means at present. It may feel funny in your toes, but these are words Mica Spirelli – au-pr extrdnre, brd of flght & prnc f Ljbljna – these are words.

I hope your français is improving très quickly and that –

Wait Mica! There.... a rabbit with yellow eyes.

I must go.

I send love (a peculiar vibration, no?)

Lui

the rabbit hole

2009-10-25T07:19:00.000-07:00

I was meant to go on a date with Mica Spirelli, my first date in eons – eons! Was I looking forward to it? (Do Serbs eat pork?) Yes, massively, and I was prepared for it too: toothpicks, mouthwash, I bought a shirt with a collar, and I even rehearsed lines in the event of a blackout (me blacking out) – What do you say you and me we go for a walk Mica? – I even called Brendan for tips in the event of the theoretical i.e. if things get hot – Shift the paradigm, Labas. Change the whole geometry on her. Get horizontal. Got it! She’s au-pair, they like that stuff.

I was ready, but nervous too, so I went down to the German bakery on Bergstraat (Ulrich’s Brothaus) for a loaf of Schwarzwald – that’s Black Forrest sourdough – but on my way back something happened and I got sidetracked.

Imagine coming out of a German bakery with a loaf of Schwarzwald and a tall guy in a suit hands you a card that reads Clay Dove Esq. III – CEO, Banque Internationale and he motions to an open door on a blacked-out vehicle with a driver in leather gloves. Imagine that.

For a minute Mica was eclipsed; for a minute I was taking in all this leather and gadgetry. Then I turned to Clay Dove with a question: Mr. Dove, is your dad called Clay too since you’re the third… and his dad, and his dad.

Mister Labas, we would like you to focus. There’s a great deal at stake. Please.

Mister Clay Dove, I’ll tell you what’s at stake, I have a date with Mica Spirelli in exactly two hours and... twenty two minutes. So I don’t know what you have in mind, but – and then I took a bite out of my Schwarzwald and cut myself off.

As we drove over the Erasmus bridge I thought of Mica, her gap teeth, her spiky hair and the way her laugh warms my belly. Mica Spirelli – father Italian; mother Slovenian, from Ljubljana –It’s true she’s au pair, but I did not know au pairs dig the horizontal. Is this so?

Trick question Mr. Dove: how many J’s in Ljubljana? ... Sir?... Mr. Dove?

(A real bag of laughs these financiers.)

The meeting at Banque Internationale was held in a pretty small room for sixteen Esquires and Thirds. One guy had a tiny laser he was pointing at a screen with charts. He looked like he knew what he was talking about so I asked him, I said: sir, tell me, what is hyperinflation... I mean, exactly? (Brendan would have poked fun: that’s like when your jeans get tight around the crotch, no? But I’m not Bren).

Hyperinflation, mister Labas, is hugujeei strajasm the money supply lieah tiy urg. And this about how much sense it made to me. I said, thank you sir. Yes, please carry on. But my presence had shaken the room and laser-man could not carry on. He could not.

This is when Clay Dove the Third asked for my opinion on (and I quote) “the coming collapse of the dollar and the investment opportunities in a global depression”. My mouth was full of sourdough. I needed a moment to think.

(Like I said) there were sixteen of them around the table and in the middle of this mahogany donut was a rabbit hole going into the ground deeper than the eye could see. I said to one of them – not Clay Dove but an even taller man – I said to him, Sir, you seem like a reasonable man. I have a date with Mica Spirelli –

But he interrupted. Mr. Labas, we want you to go down the hole and tell us what you see. So I said, why don’t you go yourself, it’s your hole, it’s right there. Or does this have to do with size, because I’m so much smaller than you. And then this wellspoken man – he wasn’t black, but he could have been – he said, we’re not asking you Mister Labas. We want you down the rabbit hole, we want you to look. Laser-man nodded and then a few of others nodded too.

I left my Schwarzwald on the table and thought of bigman as I climbed into the ground. Up above, laser-man pointed the way with his laser and grinned.

Funny, but I was relaxed on my way down, and I even calmly went over some things in my head: Toothpicks (check); mouthwash (check); collared shirt (check); "How about you and me we go for a walk…

(…to be continued)

coming home

2009-10-17T02:54:00.000-07:00

On a footpath in Yemen a man with a dog kicks up dirt as he takes a fig to his mouth. There is no shade for miles and the sun in Yemen, I suspect, is a nasty piece of work. I mention this man and his dog because at precisely this moment – with the fig – I show another man to the door of my cube here in Rotterdam City, a skinny little dude whose appeals for help I've just turned down flat. As I push him out – it’s come to that – he tells me I smell of horse’s penis and that my mother will beget children without heads, and children – anyway, all untrue, of course, my mother is too old to beget (period) and I shower regularly even by Western European standards.

I understand Yemen has customs different to our own, and perhaps Yemenis are generally more impulsive. But what the heck! He held a clipboard with signatures in wild Arabic script سید ابو الاعلىٰ مودودی عبد الحميد كشك‎ and with a pen, pointing to a blank line, he suggested I add my own: Lui Labas

Do I commiserate? Of course. Will I pay fifty euros and sign on to his campaign? No.

You smell of horse’s penis; your mother will birth children… etc, all the way to the front door. Don’t get me wrong, I understand his quarrel. The man with the fig and the dog is his brother, and I understand a fig is too little to keep a man together – too little anywhere, but especially under that nasty, blazing Yemenite sun.

I didn’t take it to heart, though. I checked my armpits and wondered for a moment at the smell of a horse’s penis, but imagined it must be like its urine and thus not exotic in any sense; then I thought of it no more. My head was still full of bright orange suits, water in gazillion liters, the cry of gulls and Roman’s stories of vulva in Riga. So the man from Yemen was not enough to knock me off course. It would take much more than a bit of Arabic script and horse piss.

You see, I was sipping hotdrink with bigman when this ingrate came barging in. Even bigman – who needs no money and has no real concept of it – smiled when Yemen raised the fifty bucks. I’m not saying it was a scam. Yemen probably does have a sunburned brother down to his last fig. I believe it, but that’s not the point.

The point is – the point is – I was home. Home! Deeply glad to be home.

When I returned from the sea and saw the grillroom on the corner, the Turks with their smoky noses; when I heard JK’s chisels and the crackle of his experiments, my heart lifted like an air balloon. I forgave JK the three hour blackout between nine and twelve and the long tongue of smoke that unfurled from his top window. Of course I forgave him. At this moment I would have forgiven my own assassin.

I was happy.

Not a feeling that shows its face much in the open . Usually, it comes wrapped in something: a redhead with nice gums, a bit of fun down in Dubrovnik, a plate of goulash from home… but here, in my candle-lit cube on this October night (a touch of smoke in the air) it came just like that. Plain and dressed down, an all-knowing, far-reaching kind of happy, as if all the world was practically within my reach. I felt Rotterdam behind me, hugging its massive harbor, twinkling in the lowlands. And my sister Bee – spacebird Bee – I felt her too, abuzz, lighting stuff up as she does, right, left and center. Even my friend Drago, on the rim of the galaxy, felt near. And, of course, In the back of my mind I could hear the soft cling-clang of Brendan’s dumbbells and the sound of Willy Nelson’s Highwayman.

To you bigman, I said raising my mug. Big looked like a bear in the darkness - a bear with a mug - and then he raised his mug too.

Home. Yeah!

the North Sea

2009-09-29T03:23:00.000-07:00

I'm in an orange jumpsuit on a deck suspended twenty meters above water, except this water is like no water I have ever seen; this is not Aegean ultramarine, this stuff is a menacing grey, shifty, jittery, surfacy. This stuff smells of dead bird and old rags, this is the stuff that comes out of the pipe when the plumber unscrews, bent down under the sink. And it's everywhere because this place has no corners, it has no angles, it has no place to hide. It's a space-water dictatorship too vast to be earthly and too full of stuff you cannot see to be comfortable for a guy like me.

I’m on the bridge now, in Arie’s field of vision – that’s Captain Arie. You won’t believe me if I tell you he looks like Popeye, but he does. Tattoos, big forearms, a disappearing lip. Maybe his wife is spindly. I’d believe it, I believe almost anything out here. I believe Roman too when he tells me of all his women. Roman is Latvian. I drink in his stories looking down at the water, my head over the railing, my hands tucked in gloves (no mittens onboard). We are shoulder to shoulder, me and Roman. There're only five things you can do out here: sleep, eat, smoke, look at water and talk. We’re doing three, the last three. Like I said, Roman tells me of his women in Riga. My ten year old cousin Popic speaks more advanced English than him, except for a few words like vulva and pubic hair which Roman uses as fluently as hardhat and stainless steel. Word has it Roman’s the best welder onboard. Word has it Latvians are the best welders period. But don’t quote me on that; there are so many words floating around here. Put fifty guys in a confined space and that’s what you get. Dutch, Russian, Hindi, French, English, Latvian. Ta mère, j’la baise – wat een paarde lul – her vulva was quite good, and so on and so forth.

I smoke Rome’s ciggies like an amateur; the smoke is so strong it’s like salt in my eyes, but I insist. It’s one of the five things and four is just too little. After Rome has run through his women, there are no more words for a while and my cigarette’s dead, so we drop two and do only one of the five: we look at the water, and we wait.

Way down, past the light, past the falling debris and sinking fish, past the point beyond which there is no point going unless you are Jacques Cousteau or Ed Harris in The Abyss… way down there, a thinking creature with night-vision eyes is looking at a cigarette butt drifting down slowly, a crooked thing discarded by a thinking creature above, that would be me...

...but I am interrupted in my thought by Captain Arie over the intercom – All to muster point. Abandon ship exercise. All to muster point.

On my way to muster I think of the thinking creature, Arie’s disappearing lip, Roman’s loves in Riga, and me on this strange surfacy space that smells of dead bird and rags.

At Abandon-Ship there is no more thinking involved: fifty heavyweights – that would be us – padded-out in fluorescent floaters crowd into an orange capsule in the middle of the night. Under real, life-threatening circumstances this capsule would drop at the pull of a lever and plunge – with fifty hairy men strapped to seats inside – plunge ten, twenty, thirty meters down into the grey waters, past the light, past the falling fish, past the thinking creature. Would it believe its night-vision eyes? An orange capsule dropping down out of nowhere, fifty men with heavy jaws looking out through portholes: Captain Arie, a Latvian foul-mouth, the Indian brothers, the French bargemaster, the Dutch paardenlullen crew, and me, like Ed Harris in The Abyss, looking out into endless water…

But it was merely an exercise. We did not plunge this time. Not really.

heavy lift in Ålborg

2009-09-13T01:32:00.000-07:00

Think of something – anything – think of it like it’s really there, like you’re about to grab it and pull it to your chest, like you own it – you feel that? You feel that!

***

I’ve been working on a construction yard lugging around objects with Serbs, crew-cut Poles and Danes from Jutland. Equipment, piping, stuff thirty times your size trolleyed around like toys. This week: steel-tube cathedrals for the sea hoisted whole into a massive Danish sky.

Me, I’m by the workers’ huts mostly, with my clipboard, my collar up, fjord-wind on my cheeks, hardhat and steel-cap boots. I note the angles when the cathedral rises, when it hangs and when it rests in the waters. It blows me away every time.

After the hoist, the Danes smoke amongst themselves and speak Danish – oodsk’de gansk’eurjeh’ twiege larsk – to my ear, sing-songs played in reverse, but I know it’s all crap, shit, fucker, whore, curses on Albania for the draw in the world cup qualifier the other night, the night we went out – the whole yard – forty-man strong strolling into Ålborg. I felt like a Viking conqueror. But Christ do these Danes drink! Holy mother of God! If the human spirit can be dissolved, these Danes know how.

In the yard, I stick with the Poles, and mostly with a painter called Vaichek, from Krakow. Paint-gun, gas mask and white pressure-suit. On his chest is a patch that reads VAICHEK that I keep reading every time we speak – VAICHEK VAICHEK VAICHEK – but underneath the gear, in his heart and mind, he’s a linguist – a scholar. Ai paint for de money, he says, producing seven fingers, seven times de money. I called him a sell-out once for fun, but he swung his gun around and debated me in seven languages. Vaichek, put it down, put down the gun, I didn’t mean it.

