<<nobr>>
<div class="cutive-mono-regular">
<<set $closer = ["If his nose were smaller, his eyes a different brown, his bottom lip pouty...", "Six years ago punk rock had focused his life", "...they'd gasp at his scribbles like they were seeing God or a UFO", "...he twitched and trembled so much he made John think of a badly tuned hologram", "John \"quite rightfully\" liked to let his \"heavy artistry\" speak for itself", "But you should know the real goal of my work is a Dorian Gray type of thing. I make you look awful, and I start to look really good...", "...he couldn't help but distinguish a few guys he'd drawn or still intended to draw scattered through the forgettables", "Facial features appeared on the page as random shaky lines, fine as hairs on a barbershop floor.", "He tried to erase the eyes. The paper tore.", "He felt something that could have been love but was too manageable and kind of coldly interesting", "To keep from causing a scene he turned his back and sulked", "They headed for Dump, a poorly lit gay bar well known from its loose clientele.", "His eyes were outlined with mascara. His mouth dangled open.", "Below the neck they were just about even: smooth, washed-out, skeletal.", "...his skull was shaped like an egg. He would have been nothing without punk.", "All three collapsed on the steps of the house, dusty and spent as ghosts.", "His belt rattled. It was a handful of bicycle chains twisted together and held in place with a rusty combination lock.", "The wounds were a really crass pink except the ones farther up, which had turned kind of violet.", "\"I'll make his ass a gift.\"", "Each lash left a red ribbon", "The guy had a cherubic face. It was meticulous, as though conceived by computer, but in every other way he was a shambles", "He talked out loud to himself, walked around in what seemed like a hypnotic trance, claimed he was a pop star, et cetera", "Even from inches away, David was one of those guys who were so cute their skin looked like plastic or candy.", "The usual ghosts of themselves were throwing balls in slow motion down corridors marked on the lawn. Balls stopped wherever", "Using his books as a pillow he lay on his back and watched the clouds move around for awhile.", , "That night he was drawing a boy named Simon whose head was shaped like a large glass of milk", "\"passive-aggressive pencil work\"", "\"I think I look like I'm wearing a Halloween mask,\" he whispered.", "He tried to whistle the tune of The Smiths' \"Handsome Devil\" but the thing had no melody so he just sounded asthmatic.", "One of the packages under the tree was a blank book.", "\"Your ideal,\" he said, \"is a pale brunet, your age, thin, male, sad eyes, big lips.\"", "\"a boy's screaming countenance faced the horizon, emitting a fresh brand of sunlight.\"", "\"When this is all over,\" Jules announced, \"let's have a three-way with some jerk.\"", "Being gorgeous, I mean. It helps me believe in myself and not worry that I'm just a bunch of blue tubes inside a skin wrapper", "Maybe his eyes are the nemesis", "I'm walking straight ahead at the rectangle of sunlight that marks the end of the hallway. It looks like my bed because that's where I wish I was.", "There are millions of people as cute as yours truly.", "He looks as calm as a lake.", "I think they call guys like me \"hothouse flowers\" because we can exist only in controlled situations.", "...I come face-to-face with my distorted reflection. I look kind of faint. Still, its contour soothes me like nothing else.", "This interlude gives me a chance to sing, so I will, in a rusty voice. Here goes nothing.", "This is a song about how great I look.", "Then he pores over the body. He doesn't want to disturb it, reinvent it or try to wear it himself.", "He wants to know where that innocent voice could have come from. It came from a perfect design. The End.", "I'm only sincere when I can forget who I am.", "...I respect that ambiguous inch between facial expression and soul.", "Remember that song I sang a few minutes ago about how great I look? Here's the disco mix.", "My shoulders seem like a clothes hanger. I mean that as a compliment.", "My ass has a permanent haze over it, like San Francisco or a dance floor.", "My legs are reliable, to be unpicturesque for a moment.", "Somebody long ago named all those horrid blue tubes like they were pets.", "What is a \"dreamboat\" exactly?", "He's terrific to look at, like me, and I have this idea if we sit and explore one another, both talkwise and physically that'll quell you-know what.", "We become two little ghosts wearing human masks, nothing to look at below the neck, but sort of too cute from there up.", "I hate the fact that human bodies are warm. I think they should either be ice-cold or have no temperature whatsoever, like pieces of paper.", "No, it wants my skin in a