Yes, this is a blog

I sit in trepidation. Have been all year, or at least the last quarter. Sitting for weeks knowing it was coming. Leading all up to this. For nothing but a few moments I've been commanded to endure. Same as its ever been. You'd think by now I'd be used to it, even skilled. Done it too many times now, so many points prepared and rehearsed. A man can get good at anything after all. Like skydiving or jumping off a cliff. Things that strike terror in most people embraced by those whose joy comes from nearly dying. But this, somehow, is different. Stood apart as the thing most abominable; a fear even surpassing death. Something that requires no real danger, no chance of physical harm. Only your nerves are at stake, your status in the eyes of others. What fragile arrogance. Please like me. I'd rather you kill me than not like me. So I sit. That morning I remembered to bring a shirt reserved for special occasions and wear pants with a modicum of formality. The bare minimum re...

When your visage graces my screen I recoil and turn away. The jolt fires up my spine and I hover paralytic with my head down and my eyes sidled. A jittery kid hiding and peeking behind the doorpost. Irrational, stupid fear. Fear that has stained my life, stunted my growth. To look away is just to let your mind wander, to freeze that frame and elaborate grotesque imagery from its imprint more haunting than anything solid. Look again. Just a man. Man of affliction. Great, aberrant, horrible. Beyond different. I know your title and the name shadowed by it. Been taken by your history, heard but never seen. Often you've returned to my thoughts, inexplicable as your continued infamy. Your bulbous forehead and crimped mouth and gnarled contusions the marks of defective notoriety. A tumorous enigma more famous than most. Could I see myself in you? No. I wouldn't dare. How ludicrous are my complaints compared to yours, king pariah. There is none more ostracized, no one farther away. But...

He couldn't make out any of their shapes in the window though he knew them by heart. Cassiopeia and Orion and Ursa Minor. Their weapons and their bipedal forms. On his own volition he studied them as a child always with the dream and motivation to travel by them, to greet them on their own turf and wave a hand hello in that great black open. The excitement and allure that for many had been lost but never for him. So groundbreaking and terrifying were the advances in galactic traversal. Expedited interstellar travel. The colonization of celestial bodies. The discovery and communication of alien species. Their arrivals came with point impacts that faded and disappeared not a moment after they had solidified. Just another facet of life, exploding every prior sight and sound known to existence then shrinking back down again. Such was the way of people, be them earthlings or seven-foot tall speaking reptiles. Adapters. There they were, a family of them sequestered by a docking station...

They kept their backs to a stream where the water ran constant and clear like a current of glass smoothing a bed of stones and falling white faster than they could go. It was cold to the touch and pure in taste and it would satiate them on the trail when the hours drug and dried. They held to their order and rested and watered over a gray caucus of shore rocks. The bank was hemmed by a mud wall ingrown with conniving roots that bowed out upholding slanted timber that grasped at its life blood. Farthest down there the thin soldier bated and spoke almost nothing. The boy would glance at him brief every now and again. Curios. Never was his scrutiny returned nor any measure of acknowledgment shared. A pricked rod of quartz he was, his visage and his demeanor. He knelt with his weapon and put his hands into the sparkling folds of the mountain runoff and cupped them and rubbed his cheeks that against the granular padding of his palms sanded a short crop of chin whiskers. A goatee he wore nea...

The first predated me. A living heirloom of sorts owned by my dad and I was born an intruder brought into a home he already lived in. His name was Rudy, a vivid pinpoint few among vague quarries of memory. I remember his name, his spotted grey torso, pink underbelly. Not much else. I was small, afraid. He was big and surly and I've been told since I didn't cared for him. But after his death I sit around the Sunday school huddle and I ask to pray, more than once, that he'd come back to life. The pause in the teacher's voice, her stuttered look. How to explain, how not to deny. I believed with a child's ignorance, the assumption that carried passed disappointment to realization. God can do anything but this won't happen. He is gone and he's not coming back. A few blurred years pass before another literally walks into our lives, a homeless wanderer gone outside in. Fourth of July in a dark and crowded parking lot. The sky's green and red fire luminous in ...

Thank you, oh Lord, for tomorrow For the sunrise, the dialed clock, the rotation Gifts renewed by the morning That I may wake like an infant regenerated Slate made clean upon the world To taste and touch the colors you made You beginner of things Every second the first and the last The chance granted again to choose, to fail Innumerable are those I have squandered One hundred thousand for each breath Your mercies I have turned to ruin And still you permit my heart to beat Still the pulse ticks, the gears turn Time allowed the greatest provision To remember, to seize To reproach and forgive And let the testament of my life be no story at all But a day, an hour, a moment altered

A cold and dark knife edge of a gust skirted a two-way pavement and across to an endless horizon of sallow grass fields. The few hours of true night between twelve and the bruising sky of dawn where there was a pervasive, present silence and lunar shading that fell stagnant on all things save one. A man walking the road, no purpose to his travel. Where he had been as unknown as his tomorrow. He happened upon a bar, a dive middle in all the vacancy. It should have been abandoned and by then would have were it not for a last few reprobate guests, their trucks resting long on the gravel as though they were growths symbiotic to the mortar. A single street lamp hung low with its trunk misshapen with collages of nails and tears of paper ingrown in the rotting wood and its jaundiced light dampened neon catcalls for alcohol consumption. OPEN. The brightest beacon in that lonesome square of an earth he hadn't yet been acquainted with. He stopped, turned, studied its face. Gaudy luminescen...