The first night, in the workers’ hut, I tried to think of something; I tried to think of it like it was really there, like I could own it, but nothing showed. So instead I reached for the money in my pocket and pulled it to my chest. Fresh money. Kroners. Call me greedy, but the first night it worked. The first night only. After that, I was left to my own devices, and had to conjure that stuff up all on my own, like those sparks out of JK’s boxes.

The trick is - I figured it out - the trick is you start with something small, a thing (people are hard; you do that later).

Tomorrow, another cathedral hoist. I’ll take angles again and talk to the Serbs – translate (that’s why I was hired) – I’ll tell them to get on with it, to get the hell on with it (foreman’s words), the whole day with my clipboard, my Bic, the sun poking me in the eye, fjord-wind on my cheeks and that something special, that something almost real – first a thing, then a person – close to my chest.

like so...

ode to disproportionate people

2009-09-06T08:45:00.000-07:00

None of you have ever seen me. You don’t know how I look, what I do at what hour, with whom or “whoms”. If you have no fallen space matter in your backyard, no Turkish thugs in your midst, then we are not neighbors. But says that something? (as my Dutch friends say). No it says nothing. I have been sitting still a lot these days – this is true– but I move whenever I can, right, left, down the center, across the Earth’s crust, and up and down sometimes too. So – thugs or no thugs – I could be in your midst anyway. As we speak.

But that's just space – coordinates – and that's mostly irrelevant. The point is – what I mean is, I like people – persons – so I could potentially like you very much too. In short, I’m not fond of breathy-voices and I don’t like perms too much on girls (much less on guys) but I trust you have neither. For the rest I like all kinds: people with hair-lips and the giggles, funny toes and foibles; bouncy girls with bright eyes and guys with pat phrases – I kid you not. I like waving at small boats with off-board motors, and talking politics with Bren (we’re being jacked Labas, dicked in the rear by a dozen dudes in suits, I kid you not). What else? I like touching elbows with redheads at bus stops and terminals. I like… boy… so much in people that I like. So many people that I like. I could go on, I could go on... and yet, ultimately, it breaks down like this: there are people that I like – just like – and there are people that I LIKE, really and inexplicably, like bigman, for whom I have a fondness that is out of measure, doubly, triply, quadruply. These are the disproportionate people, arithmetically irresolute, bottomless fuel-tanks unto themselves – stand next to them and you refuel with that substance I traverse the globe to get my fill of. Like my sister Bee – another of the disproportionate – a fount of surplus and giver of free-Bees (sorry again for the head scar sissy, I was too young to know that a spade is a spade). These are the people I was thinking of flying over the Danish fjords two nights ago (in an aeroplane –yes– I have not yet Drago’s space-folding skills). These people mean something beyond what they mean. Don’t do the maths on them because they won’t add up (2+2=78.41); these people, they have axes going into the unknown, funny angles and blind-spots all over them. They’re special. They’re disproportionate. They don’t compute. Don’t bother. Just do what I do… just…. well, watch,

Hi bigman. Everything good? Boy, it sure is nice out this evening … Mind if I stand next to you for a while?

Thanks, bigman.

That’s it. Life-fuel. And – I swear to god – if I have any left in me at any time, I’ll give you what I’ve got. All of it. I’ll try to be disproportionate. I'll do it. And maybe – if you’re a redhead and we're at a terminal or something – we’ll touch elbows too.

the freedoms of land animals

2009-08-29T03:40:00.000-07:00

JK rolled his Brontosaurus across his living room most of last night – I think he rides it – consequence is that I hardly slept. Instead I kept watch for tomfoolery on my block: Turks, junkies, riffraff and other land animals. Bigman didn’t show. I suspect he was in town resting against walls again, scratching his arms, kicking up his foot and dusting sand off his large body – the usual. He does this at different locations at different times of the night. We all have to keep busy one way or the other.

Then – very late; like at three – two Japanese girls strolled by. I was squatted in my doorway with a box of cookies. They giggled and walked bowlegged in an arc around me. Why the giggles, I thought, what is it? My “reptile” slippers? My y-fronts? or was it just the shadow of JKs prehistoric beast as it swayed past us on the sidewalk. Anyway, I gestured hello and they greeted back – like they do out east – nodding. Between us, on the ground, a pair of critters-with-teeth picked at the crumbs from the cookies I was eating earlier on. And across the street two Turks showed up from the Grillroom; older, mustachioed Turks with tea in tiny glasses, and cigarette smoke coming out of their nostrils almost non-stop. So there we were, the eight of us: the toothy critters, the girls, the turks, the roving bronto, and me. Land animals all. I made a mental note of this zoo, thankful to JK for keeping me up to bear witness.

Yeah, I was glad for all you land animals – glad to see you, I mean. I scratched my ribs like bigman and smiled. I was glad because my mind has been a watery thing of late, a vast, shifting sea: dark rolling waves; gale winds whipping up froth, salt-sting and wetness.

My work at the Plasma Center has been – mmmm… well.... the square of Delft in the window, the L-shaped desks bolted to the walls, the paper squiggles of Plasma Physics, the fire(meat)balls for lunch (one more fireball for Mr. Labas?) Enough! I’m done. I'm really done.

Crunching another cookie, I thought the obvious to myself, what are two Japanese girls doing here in the middle of the night? Kindly land animals from the East. The Turks too were puzzled I could tell. But then instantly in response I though, what the heck Lui, what about you? Caught in moon beams in the middle of the North Sea, salty spray on your Balkan nose, and sea stars in abundance overhead. Pretty unlikely too, but pretty soon that’s where you’re going be. You, land animal extraodinaire, hoarder-of-gravity and taker-of-ground-oaths. You... Lui... at sea.

practical mathematics

2009-08-21T08:01:00.001-07:00

1) A swimming pool lies 10m off the foot of a high rise downtown Zagreb. On the roof, 100m* up, a desperate man stands in suit and tie, trembling, crying, shouting abuse in Serbo-Croatian, the foam of death on his lips. In his hands is a picture of a woman with blond hair, (probably peroxide) and breasts that look – how shall I say – well, fake. Anyway - irrelevant – the point is – the question is: what is the maximum speed he must stay under when leaping off the high rise to ensure his safe passage to the underworld i.e. the guy wants to die, not go for a swim. Note1: assume a perfect parabola and no air friction. Note2: We’re on Earth, so gravity – except around Labas’ meteorite – is approximately constant. Hints:

a) Drago Stanic – that’s his name; remember him? he called me from his yacht on the Aegean – is not a stuntman, nor does he wish to be one.

b) Drago and I used to play Mikado and number games in my yard after school. He was always good with numbers, then he got really good and turned criminal. Casinos and whatnot. He loved puzzles and food. Was he fat? Yes. But this is of no practical significance since air friction is zero.

2) Once desperate, now disembodied and strangely lighthearted, Drago must travel from the concrete at the foot of the high rise to a giant rock belt on the rim of the galaxy 300 light-years away. His punishment for whacking Serbs, beating Tania and stealing money is mild: he will run a hotdog stand for the Americans he so disliked on Earth, i.e. he will languish for the rest of eternity outside a football stadium, i.e. American football. Now, if Drago can travel at 30 times the speed of light (he's disembodied, immaterial, ectoplasmic – call it what you want – so he can do this now) how long will it take Drago to get there? Note1: disregard Special Relativity. Note2: ...and General Relativity. Note3: in fact, ignore all physics post 1916. Note4: Assume a straight line and no pit stops. Note5 Assume Drago hits no obstruction and has a working knowledge of blackholes. Note6: Even though Drago – as I remember him – is notoriously “distractable”, assume that for once in his godforsaken, fucked-up life he is going to concentrate on the task at hand and not wander around full of schemes to make a quick Dinar. No dollars or dinars in space Drago! Hints:

a.Drago and Tania – lady Peroxide – enjoyed a short but intense relationship. Tania cheated, but this is just for your information and of no practical significance.

b A light-year – like a relationship – is a distance traveled, not a duration.

3) This is a two part question. If regret is a wave that spreads out through space like a ripple in water, lighting up the disembodied as it encounters them (1) how fast would this wave have to travel if it left the bosom of the regreter downtown Rotterdam to touch Drago just before he reaches the rock-belt stadium? And (2) how long would it take for Drago to appear as a shooting star for this Earthlings to behold. Note1: light must travel back the distance before it can be perceived. Note2: When he called me from his yacht - despite the jokes and tomfoolery - underneath it was a plea for help. Come to Zagreb, my friend, please come! But this is just for your information and of no practical significance

Extra credit (for smart asses and cookies): What hemisphere would see Drago if he jumped…now!

Note: Use pen & pad. You may test waves of your own and look at the sky at any time. That’s not cheating, it’s encouraged.

(RIP Drago!)

*source: Snezana Eugenia Birckenwald-Lekic IV (Snezi)

back in Amsterdam

2009-08-14T05:45:00.000-07:00

It was time to go to Amsterdam again. I hadn’t been back since before Buenos Aires. I missed the junkies, the tourists and the trip-me cobbles. And – truth be told – I missed Brendan a whole lot too.

First I went to see Julien near Westerpark. I smelled weed and heard Jacques Brel. First thing he did when I arrived was hand me one of his freshly printed business cards: Juste Julien – legal counsel with a French touche (typo or style?). I was curious what “French touch” meant in legal terms. He has a law degree – I think – but the only law Julien has ever known was being busted at the Belgian border with a pound of weed . With confidence he pronounced: I weel bee lawyur for expat wis mush monay. He seemed determined so we left it at that. Then we moved to the balcony with some Pastise to discuss his latest attempts to exercise his French touche on the opposite sex. In the background, Jacques Brel thundered Je t’aime, oui, je t’aaaaime. The sun shined down upon us. It was a fine day.

After that it was off to Brendan's. He came back from the gym when I arrived. In the kitchen he beat an eggy protein drink with a fork and downed it, keeping me laser-locked in the corner of his eye. Clearly, he had something in mind.

Lui, you look pale. You need to get laid.

This worried me.

You need action, Lui. Pronto!

Bren, you have egg on your lip.

It worried me because this guy doesn’t understand strategy. Bren knows only trial and error. He's the Thomas Edison of womanizers – he'll try every damn bulb filament known to man, every trick in the book, and one will light up. He’s about statistics, not stealth. Needless to say, I knew ahead of time that in my case the accent would be overwhelmingly on error.

Give me your hand, he said.

Wha - ?

Give me your hand! I handed it to him and he grabed it like a doorknob.

You and me, right here, we make a pact, a fucking covenant, yeah. You don’t leave ‘til we get you some action. We shake on it.

Bren, that’s bad idea. That’s a baaaaa – ouw, OOOOUW!.. ok ok ok!

It’s a deal then.

The American touch. A little coercion never hurt anyone.

An hour later I was at the Waldorf café with a drink in my injured hand. The humiliation began. Six drunk Brits from Sheffield shuffled in (every alloy known to man), enough fat on them for six more. A hen night. All morals left at the chicken coop.

Ladies, ladies, introductions, introductions. Meet my friend Lui. A lightweight, yes, but quality equipment. A Bang & Olufsen for your Samsungs ladies, he said pointing to the guys, right and left. With Bang he winked and nudged. I cringed.

Then two polish girls,

Polish!? that’s a amazing, what a coincidence, my friend here is also Balkan

(Oh god)

Lui, speak Balkan, go on. Speak it.

I cringed.

And so on and so forth…

Finally, near closing time, Sofia von Spitzenwald showed up with her Brazilian friend. Remember them from the Switcheroo. Bren suddenly simmered down. Turns out he and Sofia “know” each other; “benchpressed” her many a time, but still this Autro-Hungarian blue-blood has a hold on him it seems.

Sofia, good to see you, ravishing. What brings you here? Have a seat. And your friend too. Drink?

Brazil sat next to me. Chats went smooth: You’re pretty tall, aren’t you? I opened. This is relative, she said, you are a small man. And so on, but good. Smart cookie, Brazil. I bought her a drink for free and we drank from our respective altitudes knowing there was no danger here; we would never “know” each other.