heap on the floor and a teetering skeleton smeared with blood.", "My mind's a total blank. Is a minute up yet?", "I'm going somewhere where things transform into teentsy, unreachable stars (make that glitter) that look kind of sweet", "I stare at the walls. They start growing in every direction until my whole room is a mile wide and deep at least.", "I envision a figurine bathed in a spotlight.", "I give them love in a form they can understand, but all they seem to be able to do in return is howl like some immense dog.", "My glance usually does the trick.", "Here comes the part where I have to act human.", "...bouncing all over the stage in a vaguely symmetrical pattern.", "Well, it's just an excuse to display my ass.", "The assembled scream shrilly, like they've seen a ghost, but they're probably thinking of snowfall or cats.", "I guess it's a testament to my intelligence that I can edit myself out of life", "Who does it really belong to, this mannequin I'm so adept at portraying or . . . ?", "I'm so tired I practically creak through my dance steps", "I worship The End. It's a great concept.", "Next time I see him at school, I'll go over and try to be boyfriends.", "Blood, guts, bones, not much else.", "\"Thanks for being so well designed, kid.\"", "He thought of how vulnerable he would appear from a distance. But the halls were deserted.", "George turned to a page in his diary", "He had a fondness for empty things normally filled up with people.", "Abandoned houses, parking lot structure on Sunday nights, holograms, telephone booths. . .", "\"Prepare yourself for a charming surprise.\" said a sexy voice.", "\"God would give each boy a taste of His lips then go back to whatever dimension He hides in.\"", "Their faces were featureless, like outer space helmets.", "First they followed the shape of his skeleton, inching along, like it was covered with braille or something.", "He'd never paid much attention to how he was built, thinking that was for others to like or dislike.", "He opened the door. It was dawn.", "I kept my ears open, exaggerated my interest, and hoped compassion would strike him as sexy at some point.", "I wanted to read his mind, but all I saw was some dry leaves get larger and larger, then shatter like miniature fireworks beneath his shoes.", "His lips were so full and red they seemed magnified", "I'd arch my back and come, dazed by the strange combination of lust and petty loss I felt.", "Now George was sitting right next to me, staring up at a cloud bank.", "I couldn't guess how to get him in bed, much less save him from \"it.\"", "I set an old Bryan Wisdom LP on the turntable.", "The room was plush, refurbished in shades of white.", "Above their heads hung a charcoal drawing of somewhere that didn't exist.", "The room was subtly lit, like a case full of perishable objects.", "I wished I'd brought my old Konica. I could have gotten some great shots of George in the nude.", "As I'd hoped, he was so pale and smooth he looked airbrushed.", "...I was struck by the figures' grace. In comparison my fantasies were a scrawl.", "Without great music to structure my thoughts everything in the room became very abstract", "I stood in the shower. I saw myself as a waterfall.", "I knew he was hot for my body. I'd been avoiding the issue for months.", "What I'd thought pert at a distance was spooky close up.", "This boy's backside wasn't too far removed in appearance from one of those cheaply made monster masks.", "I imagined George floating facedown in the billows of his double bed.", "\"I'm all yours,\" George said, clicking shut the tiny lock on his red leather booklet.", "I want to figure his body out and get him over with, if it comes down to that.", "In the dark between streetlights my thoughts raced.", "The walk was lined with magnolia trees.", "I was surprised by how coldly he watched me get dressed, but I decided to not think until we were miles apart.", "After a minute or two, the sex slowly dissolves in his eyesight.", "The actor playing the dead boy has freckles.", "He'd been amazed by the sound of The Jesus and Mary Chain, a covert pop group, mixed in with the flightier disco.", "...that blondie's attracted to freckles because they remind him of pennies strewn inside a wishing pond", "Skin's skin. What's the point of decoding it.", "As an experiment, he tries to master the tone of the novel, in order to silently ornament his experience.", "He fiddles around with his light meter. The room is nightmarishly lit.", "George's body is nothing apart from his crotch, which resembles a mouse.", "...like the trace of perfume in a king's tomb.", "'I've landed the boy of a century,' he thought.'", "When he's exhausted, he's prone to seeing daydreamy mirages out there on the route.", "He points at a gray film can lying on top of his Sonic Youth bootleg LP.", "He rearranges their bodies until something works.", "He hears the pages turn. They feel like wings.", "The shadowy figure lies dead. A handsome actor steps back from the thing, drops his knife and squints into the lens of the camera. The End, it says.", "Room after room after room of incredible holograms.", "Over his head, a Milky Way of skulls snapped like turtles.", "George hallucinated in peace.", "\"My friend believes corpses dream,\", he said.", "\"Do you know what's inside that cute body of yours?