The Radio and The Internet

Nothing terrifies people like initiative.  That they meet something like  a reasonable expectation....  I was told my father  suffered from a great deal  of illness in his youth, and  that this informed  his bizarre moodswings in later-life.  By plain account he was an old father.  Born in March 1943, Philippine Province of America,  he'd endure to the 1980s (the Brooklyn  Phone Company because I don't care for  the other name for it) until fate brought him a  wife, and a son.  I remember he was happy in Brooklyn.  My four-year-old's memories of this  robust, brown goliath telling me over  and over I was the best: Oh,  initiative or no initiative  he will always be allowed to stay.  Even through the toxic instability  of his invisible hatred for my  hateful mother, even through the  3 a.m. mornings when he woke me up  in my single-occupied bunkbed  to aggressively...

No one mistook my  father for a social-butterfly  in the thirty-odd years  I knew him.  But if the droughts  could be informative  to the significance  of what's precious  I am indebted in  some peculiar, uncanny  way to his difficult,  recalcitrant dispositions.  All this to say: I'm glad  he was an authentic prick  instead of some shallow, dull,  conformist waste of life --  of which I feel there are  too fucking many in  the world.  So.  I thought to dash some  brandy into my schedule  of intoxication  and there was a customer  in the store ahead of me.  She had a child with her.  The child came up to her waist.  That's how old it was.  It was old enough that it's nose  was approximately one foot taller  than where the woman's crispy  vagina's entance was.  The child made faces while  the woman talked to the  cashier...

The captain judged Sisyphus to be close enough to his own height & weight, and he was a mildly superstitious man who routinely packed an extra change of clothes for returning to shore (*the superstition being that if some omniscient character inhabiting the fates could determine what one looked like at a particularly important juncture -- in this case, a return from sea -- they could stalk you and exert some horrifying mischief to disturb your otherwise calm, practical effort) and the captain studied the two separate wardrobes side by side in neat piles on the captain's expertly-folded blanket & sheets, bed. One pile contained a gray shirt. The other pile contained a slightly different gray shirt. "I can't remember the difference," the captain said.  Sisyphus looked at the shirts too. He recalled an intriguing rumor (but then aren't all rumors intriguing to the curious?) that many of his ancestors could not identify or describe certain colors if they hadn...

"Dick's Button to Sheepshead Port, Dick's Button to Sheepshead Port, do you read me?"  "This is Sheepshead Port. We read you, Dick's Button. Go ahead with your message."  "Copy that, Sheepshead. Dick's Button is looking to port. --"  "Tell him we're aheah of schedule."  "Yeah, yeah. Sheepshead?" he said. "The vessel in question was slated for return on..." He thought. "May 14th. Year of '25. We're three days ahead of schedule. Give you a minute to check the register."  The port-radio operator checked. "Got ya, sailor. Seems like you were. Anything big I need t' worry about?" "No injuries. No trouble. Routine early-return."  "Score something good, did ya?"  He and the other man faintly smiled with their eyes. "I wouldn'," he said, low enough the port wouldn't catch it. His smile dipped into a grin, "Suit yourself." "Nothing ...

I.  I guess I was working on the farm  a month or so, I was in medias res  to be literary about it, and Sara  was maybe the fourth or fifth  person to arrive.  Younger by three or four years  (I'd turn 26 that May)  a cute, friendly creature  ripe as fresh fruit  however your eye moved on her.  Neysa & Travis, the would-be career farmers  who'd showed up early in the roster  and were consistently more organized  than any of us, always treated her  with some deference -- Neysa, I guess,  because their personalities ran a little hot & cold  to each other; Travis because he didn't  want Neysa, his fiancee, to suppose he was  flirting.  Well, let's Super-Size this blossoming burden  and include one more to encourage our  petulant narrator's carnal appetite:  Esther: Esther: who I thought might  be flirting with me under the kitchen  table, sometimes, who me an...

Sisyphus had stood up from the floor on his own as if he'd just aroused from a brief nap on a warm, sunlit city sidewalk and the light of the world rang from every angle of the captain as he went to Sisyphus to direct him towards his private quarters in the depths of that fishing vessel and the others went about their business as he'd told them and Sisyphus reconsumed the stupefying clamor and joy of existence, the boat and day about him in its threatening uncertainty.  He walked with unfathomable confidence.  "Do you know how you got here?' the captain asked him after he'd pushed the door almost-closed.  "I came here," Sisyphus said.  "From where?"  "Purgatory. Where else?"  "How do you mean that?"  "How is there to mean it? The place after..."  Sisyphus remembered that not all beings have multiple lifetimes. "You never died."  "Well of course I haven't!" He said, "You mean... You died?...