In the morning I snuck out like a thief, in contravention of the pact, the fucking covenant. Still pale and unlaid, but sated nevertheless. Amsterdam had delivered! My headache and gut testified. It was all good, the trialing – even the erroring – so good that on the train back a haiku emerged unannounced:

Canal ladies in tights

Street-vomit on cobbles

Drunk dog barking at dawn

I was inspired.

government

2009-08-08T02:48:00.000-07:00

"Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions."

We like Machiavelli where I come from – Niccolo Machiavelli – we like him because he’s smart, because he can screw you, bamboozle you, rip you off and smile all the while. He’s an artist in the manner of the great illusionists. With sleight of hand and deflection, Lookee-here, this bird in my hand, he says and then he cleans you out. He can do this because he never actually does it himself. The best scam artists in Serbia (the best are Serbian not Croatian) have someone else do it for them. Once robbed and stripped down to your underpants, Niccolo sidles up (fully clothed of course) my friend, he says, you have been robbed, I will help you. So you follow Nico to his home – what else can you do? – and you live under his roof, under his care. He serves you plum schnapps and lets you watch cable. Soon you forget that you once had your own house, your own land, and clothes on your back. And soon it becomes normal to walk in underpants – everyone should be in underpants! For years you do little else but drink schnapps and watch cable. But one day Nico tells you you must earn your keep. You see that man over there with the jacket and the hat, he says. Here’s a bird, go! Take everything he’s got and bring it back.

Now you are working for Nico, and soon there are more and more people in underpants and fewer and fewer hats and garments. There are hand-birds all over the place, and all you can find is schnapps and cable.

Then one day you start to think to yourself, shits, holy mother of god, I’m in my underpants, my liver is busted, my eyes shot, winter lies in wait, all I have is this hand-bird. How can this be? So you talk to other people in underpants and you find that they think the same.

What the heck! You say to the men in hats, this didn’t pan out, did it? This didn't work.

My friend, things are better, don’t worry. Things are better.

Stop calling me friend. All I see is hand-birds and underpants. What’s better, tell me?

Now Belgrade is astir. More and more people in underpants speak up. Hand-birds are let free into the skies. Thousands are on the streets. Thousands.

Three are home sick.

But that is enough. A few men in hats address the assembled underpants :

People! Listen all. You have let your hand-birds free. Now there is an illness in our airs and lungs. Soon Belgrade will be like Genova during the black plague. Listen carefully. Stay inside. Your life depends on it. We will help you!

pairs make wholes

2009-08-07T02:14:00.000-07:00

First day at the Plasma-Center, Antun and I got on famously: chitchat; news of Zagreb; pork and sarma; the evils of the Ottoman empire. On the same page, right across the board. Oh, fellow countryman, what a delight. Then off he went to his fireballs, and left me a pile of papers with squiggles and footnotes, but no instructions.

He had hired me for what purpose exactly? My Croat tongue alone? The firm clasp of my handshake? My pyrotechnic heart?

I sit in a bunker of filing cabinets on the third floor, five by five by three, on a plastic-swivel, on oatmeal-colored carpet squares. There’s a window in the corner and a piece of Delft sky. I can smell cow and printer-breath from the machines in the hall.

Across from me sits Karla Sliedrecht. Dutch down to her fingernails. Her blood is the blood of the Dutch who ruled the high seas and worked the land with oxen. Blond, bovine, butter thighs – think Vermeer, ladies in petticoats, milk cans and frosty horizons. Even her soul that glimpses past the geraniums in her eyes is Dutch, Dutch, Dutch : you’re not really from here are you?

I am Lui, I volunteered. (Ik ben Lui).

Lewie?

No, l’wee. One syllable. L’WEE LA-BA.

Then in rapid succession she cross-examined: sister, brother, mother, father, hobbies and so forth. But my concentration was shot. I couldn’t get my eyes off the fuzz on her face, a film of hair beyond velvet, down her neck, across her collar bone. My mind raced - raced: I saw creatures scaling mountain fronts, large footprints, long hairs in the snow, I saw –

I think we should move our desks, Lui.

wha - why?

So we don’t stare at each other, she said in Dutch

I’m not staring.

You’re staring.

I’m not.

I was, but I was thinking too. I was thinking of bigman - lonely bigman - my subterranean friend. He too is fuzzy. YES! Put two and two together. Karla and bigman, romantic comedies and light drinks under the brickwork. There is order in this chaos Earth. There are pairs that make wholes. Bring all these pairs together, all of them, and this chaos consumes itself - wooooooooshshshshshshshshsh – until there is nothing but a hole -

Lewie!

Yes.

Help me move the tables.

Yes. Of course. Yes.

And so we slid tables over carpet squares in silence, our eyes inside our heads. Hers in hers; mine in mine.

fireballs

2009-07-28T01:50:00.000-07:00

The sun can’t get through today. The sky is cloud-paper. A few white scribbles here and there; a black doodle in the distance like a long-legged bird or a heli with a stuntman on a rope. There’s plenty going on though: the air is thick with electromagnetics from mobiles, from radios and from the Poles, North and South. They come from far these waves just to be here above my head: Zagreb, Sebastopol, Luxemburg, you name it. Meanwhile, down low at ground level, woodlice gnaw, Bigman sleeps, and way down in the darkness, at the bottom of the sea, eyeless fish scavenge for carcasses.

Hello?... Lui, are you there?

Further still, thousands of miles below the crust, a big sweltering, raging goulash of energy -

Lui, you're breaking up.

I'm here.

This line is bad. I’m going to call you back.

Click.

...big sweltering, raging goulash of energy -

Ring.

Hello.

It's me again.

Hi.

This is better. Lui, I'm calling about that job.

What job?

The one I told you about, at the plasma-physics lab in Delft.

Tell me.

The head-guy is a Croat. Dr. Antun Dragoslav. He needs an assistant.

I'm not qualified.

You're not going to do any physics. You just run the office. You file stuff, you photocopy, etc. You speak Serbo-whatsit, right?

Croatian. Yes.

Then you're qualified.

What's plasma?

It's like a gas - super hot - but it's not a gas, and they suspend it magnetically in a vacuum -

What!?

It's a fireball, Lui.

"scrotum" in Turkish

2009-07-17T01:51:00.000-07:00

The party was last night. Pavlov Pop banged through their repertoire, people danced, hop-scotched over Meteor, and sat snug and kissy on the collapsed wall of my kitchen. I haven't had the stomach to clean up yet. Jk's butts, Brendan's crushed liter-cans and all the confetti from birthday-girl Bijou. It was a party!

When the cops showed at four, five Turks gathered on my stoop to back me up in case of beef. It was good of them, a kind gesture, but I managed despite Brendan's mooning from my backyard. Butt cheeks and I SMELL PIG doesn't help with law enforcement, he should know that. Anyway, we were told what we knew already: too much brass, too loud, too late at night, and after that, people started leaving. The Doobie Brothers could not revive the spirit the Pavlovs had conjured up.

The Turks were still there when everyone had left, so I invited them in, all five of them, Izimir (from Izmir, on the Aegean), his cousin from Istanbul and three other guys. We sat with the Pavlovs under a crescent moon - ten of us - doing word-swaps, Turkish to Russian to Serbo-Croatian. This is how I discovered the fastest way to get your testicles cut off in Istanbul. Call a guy ibne, pronounced eeb-Né (pansy, push-over, gaylord but worse, ten times), and by syllable two your pants will be down to your ankles and the scimitar at your scrotum. The Pavlovs chimed in with the Russian equivalent and we all laughed – fun stuff – my balls safe on my cooling meteorite. After that we did scrotum, head-butt and Zinedine Zidane (they call him something else in Turkey).

This is when I remembered Switchblade from the 'Ol Switcheroo, with his ten thousand head of cattle, the swirling cognac in his fingers, and the nymphs on either side to rest his Ottoman paws. And I thought, what is it with these Turks, they're all tough-guys.

You know this dude called Switchblade? I asked, I was curious.

No response.

I tried again: şviçblüd. You know şviçblüd? He's from Amsterdam. Big guy, drinks cognac?

Wow, Bang! Full Pavlov-reaction from the Turks – jerky-heads, jaw-muscle contractions, the works – What did I say!?Fuck. Suddenly I feared for my teeth and my soft Balkan features. Quickly I moved on,

Gentlemen, mint-tea? Yes? and vanished into the kitchen.

After a while they simmered down again and we carried on as before, down the tri-lingual lexicon: neck brace, goulash, side-arm, hemorrhage and so on and so forth until dawn.

listening in

2009-07-11T03:59:00.000-07:00

I'm stretched in trunks across the back of my cooling meteorite. The sun drags across the Northern Hemisphere like the tongue of a dog, drippy with clouds and humidity. I ignore what I can now, the chiseling at JK's above and my own whistly nostrils – hay fevered and cold. Instead, I try to imagine this rock as a cliff-hung outcrop above the Adriatic, somewhere off Split or Dubrovnik, this beautiful rock that only some days ago was zipping past lunarscapes through showers of cosmic rays... to land here in my backyard, into this perfect crater. Perfect and parabolic, like a dish, a huge receptor –

What's that! Shshshshshshshsththth – the beginning of that Beatles song? – no, no the unsheathing blade of a cut-throat in Baluchistan, yes; And that there, – plick pluck plick pluck – Chinese fingers, a thousand or more netting rackets in Guangzhou. And there – allez, allez, on y va mon vieux, allez – the Port of Marseille, an old man and his dog. And when I shift my ear a little like this, I can hear Thriller in LA; And like this, sixteen Sunni rebels in a trailer, insurgents and their English speaking overlord – What? What's that? SAY IT AGAIN! – but I can't hear it now over the cling-clanging of Brendan's dumbbells 40 miles north in Amsterdam. Interference. I turn my head to focus, but now I hear fires rage, voices cry, guns crackle, and from afar, the keystrokes of a bureaucrat and the dim bleeps of his algorithms. But now a ringing rips through everything, an incessant intrusive ringing, I can't hear –

Wait, that's me, my front door!

Quick I thrown pants on over my Y-front trunks.

The man at the door is bearded and massive like a bear. The sun is eclipsed. He does not greet, does not introduce himself, but clenches his fists and then utters his message of information:

Are you Mr. Labas?

Yes.

Mr. Labas, you are not to listen.

I'm just sitting on my rock, sir.

Again, Mr. Labas, do not listen. You can sit, lie, talk, do as you please, but don't listen. If I have to come here again...

His jaw opens and closes. The sun appears briefly behind his ear, and then he leaves.

I go back to my rock, and try in vain to blot out what I can. But now I wonder about this man who looks so much like Chuck Norris (was it Chuck Norris?). And I think, should I be scared of this guy? I mean – fuck – after all, if I can hear all of you, then surely, well, you can hear me too, right?... No?

fête terrestre

2009-07-06T02:01:00.000-07:00

I thought about giving a party at my house, so I made some phone calls, how are you, what’s going on, this and that, and soon I had a handful of people good to go. I spoke to bigman on the stoop last night too, but he just nodded and said neither yes nor no. He shook some sand off his arm and went for a walk downtown Rotterdam. Brendan raved, of course, and immediately made a list of people: Joyce, Julie, Emerald, Bijou (see a pattern?) until I reminded him that this was a quiet kind of thing. A quiet party? What's the matter with you. That’s oxymoronic, Lui? I didn't know Bren knew that word (a burst of intelligence under pressure). JK agreed to come too, and promised to bring one of his BOXES, but I told him no, no BOXES, JK, and no animals, please. It’s a party. Bring food or something, and he looked at me kind of funny. Food, JK, real stuff, yes? He was startled, but he agreed.