\"", "It was enough to see his blood covering the floor like a magic rug.", "He pulled himself into the chair whose wooden arm had protected him.", "His ass wasn't really an ass anymore. He couldn't look at it. He dropped the mirror. It shattered.", "This cruelty, however imaginary, fell in line with his wishes.", "When he looked at the scars he saw the inside of George, not as cold, gray and empty—as he preferred it to be—but brightly colored and very disorganized.", "Still, no matter how George had filled up with hieroglyphs, they didn't help Philippe figure things out.", "Scars merely forced him to stylize his thoughts, until the destruction he saw matched the painstaking beauty he knew in his mind's eye, his tinted lens.", "The world he saw rang with percussion. Skeletons snapped.", "Death seemed a friend, being so far away.", "The only difference between, say, a pink unicorn and George's death was the chill off the mind that imagined the latter.", "He'd stroll through the streets, eat, bathe, weed his rose garden, and it would gather strength over his head, an insidious halo, as black as dried blood, glittering with the thunder of snapping bones.", "The UFO reached an ambiguous distance. Philippe changed it into a wound.", "Ed was unbearably cute, until men had worn him away.", "A death was beyond his means. He could only squint blearily into its depths, the casual bystander.", "He paid a series of hustlers to lie very still on his floor and gained a wild reputation.", "he only sound in the room was the clicking projector. Sometimes the clicks and stabs matched for a few seconds.", "I mean beauty is powerful. I feel very weak when I see it, or when I create it. No, I cannot explain.", "No, I wish never to die, but to see myself in death. To know what I am in the answer of death. I am becoming completely lost.", "I just moved stuff out into the storeroom and painted the walls flat black. I like flat black. It doesn't try to explain anything, and it's been hip since before I was born, I guess.", "My club's called The Forefront. That's the name of a band I like. They're obscure so most people will guess it's original.", "He has a dazzling ass, though I'm bored with it.", "We've a mutual fondness for gloomy perspectives and danceable beats.", "He's decayed of late, but it works.", "My flower's wilted. He's flat on the floor.", "For instance, last weekend I slept with a tall, gloomy boy in an overcoat. He was at Music Plus buying the same British import I had.", "His eyes had big question marks scribbled all over them, like a character in a comic book.", "I want to put on a record and rethink my night, get the messy or half-baked ideas out.", "Which came first, the afterimage of light through woven cloth, or the dream wall?", "Okay, I won't press. Instead I play an old Sisters of Mercy LP. I like them because they're so stoned or depressed or whatever, they think their own deaths are a hip place to be.", "His boyfriend is striking ridiculous poses behind a microphone stand", "He's very clean and kind of tasteless, like plastic.", "I explain how tonight is a gift from the good part of me, the part of me who means well and couldn't hurt him.", "David's body is shredded like paper.", "It's like this: I think I was after perfection, but wouldn't admit it."]>>
<<set $frisk = ["His hair curves sharply down either temple, sweeps back, and hooks over his ears like raised theater curtains.", "His eyes could be parts of a doll. Each reflects the front of a camera.", "If his eyes weren't such clouds, he'd appear to find something or someone hilarious.", "His back, hips, and legs are pale and forgettable by contrast. His haircut's a shambles.", "The inside of the cave is gray, chopped-up, mushy. At its center's a pit, or a small tunnel entrance, too out-of-focus to actually explore with one's eyes, but too mysterious not to want to try.", "His feelings, thoughts, etc., were the work of people around him. Men particularly.", "\"I'm so cold I'm a fucking ice sculpture, right?