He could smell gasoline. He could taste oil. Conscious, not paralyzed, but unable to sit up from where he lay in the swaying floor.  There were voices. He sensed, perhaps, a half dozen men about either side of him, standing with the assurance one learns to generate after successfully attempting anything as strange as sleeping and waking and living on water for weeks at a stretch. Men who regarded the stranger laying in the floor of their ship with curiosity that was only mildly disconcerting.  One of them on his left side, near Sisyphus's shoulder, crouched at his knees to closer study Sisyphus. He said, only somewhat like a question, "Can you hear me in there, friend-o?"  The unfamiliar accent momentarily terrified him: In his storied returns to and residences in the Tangential Plane, the hero of heroes perused, at length, the myths, scriptures, gospels, allegories and poems detailing the morality and anatomy of human creatures to such inextricable depth, the voice speak...

....There was a peculiar joy in the feeling of being defenestrated as Sisyphus cascaded down the flesh-insensitive depths of the sky, the fast dissolution of the aether like violin wire melting in its own heat and absorbed by his corporeal body as it plunged through mile after mile of some anonymous Nor-Equatorial portion of the Atlantic Ocean. Grayblack skyscape of an older world, half forgotten; in its relent to become ancient released its soul in precise detail.  ....Swimming, swimming, swimming downwards, inhaling the surfeit of wind, coughing on the thick gusts of it as they pushed and steamed into his lungs. He felt, slightly, like a walrus that'd been abandoned by its pride and left to roam crazily through the entirety of existence or like a father in search of a son. Earthly, divine, becoming human. Graceful in its stubborn resolve and product of the oldest ambition. The hierarchy of the world undone. Soon, soon, the water. The water, now.   **** 

His hibernation  was busy with dreams filled with threats and temptations, equally populated with oppressive, hateful bullies and relentlessly cunning guardians... Memories of pressing taught fingers on the surface of the rock, something between a massage and a juggle, caressing, spinning the object, like Michelangelo playing an endurance sport of one. Sisyphus the athlete. Musician of the functioning soul. In his dreams, he always fought other men -- whether previous fisticuffs were won or lost -- and it would not be until 2034 (Common Era) where the focus of this story will (by and by) eventually take place that Sisyphus opened the question Were women excluded from these challenges? Had there been some contract, or a list of maxims and commandments meant to disqualify them from competing against their male peers? Sisyphus didn't know. Since the time of Homer, the concerns of the masses had centered around recording that  things happened; reaching consensus as to the mutual c...

 "Sisyphus, I have warned thou: I will no longer entertain thine appeals!"  "My dear Queen," he continued, minding each word to carefully avoid conjunctive terms that would certainly prompt her outrage, (lovely as he sometimes found it...) "My dear Queen, I promise ye, thou shalt hear no appeal from my tongue. I desire solely to report a finding from my recent journey."  "Finding, Sisyphus?! What queer or foul discovery does thou wish to torment my ear and fragile psyche with today? What new deviant behaviour have the humans imagined for themselves?"  "Persephone, Sweet Persephone, brace thy venerable nerves and muscle, for what I say is neither rumor nor gossip and my heart trembles with cowardly fear at your disbelief: The humans are searching the millennial ruins for that supposed Cup of Christ."  She withdrew in her hostility toward Sisyphus. Proselytizer of a faith that hardly requires agreement anymore than Cosmological Genesis re...

Of course, he'd never personally encountered Adam & Eve and had only been aware of their legend through travel-worn, confused, repaired, retold versions of wheresoever it had initially sprouted from. The nature of their "sin" confused him especially. It made very little sense to Sisyphus that Creation would regard the consensual hunger of two vulnerable humans with the same animosity as it did corporeal disease or psychological abnormality. And he thought with considerable focus but there was nowhere to seek a true answer from. As the carbon of what can no longer endure time & pressure expires and sets the world at question so, too the landscape of what never was shamelessly exhales its rumor, its woeful suggestion upon the matter of the extant and the living.  Sisyphus sat down on the bed.  The quiet reminded him of earthly motel rooms, where there were clean sheets on the mattress and fresh pillowcases and comforters and every surface was dusted recently whateve...

As it happened, the dorms of Purgatory were no longer even divided into personal faiths, nor the manner in which one perished, nor even in reference to the year of one's original birth. It was, in fact, a kind of ad-hoc filing-system. Primitive in its austerity yet something akin to perfect grace in its convenience. It would be a mistake to call it serene although the darkness is purely without hostility or greed and in that passive reassurance any heart warmed by its own modesty might find some lasting refuge.  Sisyphus stepped forward in the que.  He noted, as he always did, the absence of things. Since there was little (if any) sense in paying attention to what was going on, no one really had any in tention toward it, so there could be no endocrinal or biological response to stress or worry or temptation. The others in the que ( you couldn't determine sex or age or ethnicity by their appearance and inquiring would be damning as idle chatter to a Buddhist and was therefore f...