Yes, this is a blog

Enjoy The biggest pimple I ever had in my life was a huge, red pustule on the right half of my nose closer to an aberrant cyst than your average blemish. It appeared suddenly one gray December morning bulbous and painful to the touch like a balled and raised nerve ending. I was a teenager, of course, at home and on the lam during Christmas break and I awoke to the mass greeting me and bulging my face in a way subtly foreign and it panicked me such that I felt I needed to destroy it. This would not be easy. It had no visible exit point and any attempt at incursion met with a throbbing pang like a flame under my epidermis. My eyes watered and my fists clenched as I scrubbed soap and water and alcoholic medication against the lump all without avail. But it had to go. No one must see it. So there lead to a single way, a singularly sharp and pointed instrument. No, not a knife. Something dumber, a pair of tweezers. I took an ice cube and melted it on the sore and when it had numbed enough...

They gave him a stick with harsh bristles on one end that fanned out to the sides and whipped a milky paste in a leaf and dipped the end in. Miming brushing one's teeth they handed it to him. It tasted sour and had a slimy mucous consistency and mushed under his tongue like congealed grease. He gagged and spat it out in the dirt. One snickered and the other handed him the leaf and both walked away and he balled it up and tossed it a short distance. In the pot sitting in his lap he cleaned the brush and gave heed to breaking and throwing it away but instead put it in his pocket. They had no mirror, of course, but they had metal patterned distinct among the wooden everything. Hammered scraps and varied appliances dispersed and relegated. They could be stolen, he thought. These could be like the horse-men of the plains, like marauding thieves full up of their own caravan. But they weren't men. They hadn't the greed of men. The pride perhaps but not the appetite. He sat the p...

They were about twenty miles out when the engine began to stammer and steam and finally cease. The two sat for a moment grumbling in silence until the one behind the wheel got out. He stepped down onto the cracked pavement with the far-off glint of the city amidst the gray hills and dust and clouds like a rippled cloth overlay. Near them a highway overpass cast a shadow from a muted sun that palled just out of their range and when he lifted the brown hood he saw it as a hollow gate to separate the city from where they ventured. The wastelands. Tremendous swaths of vacated ruins and nomadic cadres repopulating a wild and transformed country where even the illusion of law had no homestead. The other man who rode shotgun had his head propped up on his knuckles and his forearm braced on the open window sill. The black jacket he wore like a second skin opposing his light shirt and pale complexion. Monochromatic save the shock of hair and even formal in as much as the road would allow. He br...

When she was born they held their hands together and watched behind windows with a fever day and night. Two months premature. A little pink, wrinkled thing in a glass and mechanized bassinet, injected with tubes and taped down like an experiment in a lab beaker. Long days and long nights uncertain. When they held her in their arms they wouldn't let go, not for years. The miracle child, they would call her. Special, most beloved. They give thanks to the savior and pour their adoration onto her. Their thoughts and their possessions all to this gift. She grows in that atmosphere with no brother or sister to partition it. No brother, no sister. She comes to understand the value of her life and its position among others. To guard against the wolves and the parasites who'd leech from her birthright and the earned merit to take pride in it. Pride in the body, in the privilege within it. They watch their princess flourish over the years, becoming the warrant and the bond between them a...

Hanging from the thatched ceiling were many rows of assorted rations; carrots, bushels of herbs, fruit with leaves left attached. Half-shadowed by gray light filtering from a wide, oval entrance. By it, over a cooking pot, stood a being round in the waist and wearing a tunic and pants that concealed black hair spotted white. It whistled a melody through its teeth while it cut vegetables and when he woke the boy recognized the tune. He crept out of a lumpy cushion raised above a colossal branch that cut meandering through the wood paneled floor like a pulsated vein and he hugged his back on the curved wall. His neck hurt. The creature appeared not to notice him and in trepidation the boy plotted fast his method of slipping away unseen. But something was missing. His boots were tied together and set aside his neatly folded coat and his pack preceded them. They were there prepared for him, but still it was missing. "Oh, you're awake. You were out for a good six hours." Sai...

Shuffling, one by one. Men of disease and conviction and histories. First the clean ones, without the kindled ember of lunacy behind their eyes, that thirst for decay and relief. They travel their way back from the wilderness but aren't yet there. The line and walls are a way station, narrow as they are. Some have remained there, making a home that's not meant to be and aborting half-willed escapes and running through the laps one after the other; tripping, falling, and starting over again. But theirs are the footsteps of God. The chairs come next and the crutches, given special designation and a forefront to the feast of modesty. They say nothing other than barely audible monosyllables like primitive grunting. They're missing feet and they live what pity is felt when they're seen. Before long the barricades are opened and the brunt file in and await their meals. They're handed a tray and sustenance assembled through machinery that's scattered but swift and accu...

By boundless piles of clutter and trash there, scrounging about neighboring rats, was a man. His name was Chester but he, understandably, went by Chet. It was stitched in yellow cursive on his jumpsuit, spangled against gray darkened from well-worn grime and innumerable oil stains. Oil seemed to cover most of him, embedded permanent even into the pores of his skin. His rotund frame plunged deep into the hill, with only his loosening boots jutting out. When he emerged he had in his gloved mitts a muffler just the fit for a pickup truck waiting for him in his abode and he stashed it with other disparate gems in an accompanying motorbike, itself fashioned from the very chaff surrounding it. As he began saddling his vehicle he noticed a near-imperceptible green incandescence in the packed base of a facing heap. He'd have given no inordinate thought had it not flickered twice in quick succession, a scant beckoning of some cryptic value lurking within reach. He started the vehicle and ...