\"", "The guy just stared off at the rain, glass, hallucination, daydream, whatever.", "He still looked cute enough to justify what was starting to happen, whatever that was.", "His history had been reduced to a simplistic blur, like the trails in the air left by people on fire.", "Guys could move me around, whatever. I wouldn't have a first name, just a surface. Like pillows.", "There was a Rorschach blot of sweat on the sheet where his crotch had been pressing. Henry looked down at it, thought he saw a satanic silhouette.", "He squinted. His reflection fogged up, disconnected from him.", "Kevin was looking painfully at the cover of the latest Black Sabbath LP.", "His eyes looked hypnotized, transplanted ... something.", "The key looked like a jewel. Its design was incredibly intricate. He couldn't stop studying it, even when it was plugged in.", "He and I peered into the glittering well.", "The homely spine and rib cage got swallowed up by the crazy pattern of his musculature or whatever", "Most of my face disappeared behind Henry's ass, and tilted ninety degrees like a sinking ship.", "Saturday afternoons I'd ride my ten-speed downtown and see matinees, usually horror films. I can't remember their names anymore, since they were never the point of my trips.", "He was pale, cute, and had long, straight black hair. There was nobody else in the photos with him.", "Being eighteen, adventurous, and pretty, he raked it in.", "He was slender, bony, and his skin was the color of steamed glass. He owned about three hundred different T-shirts, most of them printed with rock bands' or products' names.", "His ass is covered with flowery handprints.", "Spoken aloud, the descriptions seemed much more pretentious, ridiculous, amoral ... something, than they'd ever been in the secret, uncritical world of my fantasies.", "But Henry didn't care how sexily I described the idea of him dead. He just listened and nodded like I was giving him directions to the next town.", "\"Strange man, but nice. I was probably in love with him.\"", "I think if he'd stayed or if I'd called him, maybe he could have answered some questions about those images that went on to completely direct or destroy my life in a way.", "That first day, for instance, he said the room had been a submarine stuck on the floor of the ocean, at least until I showed up.", "Being cold was the only way I could deflect all his ... emotion, whatever", "When I was twenty-four … I wore black, cut my hair, dyed it black, took a lot of amphetamines, and renamed myself Spit.", "I went there on the weekends to look for somebody to love. That was a very unpunk thing to think about, but people did.", "His hair was dyed blue-black and stiffened with gel into twelve-inch-long strands, most of which were bunched up on the top of his head like a scorched bouquet.", "When I met his eyes and imitated their unfocused stare he seemed to recognize something and stumbled in my direction.", "His chest was a little too narrow and pockmarked. It was all information to me.", "I told him something like, Hey, it's exactly the ugliness or whatever that makes cocks paradoxical and invaluable, blah blah blah, especially on really cute boys like himself.", "He made a face like he didn't know what I was talking about, though he later confessed that the word \"cute\" is what helped him waddle toward me, jeans inching down his calves.", "I grabbed his ass, pulled him close, sucked his cock, licked his balls, etc., while in the blurry upper edge of my vision his head wobbled and drooled like a surrealistic cloud.", "I felt numb, blank, so my face probably followed suit.", "One night I was drinking at Flintstones. The decor of that club was extravagant, a pseudo-cave with lifelike plaster stalactites and puddles of fake stagnant water", "There were still some bruises and cuts on his face, but since punks wore their physical damage like fashion accessories, he didn't particularly stand out.", "\"But it was weird being cute. It's not as great as you think.\"", "Then his eyes got this icy, removed look I sort of expect in the people I fuck.", "My perfect type tends to be distant, like me. I don't mean matter-of-fact, I mean shut tight.", "All the way home I kept turning to look at Finn's face. It was almost beautiful. He didn't even notice me studying, he was so uninterested or overly involved in himself.", "I mean sweet, but kind of spoiled. Like there was something wrong with him, hidden away in there.", "His nipples were tiny pink matterhorns. He was warm all over except for his ass, hands, and feet, which were freezing.", "His face was bluish-white with brown eyes that seemed one thought behind or ahead of me constantly.", "Then I leaned back and caught my breath, watching the splatters of sperm run together. The lacy pattern they formed reminded me of those tacky vests gays used to wear at the height of the disco craze.", "I shoved one hand down his throat, one hand up his ass, and shook hands with myself in the middle of his body, which sounds funny, but it wasn't.", "Not only did Joe meet my strict physical requirements (pale, thin, smooth, dark hair, dark eyes, big lips, spaced-out, boyish), but