Finally, when I had everything set up – who, what, when, where – it struck me across the face like an swoopy albatross: MUSIC! No furniture, is one thing, but no music! A body without spirit; a ground-hugging, invertebrate thing. What've I got? So I went through my records: Doobie Brothers, yes, lots of Doobie Brother’s. What else?... fuck! I made a desperate call to friends: guys! please, I need your help. Can you play next week? ... um, Can you come for free? I beg you. And thus was arranged live entertainment for my little soirée, a quartet of brass: tuba, trombone, and French horns, all pop repertoire, classics from Beat it to Labamba, whatever you like, Balkan stuff too. Pavlov Pop they're called – they're Russian friends. I got excited just thinking about it and made some more calls to Fer, Switch, and my sister Bee. None of them will make it, I know that, but I wanted to tell them, come, please come! My yard is all busted brick and interstellar rubble, my kitchen, a gaping wound, but no matter, no matter!! there'll be lots of space, foreign food for finger and fork, there'll be tubas, trombones, french horns and classy people..

meteor

2009-06-29T09:09:00.000-07:00

Late last night something hard and incandescent plunged down from the sky, ripped off the back wall of my kitchen and lodged itself five feet deep into my backyard. My window was shattered. Everything shook. The world was dust and broken glass, and for a moment I wondered whether I should get up at all. For a moment I thought it might be best to just sleep through this and wake up in whatever other universe I had been transported to. Not think, not look, ignore. But there was knocking at my front door, it was bigman, and eventually I got out of bed. He didn't ask to come in, he just came in. We still hadn't said a word to each other, I still didn’t know anything about him, how he lived under the brickwork, but there he was and I was grateful for it. He stood for a while, all sandy and shaky, scratching his chin at this strange rock in the ground. Then he touched it, but it was still too hot from its descent through the atmosphere. So we just stood there, side by side, me and bigman, gazing at this beautiful, amazing meteorite from the sky. And I was happy somehow, in all this wreckage, that it had come to my universe, to my backyard, to me.

bigman

2009-06-19T02:26:00.000-07:00

I’m in a bar on the Coolsingel with Bren. I haven’t slept in three days. I entered a dark hole from which I have yet to emerge.

Man, check her out, Lui, check her out! Bren elbows me in ribs. She's yours, Lui. Your name's written all over her. Step up.

Maybe later Bren.

Don’t be a pansy. Do it, man! Do it!

Three nights ago I felt quivers coming from underground. I imagined a Bangkok of rats coming and going from eatery to fornication nest. The sound strapped me to my space-cube as if gearing me up for a journey vast and interstellar. But the quivering was something else, something quite different. A large figure, man-like, but darker and taller, rose up from the brickwork outside. He dusted sand off his fuzzy body and looked around absentmindedly. Ten feet of head, chest and limb. Not a Turk, not a phantom, not a famished beast, crazed and rabid. Bigman kicked his foot up against the back wall of Ankara Grillroom and looked around the street calmly, as if he owned the place. I watched him through the blinds.

Do it, Lui.

Bren, please! I grab a handful of peanuts strewn with urine-microbes and I eat before I say something I'll regret.

Bigman... like one of JK’s contraptions morphed from cork to flesh; indeed, the sound of wood-creak and the tinkering of JK's little gas-stove have been on around-the-clock for weeks.

You’re a gaylord Lui. It’s official. You’re a disgrace to the race. Eventually we're gonna go extinct with people like you. I mean it. Look at her, man!

A redhead with pearls and colored nails. But it makes no difference. I order a tonic. Off goes Bren in my stead. Redhead ignores. Redhead stiffens. Bren flexes. Sleeves tighten. Hand on the bar. Then Bren speaks. Colored nails do the wave. Hair-flick and bracelet-pinch. Then she smiles, there it is. She’s screwed. Entry n+1.

I drink from my tonic and start thinking - I don’t know why, but I think maybe bigman is a friend. The way he was standing there, is just the way I would stand there. And the way he kicked up his foot. I do that! What are you doing underground, my friend. Come have a cup of coffee. A glass of milk. My kitchen is small but I can accommodate. Mi casa su casa. Dust of the sand and I’ll make you a sandwich. Pastrami? I have.

Bren swings around the bar: Lui, listen – big favor, huge favor – I need the mattress. I’ll make it up to you.

Bren – fuck – where the hell am I going to sleep.

You're skinny, you can sleep on my bench, no problem. I’ll make it up to you, man, I swear.

Bren!

Come on.

Alright... I won’t be sleeping anyway.

time is money

2009-06-12T00:16:00.000-07:00

Drago Stanic, my buddy from grade school, called me from his boat on the Adriatic. You must come, my friend. I have too many dollars – you cannot understand. I am shitting money. It is coming out from my backside, yes. You listen [a huddle of girls giggle in the background] you hear? You must come to Zagreb for party Lui. And you must bring your women, yes, [giggle] good women [giggle], and your wife [giggle]

Drago, how did you get my number?

Your mother.

What!? How’d you get her number?

No more questions, Lui.

Earlier that night I was on a ‘business date’ with Ietje van Velzen: medium length hair, brown nondescript; bowlegged but brisk; dentures and hairnet. She’s 75 years old. My first venture into free enterprise.

I ate Chinese and conversed for money. It was easy. I know the angles: Is that lavender Ietje?... Let me get that for you... and so on and so forth.

But let’s face it, at twenty euros an hour it was a miserable start. I made more xeroxing in servitude back in Amsterdam. I could raise my price, yes, but I’m investing. Gratitude pays greater dividends. And don’t let the hairnet and orthopedics fool you. She’s the Drago Stanic of her class. She used to own van Velzen Vliegpapier – you may know it – that’s flypaper, but not those scrolls of grim adhesive; think pastel, gauze, potpourri and scenes from Aix-en-Provence. Bowlegs never stopped her from getting places. Her factory in Slovenia employed two hundred men. She’s a killer.

Halfway through dinner Brendan called in distress. For two weeks now he’s been haunted, he says, by “poltergeists” from his little black book. Girls. What else.

They’re ganging up on me Lui. I’m telling you, it’s a fucking campaign. This one chick locked me out of my house. MY OWN HOUSE. I need a break, man. I’m coming to your place.

Now?!

Yes, right now. You mind if I bring my bench.

A bench? I have a couch, Bren. Good couch.

My bench press, man!

Now Ietje was getting offended. She rapped her knuckles on the table and lanced tofu with her chopsticks. I hung up.

An hour later I put her on the bus and headed home. That’s when Drago called (...I am shitting money... it is coming from out my...) I took a detour west and watched some geese paddle in a pond for a bit. And that’s when it hit me – fuck-a-duck – That’s what I’m going to sell (why didn’t I think of it before): TIME. Plain and simple. Lui-Labas-time. By the second, by the minute, as you wish. It starts and stops at your command. It doesn’t weigh a thing. Comes in a JK-BOX, special design. Put it in your pocket. Twenty euros an hour; a hundred for six. Order while there’s stock!

JK and the Turks

2009-06-03T03:10:00.000-07:00

There was a fight on the corner last night. Ten Turkish guys went head to head on the pavement. As I understand there were no bodies, but blood was spilt.

When it happened I was at my upstairs neighbor’s, Johan-Karl – JK, from Charleroi – I was there to ask him (for fuck’s sake!) to please stop chucking his butts and cans over his balcony onto my square-meter of yard. I have thyme growing down there for my bouillabaisse and whatnot when I have visitors. Listen friend, I said, keep your waste-things out of my yard, cappice, yes?! Then I made a fist or a finger, but he didn’t respond. He left the door open and I went in after him with more shit to deliver, but once inside, my mouth dropped.

Do not fear friends! He is much older, yes, his suits are oatmeal-beige and he’s from Flanders – it all stacks up – but he’s not a pedophile. Johan-Karl is an installation artist. He makes wood and plaster contraptions; he builds animals, current and prehistoric. e.g. a full-scale, cork-built brontosaurus split in two: the rump is near the kitchen, the other half by his bed. The other thing he makes is BOXES... yes (I don’t know how else to say this except to italicize and capitalize). I was inside one when the shit hit the fan with the Turks. Six cubic meter of darkness, the highest grade, I couldn’t see my hands, there were no grooves, no fissures, the whole thing was totally hermetic. I could hear stuff, though, the Turks shouting abuse and JK rattling ice cubes in his glass. In my head – still annoyed – I was thinking of my bouillabaisse and my thyme-bush strew with Phillip Morris.

Eventually though, mmmmmmmm, I realized where I was,

Thank you Johan-Karl. Fascinating. Thank you, yes. Now, let me out.... you’re a true artist... Thank you... Johan... Johan-Karl?

I spoke Dutch. The Flemish are pesky with language, and what with the Turks dismembering each other on the block, I took precautions.

Johan-Karl... sir!

But then – Holy mother of God – something appeared out of nowhere, an electrostatic ball that sparked sporadically and danced in suspension – WFT! – an unearthly Teslian experiment, and I was caught, riveted, like the summer in Split under the pier when Nataša Franolić showed me hers and I mine and I was catapulted like a spitball into the ether (cops - sirens - ruckus - Turks caught in hand-to-hand combat) and briefly I was glued in space.

Dear employment officer, wealthy heiress or man-with-cash

2009-05-24T00:35:00.001-07:00

I am seeking employment in all fields. My skills are varied in discipline and quality, i.e. I am better with people than pneumatic drills, but I invite and encourage suggestions from far and wide: masonry, diplomacy, fashion. There is nothing I would not do – unabashed, I confess to my cramped circumstances – nothing, except:

One. people trafficking, any and all.

Two. pimping, any and all, (however, note: I was offered an attractive position in such capacity just last week in Stuttgart. Conclusion: I am an asset in all worlds, under- nether- etc.)

Three. I will not sell my body – hold that, in a limited sense perhaps, yes, I would escort heiresses, doyennes, elderly estate-holders and suchlike, all expenses paid, plus pocket money. I know nice restaurants and dainty eateries downtown Rotterdam (note: finger food is a winner, an icebreaker for all types). My conversation is outstanding: give me a topic and I will discuss, freewheel, extemporize or just listen with bated breath. Plus, I am not averse to elderly ladies – conversationally! I insist – I was raised by my grandmother outside Dudrovnik for three years; the place was crawling with old people. I know old ladies like the back of my hand, I know their foibles, their appetites, their sweet tooth – teeth, some have several, prosthetic or real that cannot, must not be ignored. Note: I have neither car nor license, so restrict searches to: able-bodied-elderly-female. Thank you.

There’s more. Tap my entrepreneurial core and you will get the unexpected. Did I mention I was asked to partake in a commercial venture to import Davidoff Slims over the Danube into Western Europe – contraband! you will argue but that’s not the point: The point is I was singled out on the force of my commercial skills and unalloyed loyalty, both so manifest they were evident after only a five minute conversation! Five minutes! I’m sorry to toot my own horn, but such is the nature of application letters. My contact for the Slims deal is currently in St-Louis, Senegal, selling canned goods. If you are interested I can put you in touch with him... for a commission of course.

In short, and to conclude: I am a highly employable individual, a linguist, diplomatic in temperament and unassuming in posture. I have brown eyes and my hair is usually short, it’s just that these days...anyway, what else?

Best call me. I am mostly available, but better after 10.

Kind regards,

Lui Labas

ps- we can also speak face to face; I usually have a coffee around eleven at the Turkish place across the street. Don’t mind the big guys at the door, they’re Kurdish, but they’re harmless.

four by four by four

2009-05-16T02:22:00.001-07:00

I took off to Stuttgart the other day. Just like that? – yeah, just like that; I had to go see someone. I spent two hours on the side of the road with a cardboard sign in my hands. S-T-U-T-T-G-A-R-T, it said in calligraphy – I have a pen-set from way back and plenty of time to kill – I even did some medieval shit on the first letter, some coils and frills and whatnot which I figured would attract the more enlightened drivers. But waving it around, it occurred to me that this much skill could attract the wrong kind of dude. It was getting on ten o’clock and suddenly I had this frightful image of a moustache-lipped Bavarian with leather gloves, leather cap, leather... I started heading back, but a car stopped – a Fiesta – and I got in.

(What the fu— Labas! You just got back, man.)

(Yeah, so?)

(Don’t you have stuff to do?)

(I have stuff to do, yeah... in Stuttgart.)

(Ha ha ha, very funny, ha ha ha. What do you have to do in Belgium you can’t do here?)

(It’s in Germany Brendan. Stuttgart’s in Germany.)

I love Bren – God bless him.

