Yes, this is a blog

Christmastime's come again. Yep. Seems like it gets here earlier every year. Yeah, right after Halloween's over we skip right to yuletide cheer. It's a shame. In some ways. Like which? Like the excessive commercialization of it. The materialism. It's true. People go crazy for stuff that doesn't matter. They'll kill people for a frickin cabbage patch doll. It's just greed. Just empty and vapid. And advertisers prey on it. Is it really that different from any other time, though? Maybe not. It's practically woven into the fabric of society. Not practically--it is. But it's a perversion of something sacred. Sure. To me it is. If by sacred you mean pagan rituals for the winter solstice, then yes. That's not all there is to it. Then tell me what decorated pine trees and mistletoe have to do with Jesus. They're weird traditions but they're harmless. It's called cultural appropriation. I know what it is. Alright then. ...

You were thirty-five when you died, thirty-five when my mother was born. 1955, sixty-one years ago. Another age when a woman taken by a man twenty years her senior was not so unusual. A man of the drink and the carcinogenic speech. The baby he didn't want. Called a miraculous birth, the healthy girl from the dying mother. Four months later and you were gone. It was diagnosed as tuberculosis, an antiquated mislabel for hidden and insidious aberrations carried on like a curse in the blood, the genes. The kind that betrays your own body with attacks on the lungs and the liver. Weapons striking sudden and swift. A few months and the trigger is pulled. Such fragile forms set with unjustified disease to make you sure of His sadism as you are of life itself. Pulmatory fibrosis and emergency transplants and cancer. My uncle, your nephew, sits withered and pale. He sucks on an oxygen tank as we watch, sullen. "Wanna hit?" he says. I smile with him. You lived in secondhand storie...

In the early morning the new sun would pour a golden light through the windows that would blind. Fresh dawn over the parking lot and the caravans unloading congregants as they breached the gates, opened at the allotted time. The brief moments of stillness with the low eminence from heaven washed over the linoleum tiles and primary colored walls. The embolden lettering of the marquee title, the flag pole and the flag atop it. There was a broad awning over the doors held up by square pillars and wide, gentle inclines leading up. Two sets mirrored on opposite sides. Between them were harsh blocks of monotonous brickwork like a rung on a giant's ladder. Oppressive and most of it the same shade of brown. The south side. The north was much the same, but beyond its parking bed was an expanse of field as a moat and gutter to the busy street and residential mazes farther on. The road on the south was quieter and detoured and it was hedged by a small crop of trees that concealed a private pa...

The cast made the work difficult. Sprained wrist and fractured index finger on the right hand. Fumbling power tools and keyboard picking. The chamber had a vague egg shape. Held in its basket by a frame of four girders. They had to be secured to the floor and balanced. The upper left the last of it. Fixed, finished. A hollow cube with the egg inside, balanced and suspended a fraction of an inch. Three steps knelt at its base. Cabling festooned on the concrete before it like intestines that tangled and slithered to the command terminal. A fair distance away. Ten feet or so. Just a hair below the recommendation. On the desk were four monitors. Bracketed panoramic along the width of the station. Legs bolted to the ground. Two CPU's concealed below and two keyboards perched above. A hunched worker. Winnowed eyes and pale skin. Hands clawlike from nights of sleepless toil. Sluggish, exhausted devotion. Amnesiac. Imprecise. One monitor displayed a map used to calculate the latitude and l...

Pink, purple paper. Hearts over the lower case i's. Blocky handwriting slanting down to the side. Droplets of blood that trailed across the lawn from her house to his. He dropped it as he ran yelping and holding his face. I followed, I stopped. The note in the grass. For years there was a revolving door of occupants in the house two doors down from mine. A hazy myriad of faces, some clearer than others. Just ancillary variables to the constant of he and me. Next door neighbor, closest friend. His house right of mine, separated by a brick wall easily scalable with the right momentum. His yard was an arena for the enacted whims of our imagination. Not uninhibited. Structured with arbitrary but no less vital parameters of our own design. The games we made. With roles that were hewn from the influence of cartoons and video games and grafted on to our bodies and minds. Goku, Batman, and Luke Skywalker were our patrons. Entire worlds created to live a day or two without the judgement o...

She had dark hair, dark eyes, strong nose. Like my father, like my sister. In her youth she was spry and mobile. She rode motorcycles with her husband and posed for photos seen years later framed in colorless, dazed remembrance when clearing out her house. But I only remember her sitting or wobbling precipitously on her walker. Sitting in her home, her room padded with a mountain of her possessions. Dressers and miscellaneous clothes and makeup kits. A large thermos atop a night stand beset by a litany of pill bottles in various sizes. She pulled me near, hand in my hand. Her old skin a cellophane husk pulled too loose in some places and too tight in others. Over the fingers and knuckles like knobby roots. Mulberry veins so distended and raised it looked as though they were scarcely connected to her body, like a detachable apparatus of tubing that laid just on the surface of her arms. She wore thick makeup, a cosmetic disguise that rubbed blush on the bedspread and her purple blouse....

On the outskirts, spread even and deliberate, are towers in T-shapes with ladders and antenna. Behind them a chain link fence casts a wide perimeter, easily traversable. They chaperon a cardboard cutout of Kansas plain country stitched to a quilt in the downslope shadow of the Smokies. In the hill valley hemmed by distinguished plateaus and accompanying rivers. The land is cut and cornered by a road that zig-zags from point to point, lilting up and down and steady like the tide. The pavement widens and shrinks and digs underneath runways. One tunnel's so long and spread your radio craps out and the car in the next lane honks its horn for the echo's novelty value alone. A grey, bright ambiance from the multitude of square overhead lights like buttons on a console board paint the inside and set it distinction. A building is on the left with a slanted roof. It is alone, surrounded by more flat terrain. A hangar with a small jet inside. More structures and busyness encroach fur...

A preamble of deliberate silences and curt remarks. In the atmosphere a feeling of conflict already poised to detonate. The kind of recurring antipathy that rises every so often to the surface when it has stewed and boiled over. The staccato barbs and knowing looks. Try your best not to light the fuse. Avoid as much contact as possible; speak gently and directly. Count and measure your words for any could be the one that sets off the neutron bomb laying on the couch after a long day. Long day, long week, long life. How quickly the temperature changes. Like a coin flipped in the air it is either/or. Tender and bitter, generous and vengeful. Two faces of one person appear seemingly at random as if the same breath could heal and brutalize with equal intent. There are no disguises here, no masks. This is honesty. These are the true contents otherwise buried and hidden away. The purified current of venom that runs beneath the day to day. Tomorrow they will shake hands with dressed up acqu...