his only passion, as far as Samuel could tell, was splatter films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.", "One day there was a sketch in the newspaper of a seemingly pretty young man.", "The view was milky with cobwebs, so he kicked a hole. That framed the top several rungs of a rope ladder. He studied them for a few seconds, shrugged, and jumped into the black.", "He forced one end of the bone into the back pocket of his faded jeans.", "The floor of the basement was empty, apart from some waterlogged, mass-market paperbacks off in a corner.", "Climbing the rope ladder, he tried to imagine his skeleton folding and straightening out inside his skin, but his knowledge of bodies was slight, and his brain such a weakling it couldn't conceptualize a crisp image.", "When his coffee got cold the next morning he studied the bone he'd found, occasionally rubbing his own bones by way of comparison.", "There was nothing particularly worthwhile in his waist, as far as he could surmise, so he skipped to his hips, which reminded him of a Mobius strip.", "He'd never realized how inventive his skeleton could be. It had just been in storage inside him for twenty-six years, like a piece of unfashionable sculpture.", "Over the years I've decided or figured out that there's a strain of the human race I'm uncontrollably drawn to. Male, younger, lean, pale, dark-haired, full-lipped, dazed looking.", "Every guy I've wanted since has had his same basic look. I suppose in a sense it's like being involved with the same person over and over without getting bored.", "Sears had been painted light purple a month, six weeks back. That was supposed to attract a younger clientele. Instead it seemed to antagonize regulars.", "Joe suddenly had a mild deja vu. It whited out his view for a second.", "He has a great profile, sharp nose, full lips, big eyes, thick brown bangs. That's all I've been able to see as of yet. But it's enough.", "It means perfecting your feelings for them, or dissecting their seeming perfection, or …", "Up his asshole the feeling was much more complex and kind of itchy. Slap, slap. It made Joe imagine a beehive. Slap.", "Even during sex I don't use my body that much. I'm more interested in other guys'. Mine just sort of follows my head and hands, like a trailer.", "The subjects' faces were a little too impish and sweet, but their skin looked realistic, if kind of colorless. He couldn't be sure if the visible parts of the skeleton and guts were correct. He hoped so, shivered.", "All I could see was a sliver of him along the edge of his seat. Sometimes that's plenty.", "His eyes have grown dull and sleepy, or maybe hyper, or scared, but uncomprehending for sure, like I need eyes to look before I feel comfortable around them.", "His personality's mechanical and calm, bordering on nonexistent, like a tool.", "I want him, specifically his skin, because skin's the only thing that's available.", "I mean, skin's biggest reward, which is sperm, I guess, is only great because it's a message from somewhere inside a great body. But it's totally primitive.", "Either I can pretend I'm a psychic or palm reader and tell myself I understand some cute guy if his sperm leaves his body when I'm in his presence, or, as I find myself doing more often these days, I can actually imagine myself inside the skins I admire.", "The library's domed lobby towered up, off-white and cracked in spots like a huge egg or skull.", "I just realized the major reason I'm so nonchalant about death is that no one I knew ever died until the last few years, when I was already pretty removed and amoral.", " I'm just weirdly, intensely entertained by the thought of a boy being deep in the ground and unreachable.", "Then I rerun the new death until its details are so familiar, and the actor in question so dead, that I'm ready to cast, kill, bury someone fresh.", "Joe imagined his back, ass, legs being punched by a freckled fist. That relaxed him a little.", "\"Well, I'm supposed to look almost exactly like Keanu Reeves, the actor. Know him? He was the nice kid in River's Edge.\"", "\"Why would someone who looks like Keanu Reeves want to fuck himself up?