The Fiesta was tiny and dark. A large primate was at the wheel. Big, tattooed, bald, Aryan stock – think sauerkraut and Autobahn – I didn’t say Nazi, I said Aryan – that’s still a legitimate word last I checked – anyway, not to worry, I don’t think this guy’s history or sense of himself goes back much further than the 2006 Fussball Weltmeisterschaft and the trauma of Germany’s defeat on home ground. Everything before that is unknowable or beer-soaked beyond recognition.

My name is Lui – Lui Labas.

I’m Jürg!

I know, I said.

That was stupid. The tiny car suddenly swerved way out as Jürg’s heavy Aryan head swung towards me. Woher wissen sie das?! How do you know?!

It says on your arm, Jürg. Take it easy, It’s written on your arm.

Ah, Ach zo, Ja. Das ist correct. Ja, ja. And the Fiesta settled back into its lane.

All the rest of his tattoos were basically doodles, scattered and incoherent, but his name – JURG – was written in clean, Gothic letters – you guessed it, calligraphy. And like my S, his J was a clutter of coils, frills and illumination, a beautiful piece of work, unexpected on such an undignified arm.

Eventually we got to talking,

...I wurk in nightlife, ja.

At the bar or something?

Nein. Nightlife-security, ja. Und also ze administration, ja, ze treasury.

The what?

Ze treasury.

Jürg has a lot of flaccid muscle he probably doesn’t use much but which I’m sure is integral to his services for “ze treasury”. I didn’t know what he was talking about and I didn’t want to ask. He said nightlife another twenty times before he finally mentioned the word girls: Ze treasury, is depending on how many girls are on ze floor, ja. Jürg shifted into fifth gear. What girls, Jürg, what floor? Then Jürg showed me his teeth and lifted his big hand – like some German, multi-grained loaf off the top shelf – to remind me once more – stupid Croat that I am – that he works in NIGHTLIFE. Yes, yes, yes, I got it Jürg, but something doesn’t square, man. We’re sitting in a Ford Fiesta, a diesel; we’re barely breaking 110 kph, we’re sputtering forth. What kind of joint do you run? Donations from your clientele to The Treasury must be very ungenerous. Where’s the Merc 600SL? In my hometown Zagreb, among contraband runners and pimps, you would be a disgrace, Jürg, a laughing stock. What treasury is this!? But I kept quiet, and finally he changed the subject

Und you, why you going to Stuttgart, ja?

For work.

Ach zo. Wat wurk?

um... mostly manual.

Mechanisch, ja?

Yes, mechanical , yes,

ja, ja, sehr gut.

What the hell. I’m a liar.

I was stumped. I've lost the concept of work. My work these days is purely internal: a beating heart, the limbs on my body that, by necessity, I move from A to B; my work is the flurry of ideas that batter my brain; channeling them and filing them is work; my work... um... my work was getting to Stuttgart... and maybe Jürg was about to offer me a job at ze treasury or – fuck-a-duck – running the floor! Imagine that. I thought of his multigrain-hand giving directions, the eruption of tattoos across his arms, I thought of calling him boss from behind the bar, but then my mind slipped and for the next ten seconds all I could think of was my new cube of space in Rotterdam, my new home – four by four by four – now rid of rats, spacious and grand, and right then – caught in Jürg’s Fiesta – I felt like an emperor and the think-space in my mind filled the cube to perfection, fully, every patch of space – four by four by four – in length, in width, in height, and finally, in the last seconds, in an other dimension too.

rats

2009-05-06T07:32:00.000-07:00

...these fuckers, they weigh a few pounds – did you know – they’re too heavy to truly scuttle like their smaller cousins; even fear-drenched, they still have this ugly swagger when they trespass across your living room, leaving shits as they go. In India they have rat-mercenaries, barefoot street-folk with makeshift lances who bring evil unto the Kingdom of Rats. I would invite such a man into my home – my new home – I would pay him generously, not per kilo of tail, like his employers in Mumbai, but for the whole Goddam operation. Contract and all: Please sign here sir. And would you like a new stick for that lance. The Chinese have the Year of the Rat, the most fortuitous on their calendar – wtf! – vermin that bring famine, disarray and stink. It must be the symbolism. Tell me.

To begin, it is a fact that there is nothing more gruesome than a rat’s tail. It is a juicy, inorganic looking thing, like a piece of cable, and I would go so far as to theorize – listen up evolutionary biologists – that they’re actually fake! Those things are plug-ins, enlargements of some kind rats got on the cheap a few eons back when it was fashionable. They’re fake. I dare you to check!

I don’t hate rats, I just find them completely lacking in anything dignified! Even a dung-beetle has that fancy gloss on his back he can be proud of, but a rat.... I am a lowly thing, he says – just check his body language – I have nothing going for me. I would trade with a pigeon, or even one of those screechy baboons with a snout and a scorched back-end. I would trade today!

Alas, Rat, such is life! Without that tail you could have masqueraded as a guinea pig, but you blew it! You had to get pimped-up, and look where you are now, forever the prey of barefoot mercenaries with lances and nothing to lose. I pity you Rat.

Now, existentially – this is a point in their favor... maybe – existentially they do better than many of us (why do I feel blah blah when I do blah with blah). Rats have come to terms with themselves. Simply: I eat therefore I am. Cardboard, teabags, socks, dirt, poop, and even – when the going gets tough – a fellow rat. In the end, only their tails remain because these are synthetic and indigestible.

Jesus, Labas, what are you on about? You're getting obsessive. No one wants to read about this crap. No one gives a rat’s ass!

Well they would if they nearly shared a flat with three of them, X Y and Z; all more than a pound in weight; distinguishable only by the intensity of their fright and the size of their rodent-turds. But I ask you: Where did they come from and how did they enter my home? It’s a mystery. My space is darker than most, but I do not live underground, and every nook and cranny is exposed. I suspect otherworldliness and Faustian arrangements. Is this the Year of Rat? Are these creatures back in favor, strutting the streets, eyeing new prosthetics? I shudder...

Enough. Anyway, who I am to judge! Maybe, if it came down to it, a rat would trade with all of God’s creatures EXCEPT Man: gangly, two-legged, hairless like the back-end of those baboons. Man: Noisy, forever stomping around, disrupting the peace, planting poison right and left, killing, maiming, usurping, duping, excavating grounds unannounced, dislocating families. Man!

Would a rat do such a thing?

hard edges

2009-04-30T03:51:00.000-07:00

Voice-man, Office-man... I call him Grind-man.

Grind-man is a fat man with diabetes, a pug-nose and a spirit like a sack of gravel. Grind-man sits for hours moving numbers across a screen, always fearful this task will be taken from him, fearful his life will fold up before his eyes, leaving him to stare into the abyss.

I feel for Grind-man. He drinks coffee and sucks on Werther’s Originals. He has a flat-screen tv and a leather couch at home, but now he sits in the back of a crowded, computer-strewn work-space amid a populace of youngsters who do not know his name.

When I got off the plane at Schiphol my phone rang –my Dutch phone! How could this be? I thought. But thus it transpired that Grind-man was my first connection, my first link to land, and life ahead.

Blah blah blah blah... Lui Labas?

Yes.

Meneer Labas, u heeft achterstallige betalingen...

Payments overdue – I put Grind-man on hold while I pulled my bags off the conveyor belt. I paused, then put him back on. I could hear the Werther’s Original knocking against a molar in the back his mouth, and I could see him in my mind: Grind-man at his desk, his stomach squeezed, his pen against the screen, his headset like a pincer around his fat face. Looking closely, I could practically count the open pores on his nose. Look, Mr. Grind-man, I said, I just got back from Buenos Aires. I did not sleep, sir – do you hear – eight weeks I did not sleep. I’ve come practically from another world, do you understand, I don’t even live here Mr.Grind-man, I have no address – permanent or otherwise. Comprendo? So this can’t be. There must be some kind of mistake. Payments for WHAT anyway? I don’t even exist; I own nothing. This is Kafkaesque Mr.Grind-man. For all you know I could be on a boat in international waters, beyond the reach of any bureaucracy, yours included. You understand?

It’s about your phone Meneer Labas. You do own something. The bills are for your phone.

Life has molded Grind-man out the papier-mâché of chance: man meets woman; they beget a child who fattens over fifty years and stumbles from this into that...

Meneer Labas?

Yes, Grind-man?

It’s the phone in your hand Meneer Labas! And why are you calling me Grind-man. Who is Grind-man? Who the hell do you think you are? My name is Oldenbrecht. Ronald Oldenbrecht. Exactly as I introduced myself. Do YOU understand?!

Fuck.

For a second all of Schiphol froze. And there it stood, in all its solidity, staring me in the face.

...Meneer Labas?

Hard edges, solid glass and steel, and my feet planted on the ground.

...Meneer Labas?

I would have spoken, I would have said something – I’m sorry Mr. Oldenbrecht. I’m sorry, I’m just not with it. I don’t know a thing about you. I just haven’t slept very much...

But I was speechless with shame

lifeline

2009-04-19T23:38:00.000-07:00

For eight weeks money had come out of a wall on Santa Fe, generously and without question, a thousand pesos at a time. But now, out of nowhere, the mouth spoketh nay.

I practically ran the twenty-two blocks south east, across slums and train tracks, to find my friend - my British friend (remember her, the bowels, the diarrhea). Just fifteen hours before my flight back I was stone broke; I couldn’t even pay for a cab. I love Buenos Aires, I love media lunas, I love the sun, the beautiful portenas, the warm nights, the bus rides through the labyrinth-grid, but to be stuck here without a cent…

I found her on Plaza Dorrego dancing folklore with the assembled gypsies and riffraff. She was drunk or exuberant, or both, on the brink of something in any case, her arms up in a fire of pride in a way thoroughly un-British. When she saw me she shouted my name and pushed aside a crew of skinny Che Guevaras. I told her about the mouth, my empty pockets and my flight back. She didn’t hesitate.Take, she said, please, take, and she pushed a wad of money into my hands. Then she dragged me onto the cobbles, into the melee of arms and legs…

What do I do?
Just dance, Lui
I don’t know this stuff
Just follow me, just dance.

So I did. I tried. I tripped. I jostled for space. I cursed my feet and apologized right and left, but no one cared. Twenty-two Argentines turned circles around me, and I danced - in my own way - with elbows and knees, my arms splayed, my head turned this way and that way, while my heels thudded a Balkan beat. This was zamba, but who cares: the stars shimmered down, there was money in my pocket and my feet did as they pleased! I was happy. I was so happy I nearly forgot everything again. I would have stayed longer with this rowdy gang, but now, in my last hours, I had one more thing to do.

As I walked back across rail and slum I spoke to myself for the first time in a while: Listen to me, Lui, listen carefully. I’m only going to say this once, and then I proceeded to repeat it a dozen times, as if to convince this man crossing rail and slum that he was finally going in the right direction – and not just tonight – that earth and stars were aligned in his favor, that life would extend to him its fruits from now on. But this man was hard to convince, and the monologue continued the twenty blocks into Villa Crespo.

When I arrived the stage was set.

The stars still shimmered and all was quiet. I threw a pebble. Then another, and a third, until a dog barked and a light went on, and the shadow of Adriana appeared in the grooves of the closed shutters.

Adriana,
Shshshshs
Adriana, is that you?
Shshshshs, be quiet.
It’s me. It's Lui. Open the shutters.
I can’t.
Why not?
They’re stuck. They don’t work.
Come down then.
I can’t.
Why not? … Adriana?

She never did come down, but I saw her shadow roam and a small light in her room go on and off in a Morse code that said everything.

Finally, I walked away, fifteen blocks down Colonel Diaz. Home.