\"", "He carried the phone across the room to his bookcase. He grabbed the bone off its place on the second shelf down from the top and started studying it.", "Although the victim looked so much like him that the sketch could have been a dirty little mirror, Joe found the guy sort of unsympathetic.", "He laid the clipping and bone on the bookshelf, settled into his armchair, lit a cigarette.", "He turned on the TV, switching around with the remote control unit until something violent appeared. His memory of the portrait and bone immediately blanked as his eyes started noting the action.", "I think I'm ready. It's hard to describe these moments …", "Overfurnished with scratched-up antiques, it had three tiny, sepia-colored windows.", "Far, far off, halfobscured by trees, he could see a kind of giant-sized doll house whose windows glowed like kerosene lanterns.", "Joe was trailing the actor along a path roofed with the limbs of fruit trees. Oranges, lemons, pears, apples ... Perched in their branches, brightly colored birds blinked at the passing intruders.", "The interior was painted black. A large X made of two massive pieces of wood, maybe seven feet long, one wide and deep, stood upright room center, decorated with handcuffs.", "The floor was an inch deep in whips, paddles, knives, etc.", "When he shut his eyes a second later, the four things-pink nipple, knife point, crinkly smile, white smudge-were superimposed against the reddish darkness of his lids. It looked like a flower.", "My eyes zigzag down his chest, stomach, crotch like they're watching a tiny or distant rock climber.", "\"I get to use your skin, and the little areas of your skeleton I can feel underneath, and whatever I manage to squeeze or suck out.\"", "\"Well, if I think you're one of the most extraordinary boys I've ever seen, and I do, then logging your tastes, smells, sounds, textures isn't enough somehow, for me at least.\"", "I look calm, but if the slightest insanity distorts my face, voice, he's ready to leap for his clothes", "\"But it's true that the way men deal with me is like I'm a kind of costume that someone else, someone they've known or made up, is wearing.\"", "I'm always right there inching gradually up his body, hunched down like I'm licking a very large envelope.", "He's relaxed enough generally to mumble some pointers-what feels good, what's boring some of which I acknowledge with grunts, snorts, moans.", "My eyes fix on the sheet that separates me from him. They startle or widen, like they're seeing something miraculous.", "\"I find what I know about you amazing, so amazing I can't get beyond my awe. So part of me wants to dismantle that awe or whatever, and see how you work.\"", "On his way to the shower Pierre makes a stop at the stereo, plays side one of Here Comes the Warm jets, an old Eno album. It's still on his turntable.", "It's weird to get lost in something so calculatedly chaotic. It's retro, pre-punk, bourgeois, meaningless, etc.", "Tying his sneakers, he flips the scuffed-up LP, plays his two favorite songs on the second side, which happen to sit third and fourth, and are aurally welded together by some distorted synthesizer-esque percussion, maybe ten, fifteen seconds in length.", "The lobby's faint Muzak is gruesome-old Beatles, homely as a buzzing mosquito. It follows him into the elevator, down the third-floor hall.", "Sometimes the armpit hairs stand in a skinny brown stalk, with Terrence's lips as its flower. Then the hairs will come to a point and twist slightly at the tip like chocolate ice cream or smoke.", "Then he slides one hand loose, focuses on his watch, and counts down the rest of the hour, rerunning some particularly nonsensical Eno lyrics in his head.", "When I open up, disheveled, smiling, he remembers how harmless I seemed in relation to what I was spouting, like those angelic singers in satanic rock bands, but less cute.", "I twist my lip, eyes following an invisible fly. Pierre has relaxed and is fingering one of his brown curls.", "\"Music,\" he says. \"Seventies Art Rock. Eno, Roxy, Sparks, T. Rex? Know that period?\"", "My face is adrift again. Well, mainly the eyes and especially my mouth, which hangs partway open. It's pink and kind of too dry inside.", "Maybe he's being too nonchalant. Or maybe I'm totally harmless, just ... Who knows?", "Six months later, Pierre refolds my newest letter, jabs it into his back pocket.", "Now his asshole is overexposed, supposedly.", "The way Warren cocks his head, smiles, winks, Pierre guesses he was beautiful in his younger days.", "He draws a girlish butt in the air in front of his face, sticks his tongue out.", "Good thing asses don't communicate their owners' emotional states.", "When he lets go, it's still a smooth, two-part, rectangular slab that must be pretty top-notch as asses go", "Warren puts down the letter. It folds up by itself.", "Warren's eyes get a glary sheen that might or might not be imploding emotion. Strange.", "Anyway, they're not green anymore. More, well, metallic-hued, like those contacts Peter Gabriel wore to look mechanical when he was in Genesis.", "He hears Warren's clothes open. A dull, irregular pop, pop, pop …", "The yellow wallpaper's fake-elegant in a vaguely uninteresting way.", "Still, the guy's eyes were so far away the whole hour, or each time Pierre thought to check, like it either meant nothing or everything to have total access to a sterling, unjudgmental face and ass.", "He himself had felt ... what? Maybe little to zero, as usual."]>>
<<set $try =["At the moment he's hunched over, filling up most of page eight with a self-portrait. Him scared.", "Very . . . psychedelic?", "He pushes the part-finished zine aside, looking worriedly at a Polaroid he based the self-portrait on.", "His body's just sort of there.", "Nearby, a laptop computer's screen exudes this turquoise glow, into which a paragraph of his novel-in-progress dissolves, or appears to.", "That would be the scariest sight in the world—gentle, brilliant Calhoun and his writing in deep hibernation—but no one else sees.", "If his friends feel like hanging around with him anyway, fine.", "Cover art: huge, rotting skull populated by demonic, half-human figures.", "She yawns a lengthy, multipitched type. Even thinned to wisp by the mechanism, the sound's totally erotic.", "\"So, what's your opinion of Hüsker Dü?\" he interrupts hopefully.", "Ziggy reaches over, pushes PLAY on his cassette deck. New Day Rising comes on.", "A headache's sort of eating his train of thought.", "He's still scrounging through invisible books, magazines, videocassettes, papers, stiff towels, etc.", "...several androgynous, entangled adults wearing cowboy hats.", "When Ziggy called, I was at the Macintosh. Walkman cranked, so the phone machine answered.", "Ahem. I met Brian McCauley, unemployed hunk, at an Echo & the Bunnymen concert some sixteen years earlier.", "Dark pink eyelids penciled once above the lashes with liner then brushed very lightly above and below with a cobalt blue powder that looked prostitute, not fierce, assuming that's what the kid had intended.", "Then, reassured, he spaces out on, oh, nothing . . .", "My Dear Ziggy, The sky is a malted gray out . . . Blah, blah, blah . . . blah, blah . . .", "...slim, depressed, cute, intelligent, haunted…", "My interest seems to reinforce these boys' secret if fragile belief in themselves. . .", "First of all, understand that my heightened, nitpicky perceptions of popular music extend to human beings.", "But bodies are too crude or sneaky or something.", "Ziggy's smeary eyes narrow and flit to the garbage-strewn floor, specifically a shred of Bob Mould's honest, middle-aged-before-its-time face.", "Looking into Bob Mould's enlarged, tinted eye, the situation kind of dissolves into general okayness.", "Sometimes he sang along with Tom Araya, Slayer's vocalist, who was yelling about how Christianity's a lie and Satanism's perfection.", "Calhoun's mouth's hanging open. His thoughts, emotions, etc., are so indistinct it's like . . . what? . . . that they've splintered to . . . atoms somewhere in his overtaxed brain or . . . whatever.", "It does not compute, as they say, though he's learned to use \"love\" in his fiction when needed. That's different.", "He has theories galore about how well the world seems to function when one maintains distance from all other people.", "Later, having read a little Nietzsche in school, he decided, among other things, that the world was preprogrammed by Satan or God or whoever, and, semibelieving this theory, as he continues to do on occasion, human beings are viruses.", "Dark blue air, starless, accompanied by crickets, bird chirps, and the occasional revving of cars whose ghostly headlights have somehow infiltrated the overgrown bushes and trees that parenthesize Ziggy's dad's house…", "His stupid feet aren't that thrashed after all. They could be bad pottery.", "He's trying to fantasize why he's upset into a single frame comic, but his emotions are too, uh, nearby now, too . . . focused?", "His eyes fix on the phone. Fucking ring, he thinks. Tick, tick tick . . . Okay, then explode, he rethinks and adopts a like, telekinetic or whatever stare.", "Little black phone book, house key, Certs, lighter, Swiss Army knife, condoms, folded-up copy of I Apologize No. 19 . . .", "I did my best to think peacefulesque thoughts.", "I masturbated halfheartedly until further notice.", "Calhoun sits back, still relatively high, thank God, eating blueberry yogurt.", "On his laptop computer screen: one paragraph of his novel-in-progress. The last sentence dangles before a pulsating cursor.", "Still, everything's equal, which is to say irrelevant, from the spectacular, fogged vantage point of wherever he is at the moment.", "Behind a small fleet of parked luxury cars is a chain-link fence overgrown with clumpy dying or dead vines.", "His eye catches a sparkling mirror hung over her, uh, antique dresser. He moves close, squints at his reflection until it's in focus, then revolves like a beauty pageant contestant", "All the toys' fake attention is weirding him out", "Still, gay sex seems to have this great scariness quotient, whereby no two situations are ever alike, as far as he can tell.", "Squarish ears bracketed by a virtual haystack of black hair that flip-flopped along with his