***

Now it’s 6 AM; another time; another place. Now I’m a ghostly figure at Madrid airport. I'm a guy sprawled across two seats. I'm a guy who hasn't slept in fourty-eight hours - maybe more. I look up at the beams holding the wavy roof of the terminal, the way they break down into a spectrum of color over hundreds of meters. I’m in the reds - the oranges. The blues are far down in the distance. The whole hall is virtually empty and everywhere there are stars of light, real and artificial, fizzing and blinking... and there's a hum, a light hum, like inside a spaceship, a vast machine, alive and uncontralable, ready to go...

dangerous ties

2009-04-10T14:50:00.000-07:00

She said she was thirty, but I didn’t buy it. To keep it real – the gap between us – I told her I was eighteen, dieciocho, but she didn’t believe me either: My unshaven cheeks, my Balkan charisma, my language skills, something gave me away. I started in Spanish, but quickly lapsed into French. She told me to take the toothpick out of my mouth, but even then she only got every fifth word, maybe less. Anyway, who cares, it wasn’t about that. At first, it wasn’t about anything at all. I told her about my father’s tie collection – his hundreds of ties – and mimed the procedure, tightening an invisible thing around my neck. I remembered E=mc² and Einstein’s hallow of hair dangling over the mashed potatoes as my father reached for the salt across the table. He had many such prints and I began to enumerate, but she seemed uninterested or just preoccupied. She pressed her finger on the red of my sunburnt nose and made an ouw-face with her eyes and lips. Then our steaks arrived and conversation stopped. I ate like an animal. I tore at my bife de choriso and downed water like an ox. Meanwhile she cut her meat in strips and sipped wine after each bite. I don’t think she was making a point – maybe she was, but I was hungry, for several days I’d been hungry. I’ve been eating, that’s not it. Sometimes hunger is more comprehensive. Sometimes you stay hungry for a while.

I dropped her off in Villa Crespo and told moustache-man at the wheel to keep driving. Where to? he asked. Just take me for a ride senior. This he understood. The meter ticked and my eyes shot up out of the open window. The sky was clear and at ten thousand feet above the city I asked him to stop. I got out and I walked the rest of Rivadavia thinking of my father and his funny ties. I was happy that such things could be so important to him, especially after what she told me. For her father this was not possible. His ties were dangerous. He disappeared in 1981, or – as they say in this country – he was disappeared. They could do that in Argentina back then. Disappear a man. Tuck him into a space-fold. Drop him down a chute into a void. Dispatch him at the speed of light. But where to, how, why? She didn’t want to talk about it and instead she pressed the red of my sunburnt nose… once, twice… Adriana, stop!

On Rivadavia I took in large gasps of air looking down the width and breath of Buenos Aires. Dogs barked and the street stank of their offerings. I looked. I focused. I hoped. Maybe I could find this man – the man with the dangerous ties – maybe I could. Nothing would make her happier. Ten years would vanish instantly from her face. She would be thirty again and I twenty eight. There would be no more gap between us, and – this is a fact – my hunger too would disappear.

slow down Lui

2009-04-03T14:40:00.000-07:00

I out-run buses, I out-scuttle roaches, I am a spirit on legs, my brain now at a virtual standstill. LUI LABAS SHUTTLES BODY FROM VILLA CRESPO TO SAN TELMO BACK TO RECOLETA. All is meet-you-speaky-go, quick glances and dirty pesos. I feed on media lunas noon and night – mornings now nonexistent. I do face-prints and name-swaps. I am like cat rubbing tail with other cats. And I speak like local-man, no Serbo-Croatian, no finicky French, no hammer-blow Dutch, just bare bones meet me in door, I wait you, yes. And as I wait I never stand idle, I smoke cigarettes and make face-prints with my brain.

Accelerations down Sante Fe; about-turns on Pueyrredon. This body loves Buenos Aires – the racetrack Buenos Aires – even if my heart still beats in Zagreb, and my mind still strolls down Hundertwasser Promenade. But tonight Lui sleeps. This body sleeps, do you hear. I re-inhabit Lui. I curl up paws and tail and enter private domain where I am mayor, magistrate and high priest; where I rule over cabs and passengers, friends and foes, to’s-and-fro’s. Sleep will come, Lui Labas. Believe me. Even orchestrations of dog and coughings of old man early morning will not wake you. Your realm is impenetrable – mayor, magistrate, and high priest – and, as my friend wrote to me the other day, you will sleep like big mountain on edge of stars until soon be new man...

rhythmsong

2009-03-25T09:36:00.000-07:00

A thought came to me through the air. It was mine when it reached me, but maybe not before. Not a thought, in fact, but a song, a rhythm that pushed my feet – tip tap – this way and that way, like those seven league boots – what are they called? – but smaller, smaller steps, many steps across town, hopscotch over the sprawled limbs of a junky underground, out into the open air, around a leashed Pekinese pressing out a turd on Peña, this way that way, this song – dada dada dum – on the corner one peso for a starveling, three for Fabian at the kiosk – excuso, perdonne – I go, I go, my feet – tip tap – the warm sun on my back, not an Argentine bone in my body, but I go those seven leagues unhindered here in busy busy Buenos Aires.

no use hands

2009-03-23T10:43:00.000-07:00

No, Luis!… use chest for make move lady, yes. And for make stop her, no use hands… Intenshion, Lui, intenshion.

I despaired. Only Uri Geller, I thought, could get one of these (abstract) “ladies” gracefully around a dance floor. This was meant to be fun, not an exercise in psychokinesis.

My class was in Constitucion, in a windowless room lit with six compact fluorescents. I was dancing inside a fly-zapper to music… how shall I say, the music was like an old carousel – creaky, violins on one end, bandoneons on the other – turning in circles of sadness and suffering. I’m a Croat; we do not get together as a nation and bare our souls; we cry in private.

The compacts flickered. My mind flickered and then my attention drifted and I squashed his foot with my heel. Dagostino! he cried in my ear. First, I thought how inefficient these Argentines, four syllables to say, ouw! But then it occurred to me that, like their music, these people are just comprehensive in their suffering. I apologized with many syllables of my own, but he interrupted – No, no, dé music, Lui. Thees music are D’Agostino. Angel D’Agostino.

I understood and we carried on walking… yes, walking; this all we did in this dance class, we walked. We did laps inside the fly-zapper, no faster than the carousel, no slower than the carousel. And as I walked these crude circles with his hands on my chest – for make move lady – I thought of spoons bending and women – porteñas – melting in mi abrazo, my embrace: curious, Croatian, unlike the hairy-armed bracket of machos here, soft yet dangerous – yes – like the Aegean, like –

Luis, no use hands… wi’ dé chest… intenshion.

Yes, yes, intention, of course. But after so many more laps, he began to explain that tango is as much about standing still as it is about moving (unbend that spoon, Uri, can you do that?). Listen, he said pointing to Dagostino in my ear. Listen, yes…NOW!

Now what?

No move, Lui.

A violin cried, the singer waned and we stood still.

Briefly, finally, I was myself again, at ease, my mind in its habitual cadence: I thought of my backyard in Zagreb, the old shrub in the corner and the dead cat under the vines my friend Drago used to disinter every year on a specific day; he’d bring his own spade from his house and –

Now, Luis, walk… Luis!

… Luis!

LUIS!

Doblogango

2009-03-18T11:26:00.000-07:00

I am rushing diarrhea pills across town to a friend in need. A British friend with British bowels (custard and marmalade). I am underground of course – I am so often underground these days I am starting to feel strangely unmammalian – but the air is no worse here than above, so…

wait… wait…

…he’s here!

Yesterday he sold mirrors, the kind with two sides: one for your face; one for blackheads that hide, and hairs you cannot see. Today it’s permanent markers. He drops them on your lap, walks away and returns moments later with a pitch in espagnol. “Everything you write with this marker is permanent,” he says of his permanent markers.

…but none of this is the point: The point is he’s got my hair, my teeth, my nose, my FACE. He even swings his arms like me. And in his voice there is that scratchiness – you know what I’m taking about – that scratchiness that is mine. Mine!

A bastard-brother in the southern hemisphere? A genetic experiment? A figment of my imagination??

…there he comes. Shorts, flip-flops, a nervous tick in his lip and a tongue that rolls a rickety R. I give him five, he gives me change. And with my own graceless gait he shuffles out at Bolivar.

Wait! Attend! Wacht! I say. But language fails me (not enough poly in that polyglot, Labas).

I skip Serbo-Croatian and go for broke – a gringo in a wagon full of porteños – I shout my name, LUI! – I shout it loud – LUI LABAS! And again, until he turns on his heels, the markers drop to the ground and he stands before me, my mirror image on the platform.

***

I have pressed my hand against this city, grimed my lungs with its air, missed its buses, digested its food, listened to its people, its traffic, its dogs… and now,

I’VE ARRIVED.

I write this in big letter – ARRIVED – permanent letters that go right through the page. Twice, therefore, I write it. Twice…

Once for him; once for me.

Porteñas

2009-03-11T09:52:00.000-07:00

The city is quiet. The Boca Juniors are playing in Boca Stadium. All men are inside. All men.

On the corner of Callao and Juncal I’m breathing in a mixture of humid air and exhaust fumes, probably peculiar to Buenos Aires. I’m breathing unevenly, not from exhaustion, for I do very little these days, but from amazement. With a grin on my face I recall the streets of Zagreb and my eatery on Makarska, where I used to sit for hours sometimes to see a single beauty (and usually she was Serbian). But here, before me – it is breathtaking – not one, not two, but an endless procession of splendours, each one more beautiful than then next. And note, please: I have not sought out some special observation post to bear witness, like a red-faced Brit with binoculars gazing at gazelle in Kenya. This is an utterly ordinary corner, such as you will find in Boca, San Telmo, or San Cristobal. Simply, they are everywhere: green-eyed, hair raven-black, legs lustrous and tan, like a rare breed from an age-old, mysterious gene pool, as unDarwinian as the peacock, designed only to dazzle.

They are – and do not forget it or they will hate you for it! – the Porteñas.

On the corner of Callao and Juncal I take in humid air and exhaust, and my eye wonders… until

…there… she strolls like a ballerina, her sun-bronzed arms, like pendula mark the rhythm of this city. She does not see me. I do not exist. I am a pigeon. Less, part of the pavement below her feet. I follow her caramel toes.

… it is said these women could commit suicide by jumping off their ego. If it is true, this is OK. I will catch them at the bottom – maybe – and if feel like it, take them out for a coffee and a media luna… that’s a croissant.

Me llamo Luis Labas, y tu?

Buenos Aires

2009-03-05T15:22:00.000-08:00

I landed here a few days ago. I dropped out of the sky of the southern hemisphere, fully dressed, in full possession of my senses, but far from my cot in Recoleta and without the language skills – polyglot though I am! – to negotiate an elegant arrival: I lost my bags, busted my phone and stammered and strained through this vast, enormous grid that is Buenos Aires.

PLUS, it appears I have picked a strange time to come (although this, I can say, is out of my capable hands): It hasn’t stopped raining now for three days. THREE DAYS! And it’s been Biblical. Buckets. Sheets. Cats. Dogs (As Bee would say, strangé*). Yet, perhaps, this has been my only advantage here: in matters of rain I am a professional, I come from the place where it was invented. Holland is not a country, but a rain-scape, a delta caught in perpetual drizzle (at the very least). So in that respect – and only in that respect – I have the upper hand here over these crafty portenos (locals) as they sludge through puddles in waterlogged sneakers and look up stunned at the sky as though the Amazon has come to Argentina. Me, I am whizzing all over the place in my rain suit, in and out of the subte (subway), zigzagging through the city by foot and bus… umm… that is, when I am able to figure out the f!@$%ing bus route, which in Buenos Aires is something like solving a Sudoku puzzle spread over several pages, with instructions in a foreign language… and of course, in the rain.

In the meantime though, I have become adept at hand gestures and on occasion I have been able to make myself understood by corkscrewing my French into what must sound like an ancient dialect to people around here, no more Spanish than Friesian is Dutch, but it works (sometimes) and it has earned me, if not respect, at least some compassion amongst the kiosk owners and the bus drivers of this city.

Finally, I want to register a formal complaint: It has not been unusual for me to go to bed extremely late these days. EXTREMELY LATE. There is no print big enough, no font bold enough to stress this. At hours previously unknown to me, so late into the night that – when arriving home – morning sits at the end of my bed greeting me with a middle finger. That late. Now, I do not expect all the world’s activities to cease and all man woman and child to hush while Lui Labas sleeps, but for God’s sake – the rain-God, if it is he you believe in – please, silence your dogs!

Adios,
Lui
or, (in Buenos Aires), Luis

ps- if you are wondering what it is I am doing here, I will tell you…
…as soon as I know.

*(pronounced: stranjay)

economics of play

2009-02-25T01:57:00.001-08:00

More than eighty feet underground on metro line 11, I’m heading east to a party on Rue des Rigoles – no jokes – and appropriately, I feel festive. Festive even if I have no reason to. The ground beneath my feet, just under the rails, is a morass, economic, geopolitical, blah-blah-blah. "The US alone is losing 30,000 jobs a day", Le Monde affirmed in italics this morning.

But now – a new Casio on my wrist and the Doobie Brothers in my ears – I laugh at these jobs, every one of them – so many per hour – because these are not jobs I want. Lui will not move to Detroit to handle car-parts and drink coffee out of a thermos... will not move to Florida to sell real-estate to old ladies with white sneakers... will not move to Arizona to mow lawns that shouldn't be there...

...the quartz on my wrist reads 23-hundred. I feel sharp when I hit the hour on the head like that, right when the bleep bleeps.

Still eighty feet underground, I think of other stints more to my taste, and in keeping with my sense of things and place in this universe, a zillion-zillion feet wide, as many high and deep, and as unknown as the territories of the human mind.

SO NOW – in no special order and off the bat, eighty feet down, near station Goncourt – I WOULD:

dismantle oil tankers with marauding monks from the East: Bangladeshi, Thai and the like.
clean up debris from satellites and other space-contraptions – a lonely but adventurous task... with perks: Russian cappuccinos on space station Mir.
cook Balkan for the infirm but ultra-rich, bringing Croatian cuisine to Tokyo.
pick berries in Jutland with types like Eve - sprightly and elfish - the Czech girl I met on the bus the other day (but I would pick any number of produce with her, zucchinis, leek, rhubarb, you name it, any type)...

Still eighty feet underground, station Belleville at hand, a dark-skinned man with an accordion and a set of uneven teeth sings a song about a lost land south of the Carpathians where women are aplenty, laughs are aplenty, the sun is bountiful and where – I deduce from his smile and the riddle of notes spiralling up from his instrument – there is no downturn, no boom-and-bust, only and ever the economics of play.

de la merde

2009-02-19T01:35:00.000-08:00

I met my friend from Zagreb a few days ago – fifteen years in the offing – and he didn’t hold back one second. He asked me a thousand questions off the bat – hardly let me speak – one after the other, a floodgate unto himself – Lui this, Lui that, remember bleeh, remember blah – and he laughed with his arms and feet like he used. I had to rein in my friend and remind him that I had questions too, like why he had a scar down the side of his face, why his hands looked like worn gloves, and why the glint in his eye I used to count on to lift me up was now replaced by the gloss of melancholy.

We sat in a cafe on Rienößlgasse in the fourth. The air was smoky. He motioned to a woman in the corner and said she looked like my mother on a good day – a staple joke of ours – and I punched him in the arm. Then we drank from our coffees, smoked and finally, briefly, we were both quiet.

My friend survived the war in Bosnia. By a hair. He fought for a year and lived in a cellar on his own another two. Pointing at his face – not his scar – he said he left something behind over there… in the ground. Something – pointing at the floor between his feet – he will never retrieve. And then the gloss in his eye shimmered and his voice broke.

The more I looked at him, the more I thought of Brendan doing push-ups and benches presses insistently and continually back in Amsterdam – I don’t know why, maybe I just couldn’t fathom what my friend was talking about. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought of me and where I was going at this strange and irregular speed, on this strange course, as if strapped to the back of a wild animal…

… take now: It’s 9 PM. I’m on a train to Paris. A night train. The beds are up. Across from me there’s a woman – a school teacher – grading papers. A moment ago I saw her scrawl de la merde on one of them and then erase it with the rubber on the back of her pencil. She saw I saw and turned red on the spot, pursing her lips in a way only the French know how. I gave her my bunk – the bottom bunk – which was better than hers and I smiled to let her know that it’s OK – a 100% OK – that some things are truly shit and there’s no need to apologize for that. But she didn’t get it. I wanted to pen it with my finger across the misted window – DE LA MERDE – in big fat block letters – DE LA GROSSE MERDE – then I imagined these letters carved into the nose of the Great Sphinx, etched into the Coliseum, drilled across Fifth Avenue. C’EST DE LA MERDE, a city-wide exclamation! Unavoidable and unapologetic. And when I had everyone’s attention – heads of state, congressmen, mayors, chief magistrates – and all people below them – clerks, orderlies, “underlies” – I would laid it out straight and hard: Give my friend back what he lost! NOW! Or these are the only words you will ever read until the end of time.

Then I thought of my friend laughing with his hands and feet, and I smiled from my top bunk and patted the wild animal beneath me.

the siege

2009-02-12T11:33:00.000-08:00

Funny how things creep up. I thought I’d stopped thinking about her; for weeks she hadn’t even occurred to me.

And then, there she was. First she knocked quietly on my mind’s door; she threw some pebbles and called my name. But the next day she began in earnest: she made demands, pitched a tent, and – without provocation, besides the natural workings of my brain – she laid a siege.

Two days later I broke down. I called.

In my mind I was hopeful; at least, I felt worthy enough of the attention – I was the one besieged, after all – but in reality I was shunned like the plague. What a treacherous little machine we carry around.

Goni spoke to me in monotones,

This isn’t a good time, Lui.
Well, when is a good time then, tell me?
I have company.
Gon, when is a good time?
I have to go, Lui. Goodbye.

Under the yellow light of a payphone, a dial tone in my ear, I heard a hundred teenagers gather outside Discothek Danube behind me. I watched them, a lubricant mass, oily, gleeful, smitten with one another, candy-humans with cell phones, and I felt something… disgust maybe… who knows.

On the other side, in the distance, a huge catamaran filled with day-trippers from Bratislava steered across the river. A big white whale on the Danube. And I stood there with my dial tone...

… and that’s when it happened.

The me-of-me. The lover of Frankfurters and trapdoors. Over the sound of candy-human-chatter and ringtones, he showed up. The kid out-of-nowhere. The me-of-me. You must remember him. You must. Not a friendly grin this time, though, but a hard stare. And as he stabbed his finger in the air toward my chest and moved his chapped lips –

He was gone.

Just like that. But he said something, I know he said something – I swear to God – I just can’t remember what. It’s like waking up feeling something strange on your stomach only to discover it’s your own hand.

The dial tone. The whale. Everything was in place. Nothing had changed except that now the siege was lifted. Suddenly. Fully. The tents swept up. The ground cleared. Goni gone. And now the candy-humans made me laugh again and their ringtones dance on my feet.

If you saw a guy strolling down Hundertwasser Promenade with a woolly and a big grin – a huge grin – that was me. And if you were thinking about talking to him, if you thought of saying, hey what’s going on, what are you smiling about? you should have, he would have bought you a strudel and a wiener melange and told you all about it, and he would have liked it – Lui Labas – he would have loved it.

on a train to Dresden

2009-02-01T06:16:00.000-08:00

On a train to Dresden I met a man from Budapest. He told me his mother was ill and he was rushing home as fast as he could. He would have flown, he said, but couldn't afford to now. Then he offered me a piece of meat from a long, dry sausage, like a beef-jerky, and said he was glad we were sitting together. His name was Nando. He was fat with gray stubble on his cheeks and he often got up to smoke a cigarette (in the toilets, I suppose). Earlier that same day I received a phone call from a friend I hadn't spoken to in fifteen years - fifteen years - an estranged friend and - at the time in Zagreb - my closest friend. He called me to apologize for something he had done, something I could scarcely remember. Between each word seconds elapsed; I could tell it weighed heavily on his heart. Now he lives in Vienna and I am on my way to see him. The day he called me, earlier that morning, I'd been sucked out of this universe through a wormhole or some such thing somewhere between Hamburg and Berlin, some aperture I knew not of that landed me neither here nor there, in a place both palatial and squalid like Caucescu's Bucarest. This is where I was when that phone call jerked me like a rope across space and hurdled me back. I think I felt my feet scramble to cover ground that wasn't there and my body adjust itself to a distance so enormous, so disproportionate...

I got your number from your mother, my friend said. I hope you don't mind.

A few hours later I was sitting next to Nando eating beef-jerky with a smile on my face as big as the distance I traveled. He told me about his work - he's a trumpet maker - and he showed me his hands and the results of working brass for so many years. But the yellow stains, I knew, were from the cigarettes, and the bitten-down nails from his mother ill in bed.

Sitting still, going hundred-ten, hundred-twenty miles an hours, with Nando playing a bit of trumpet for me with his lips, I thought briefly of the past, my lost love Goni, my dear friend Brendan, my comrade Fer, my illusion Anna, and also that wet and narrow city of Amsterdam. But only briefly, and then, the rope still firmly in my hands, I thought of everything else... of everything yet to come.

signing off

2008-12-25T06:37:00.000-08:00

I’ve been absent my friends, but mostly in spirit, though. I’ve been here packing boxes, sorting cassettes, spoons, postcards… filling out forms, running errands and vacating from this place – my home! – all remnants of me. It has been an exercise both existential and physical (to be avoided if melancholy or faint of heart). What’s more, Brendan has been highly distraught ever since I told him. Believe it or not, but it pains me to leave this guy. As beefy, brutish and brash as he may seem, he’s the biggest kid of us all, and I’m sure he will double his bench-presses over the next few weeks to push back the emotion that is already visible in his face and manifest in his regular outbursts – Goddam you, Lui, Goddam you!

But here we are. December 25th. X-mas day. And as this strange, invertebrate year crawls slowly to a close, I’m on the point of departure, my life whittled down to its bare bones, the chaff out on the curb ready for collection. I have a few more phone calls to make and a dinner at a Chinese restaurant tonight, but to be honest, my heart isn't in it, I'm fizzing with anticipation, and my mind may be partly on its way already. Besides Goni’s extraordinary abruptness cutting me adrift, my head is clear and my heart unencumbered. I'm ready.

One final thing, though. You'll think me odd, maybe even pubescent – and you'd be right on that one, I’ve been sixteen for as long as I can remember – but the fact is, I would really, terribly like to see Anna just one last time before I go; my dangly-armed, deer-eyed Anna. After the Chinese tonight I will go look for her. I will put on my best shirt, spray my teeth with Vicks, gather my courage and - who knows - ask her out, buy her a drink, hold her hand, touch her arm, kiss her ears, feel her –

Cool it, Lui! Find her first; speak to her in your many tongues, amuse her with you body language, and whatever you do, stand straight and do not roll your eyes, that’s what old Croat’s do and you’re not an old Croat, you’re a young vigorous European on the cusp of a great adventure, a journey that will change you, and perhaps – if you are fully invested –change others too.

That's it!

I am Lui Labas, signing off for 2008, wishing you – and you know who you are, don’t make me call your name – wishing you THE year.

The year in which everything comes together. The year in which – even magically, if that’s what it takes – all the pieces fly effortlessly into place like a crashing vase played in reverse.

I wish it for you.
Your fondest admirer, your adventurer,

Lui Labas

Lui's list

2008-11-29T05:06:00.000-08:00

What are you moping around for, Lui? Get off your butt, get out, get some action. You’re a free man, don’t you get it? You’re free! What more do you want?

I had no answer to this question. I was stumped. I drew a blank as I watched Brendan finish his protein drink.

Does this mean I have everything? Does this mean I am complete, whole and consummate? But I’m a Croat, that’s impossible! Everything comes to me riddled. Freedom especially. I love my problems – this is a matter of national pride – my barricades and my heads-of-state. Wall me in, throw me a clash or a confrontation. I’m alive only when embattled. Chaos tickles me. And freedom is a slippery product anyway. It’s colorless, it doesn’t talk to you, it doesn’t move until agitated. It’s like water: no one necessarily likes to drink it... until it’s taken away and then you think of NOTHING else.

But back to Brendan: You’re a free man, don’t you get it? You’re free! What more do you want?

I’m a roving engine of curiosity. My actions are stopgaps and my thoughts are scarcely within my control. Far from the flowing dress of the Buddhist monk, my life is an ill-fitting jumpsuit. So I am truly flabbergasted, and grateful too, that it can feel so comfortable at times. HAHAHAHA!

But anyway, things can be better, of course... so with Christmas in mind, I made a small list:

1. a svelte redhead with freckles and pink gums

2. a skinny cat with a tail-kink and a haughty eye

3. a live grizzly you can scratch and pat on the back

4. the legs of a sprinter

5. the eyes of lynx

6. the swiftness of a lizard

7. a houseboat moored off Dubrovnik

8. a small Balkan province in the Benelux

9. a rucksack full of gold bouillon

10. and lastly - as a matter of course - a carte blanche for this and adjacent galaxies

(this list is not exhaustive... feel free to add liberally).

Switch

2008-11-22T04:18:00.000-08:00

Whining and moaning is un-Croatlike and unbecoming a man of your heritage. Snap out of it! He said. I wanted to ask, what heritage are you talking about, thinking he must have it confused with his own Ottoman lineage, but seeing as his name was Switchblade I thought it best to keep quiet and not interrupt. He assured me "Switchblade" is not an epithet, but his real name. I suppose it must be a common name in Turkey; there must be many young Switchblades in Istanbul; perhaps there are Turkish ministers and heads of state called Switchblade – how else do you explain this. And perhaps it is not written, Switchblade, but şviçblüd, or some such Turkish script. I nearly asked him to write it on a beer coaster, but his eyes sent out darts to let me know I had belabored the subject long enough . He concluded by saying that once we are friends I could call him Switch, but the suggestion was clear: do not do so until I tell you to.

Switchblade trades in fanciful, near-imaginary financial products meant to bamboozle and – in his words – throw sand in the eyes of the competition. He owns a loft in Soho, a bar in Amsterdam and sixty thousand head of livestock somewhere on a Turkish plain. He is an imposing figure. He drinks cognac and speaks his mind. We met last last night in what turned out to be his own bar, called – you will not believe it – The Ol’ Switcheroo.

Lui, what were you doing in a bar on your own, without Goni or Brendan? You ask.

I will not beat around the bush, I will not shrink from the truth – that too is un-Croatlike – Goni broke up with me. That's it. Full stop. That’s how fast it went. She called me from the airport on her way back from Haifa – at the f*!$@ airport– evidently keen, to finalize this little “procedure”. I asked her: Why? Why now? Why so sudden? Is it 'cause I’m broke? 'cause I’m unemployed? 'cause I’m too young? Her answer was unequivocal,

Yes.

But then I thought about it and I got confused. “Yes” what? What are you saying “yes” to? All of them? And then she was really unequivocal,

Yes

In an act of savage spitefulness I retracted the two line of verse I wrote for her last week and I told her she wasn’t the worth the credit on my cell phone. But an hour later I got weak at the knees and I called her at home hoping to convince her to change her mind and to tell her I could get a job easypeasy and that I’m not as young as she thinks (I was prepared to lie and forge documents). Alas, I got no further than her personal firewall, her pesky eighteen year old daughter Geraldine, who snapped at me in Hebrew and told me to take a hike.

This is unconventional. This is not a break up worthy of the Western World. This is an eviction. I feel kinship with the Palestinians. And do not tell me things could be worse. DO NOT! Of course they could be worse! I could be thirsting in the deserts of Yemen; I could contract a disfiguring disease; I could be trampled by hooligans or crippled by polio. So what! Let me feel like shit. I was outmaneuvered, outflanked, emotionally gutted and I came down to The Ol’ Switcheroo to drown my sorrows. I will not apologize for that.

Anyway, after the whole heritage thing, Switchblade swirled his cognac, looked me dead in the eye and said: Fight back you chump! and then he lay his free hand on a lush thigh to the right of him. I’m not sure what he meant, but it conjured up images of Brad Pitt in a dark corridor beating a man to a pulp. I’m sure he meant this figuratively (please God!). Switchblade is not a bad person, but I’m thankful for the civilizing effect of his entourage. The “lush thigh” I mentioned belonged to a mysterious, dark-eyed, raven-haired nymph by the name of Sofia von Spitzenwald – blue-blooded, maybe German, maybe Austro-Hungarian; germanophone in any case. And on the other side of him, a chocolate-colored splendor stroked a Mojito and on occasion voiced her dismay in Portuguese as she was forced to lift, again and again, Switch’s heavy hand from her thigh.

The next day I woke up in my own bed with cognac on my breath... And truly, that is all I remember.

teckels and pizza

2008-11-13T11:05:00.000-08:00

I walked Goni’s teckel, picked up his turds, did the wash, split a pizza with Bren, and thought positive thoughts. I thought about light years and how many miles that makes, and I watched Chuck Norris fight the enemy in Delta Force. Zombie, enthusiast, geek, buff, introvert... a strand of each coiled into a hairball: that’s me these days. Kicked around and wind-blown. From introspection to Chinese cookery to being sleepy and lovelorn for my beautiful Goni. She left to Haifa this week to see her mother. I wrote her a poem: Your toes, islets / Your fingers, ridges/ Your arms a bay around my beating heart... then I got stuck rhyming Adriatic for my Balkan-theme (ecstatic? aromatic?).... and thinking of home I decided to call my mother in Zagreb. We talked about me, about Bee in LA, and then she let me rail against the new prince-elect across the Atlantic –

I’m restless! Have you noticed? I started jogging today. I got tights and a timer. I did laps and checked my pulse. Bren said to stick to one sixty to burn fat. Bren, I’m skinny as a rake. But he insisted. He’s the only guy I know who can talk and do push ups at the same time. He's the only guy I know who can use "triceps" and "Patriot Act" in the same sentence. I laughed like a crazy man, and then I stopped!

Get serious. We are on the cusp of something. The world is on a razor’s edge. Every day is momentous. Every day is the day. I could do a hundred things. I could save the downtrodden in Brazil like my friend Jeru. I could fight the Japanese whalers on the Pacific. Or I could go dark, break rank, conspire and sabotage the Machine. It can’t be about teckels and pizza. It can’t be about Chuck Norris. And if it’s about light years, then show me how!

“Change”

2008-11-07T13:35:00.000-08:00

Ever heard of Zbigniew Brzezinski? Most people haven’t. He was the guy in charge of national security under president Carter back in the seventies when the US was fighting Russia in Afghanistan and funding the mujihadeen (today’s Al Qaida) to do their dirty work. A less known fact is that he is the co-founder of the Trilateral Commission together with David Rockefeller (who’s name seems to pop up everywhere, except in mainstream news). I wish I could tell you more about the Commission, Lui, but its handpicked members are sworn to secrecy so I guess we’ll have to take Zbigniew’s word for it that its aims are peace on Earth and goodwill toward Man. Why shouldn’t we, he’s done so many wonderful things already. Let’s see what light breeze of change he will blow into US foreign policy. I can’t wait.

Are you serious?

Yes, I’m serious. And what about Paul Volcker? remember him? No, he’s not dead, he’s 81 years old; young, energetic, the picture of hope and vitality in this new age of “change”. He was Federal Reserve chairman under – guess who? – president Carter. Ha, ha, ha this is so much fun, I wish I could cast this movie myself. And guess what, he’s also a Trilateralist. And guess what he did when the US was plunged into a major economic crisis after the oil spike in the late seventies.. Everyone was strapped for cash, no one could get a lone to save their life, and guess what mister chairman did? (Such foresight, so much common sense!!) Did he increase the money supply, did he try to stimulate the economy? No, that would be boring. He ratcheted up interest rate up to 20%! The economy imploded. And now it looks like Mr.Volcker is set to become Treasury Secretary! Why, you ask? Especially now at this time of economic crisis? Because he did such a friggin’ good job as fed chairman?

Brendan, who came up with this plan? Are they stupid, or this intentional?

Wait, wait, there’s more... Rahm Emanuel. Sweet, gentle Rahm. Chief of Staff under President Clinton. The image of composure and poise? Forget it! Not only is he known for his flighty temper, he’s also heavily, heavily pro-Israel. His father was a member of Irgun, a Zionist group that even the New York Times has labeled as a terrorist organization. Like father like son? No, I don’t believe that – look at me – but for God’s sake, Lui, to set this man up as chief of staff – that’s a very, very important position, he’s virtually co-president, he structures the president’s agenda, he essentially frames the issues for him – to set this guy up as chief of staff at a time when tensions with the Arab world are at an absolute boiling point, and when the question of Palestine is indisputably at the heart of this conflict, that, my friend is plain and simple provocation! Nothing short! And Lui, these are just some of the upstanding gentlemen that are suppose to represent a "breath of fresh air" in US politics. So forgive me if I don't drop to knees before the savior just yet.

Again, are they stupid or this intentional?

Well, one guy said – I forgot who – he said, “consistency has never been the mark of stupidity. If they were merely stupid, they would occasionally make a mistake in our favor.”

Delta Romeo Unicorn

2008-11-01T02:23:00.000-07:00

Lui Labas, where are you going with your life, where are you steering this vehicle, you haven’t thought things through, you’re not in Zagreb anymore.... you don’t have a clue? Are you on drugs?

What!?

Delta Romeo Unicorn –

No, no, I got it, of course I’m not on drugs.

Well, you sure act like you are. The world isn’t arranged to suit your little whims, Lui Labas, you have to start taking things seriously. You have to start facing reality.

I am serious. I’m dead serious. I look people in the eye. I tell them straight when I don’t like something. I’ve been serious since I was five, my friend. Five. I was going to be a tennis star – Bjorn Borg, James McEnroe – nothing could stop me, I played like my life depended on it. Me and the wall. Grit and determination. Sweat on my brow. All of that. I am serious. I’m too serious. That’s my problem.

It’s John. It’s John McEnroe. Common, Lui. And what about Goni?

Yeah, what about her?

You should get married. You can’t keep roaming around like a gypsy. Buy a house, get settled, have some kids? You’re great with kids.

How do you know? Man, who the hell are you?

My name is Louis.

Well Louis, if you don’t mind, fuck off!

What!?

Foxtrot Unicorn Charlie …

whale-man and the Emilians

2008-10-24T10:59:00.000-07:00

This week was not a week. It was a series of hours strung together, a loose-knit thing full of holes I slumped into like a hammock. No work, no ideas, no conversation except Brendan’s odd outbursts on the state of the economy and my state of inactivity (you’re a friggin' sloth, Lui, he said working his dumbbells).

I did have one conversation. I went out for coffee around the corner on tuesday and a huge man – four hundred pounds of burgers and sweat – a whale of a man, an American with a big t-shirt - we are not alone, it read - struck up a conversation. What’s going on, how’ya doin’? Where ya from? and so on, but quickly he began in earnest:.. we're on an asteroid my friend, we’re on an asteroid barreling through space, a clump of sediment and water and plants and microbes and–

Ok, ok… we're barreling through space, go on…

that's right, and every couple of millennia, he said shifting his paunch from one knee to the other, a planet comes within our “reach” quoting with this fingers, an unknown, an unacknowledged planet nested in gravitational fields. That's right my friend, and this planet – but then he stopped – what’s your name?

Lui.

Gluey?

No, LUI.

…this planet, Lui, this planet is not uninhabited, repeat, NOT uninhabited. A donut disappeared into his mouth as he waited for a reaction.

None came. This guy’s a nut, I thought. But he continued and every time he said Earth he poked my arm as if I was partly responsible for our asteroid's trajectory, always adding, barreling through space, keen to remind me that even though he could barely move himself, he was still “moving” on a galactic level.

Back in my hammock I couldn’t help but think of whale-man and his planet of humanoids. Millions, he kept saying, millions of ‘em. I thought of them so much that gave them a name. They're called Emilians, they’re about 4 feet tall and they’re a pesky, irascible bunch of backbiters. And I suspect they are walking among us as I speak. Emilians are avid collectors of EVERYTHING. They collect, they jar, they categorize and they store everything this side of the galaxy, and then they meet somewhere on vast open plains, hundreds of thousands of them, and they trade like a bunch interplanetary geeks gone awry.

You really have too much time on your hands, Lui, Goni said when I told her on the phone. Go do something, for God's sake, please go do something!.

... my hammock swayed.

I couldn't stop thinking about what I would collect if were Emilian. What would be my specialty, how would I stand out as a four-footer.