gesticulations.", "...as unpored as tinted cellophane, at least from a few feet away—sleek, shimmering, and packed full of nearly shaped, well-hidden bones and eye-tickling musculature…", "His features are so narrow and grayish they could be an ax blade, a few chunks knocked out here and there.", "Maybe angelic, but masculine too, not a fashion model's exactly, not fake.", "Is he really up there with Rimbaud, as some teachers once hinted?", "When the crowds thin, he leans way back into a shadow nook between two banks of book lockers, waiting, bored as shit, singing Hüsker Dü's \"I Apologize\" to himself, for the 8:15 bell.", "In the background, Slayer's LP was there again full blast.", "The man shut one eye, zoomed in … in … in ... ", "They're chanting his name out of sync, which sort of thrills him at first, like he's a band being begged for an encore.", "Lots of nightmarish breathing. Distorted Heavy Metal in the background.", "Some laughlike or Satanic noise.", "It reminds him of … what? A smashed-down snow dome or whatever. Pretty.", "These arms are his, like the moon is a handful of astronauts'.", "I was gazing on him with extremely mixed feelings.", "Fifteen minutes later we lay side by side, spoiled, tired, frazzled.", "His mouth just sort of falls open, hangs there, a reddish black, roughly triangular slot", "Ziggy loves how, like, even after it’s off, loud music, especially guitar, hangs around in the air tinkling faintly for two, three seconds."]>>
<<set $guide = ["Mason's home jerking off to a picture of Smear's bassist, Alex. Alex's jeans are so tight you can make out his ass.", "I'm home playing records and writing a novel", "Luke smiled mesmerizingly, he could just tell. Then he let his thought patterns crap out to the music.", "Luke's sweet, deep, a little paranoid, and perpetually on.", "Just twenty-five, he has chocolatey shoulder-length hair, a thin face, big wild eyes, and a tall, narrow body disguised by loose clothes.", "Balding and schlumpy, with an agreeable, unshaven face, he's overeducated, spaced out, and extremely neurotic.", "\"Luke, you're too metaphysical for words.\"", "Luke sits for a half minute, eyes glazed, absorbing Guided by Voices.", "Their fractured pop stylings are not to his taste.", "He's into trippy, computer-built danceable soundscapes.", "In Luke's fantasy, they're at the used CD store where Chris works, and their eyes accidentally meet.", "It could be emotional, spiritual, sexual, whatever. The details don't matter.", "Every morning we'd score a few blotter hits, hitchhike to the remote beach, and spend the day zonked, hallucinating, babbling, and swimming around in the ocean.", "One day we robbed a hotel room, stole a truck, and transported the room's furnishings to the beach.", "We towed our loot, piece by piece, through the surf, underwater, and into this huge cavelike nook in the reef, setting each chair, rug, et cetera, in place, then swimming furiously back for the surface.", "Our plan was to live in this cave, rent-free, far away from fascistic reality.", "It never crossed our minds that we wouldn't be able to breathe.", "Tallish and slim, he had a newborn goatee, tiny eyes, and an ironic manner.", "As they drove, Mason declaimed about the beauty of Smear's bassist, who'd just inspired a new group of his famous collages.", "\"Is this funereal enough?\" Tracy fed the new Guided by Voices CD into the player and punched track 15.", "Out poured a charred, thudding song redolent of the early punk era but sweetened, perhaps in production.", "His deep-set blue eyes were consistently sad, but his voice had a brittle, imperious manner, which made him unpopular, hence lonely.", "All that other-worldly information, so suddenly focused, available, et cetera, had no accompanying language.", "But in describing my state, I'm unable to note more than its skimpiest outline.", "He pointed at Chris, whose long, slight, androgynous body lay spookily still on the carpet.", "In the background, Guided by Voices blared away, giving the situation a tense, darkly comical spin.", "Chris had been drugging himself in death's general direction for years, to his friends' mild amusement.", "They sprawl around for a few minutes, nodding out, nodding in.", "En route, each one thinks spacily about death.", "To become dead as gradually and with as much intricacy as is humanly possible.", "He wants to feel himself fading away from one world, fading into what's next.", "There'd be a point, he imagines, where he would be simultaneously dead and alive. For that moment, however tiny, he'd know everything there is to know about human existence.", "I'm playing an LP that came out the summer I took too much acid.", "Chris doesn't need people, at least not in that lovey-dovey, spiritual way. All of which gives him a slightly ethereal air.", "Being passive and drugged out, he's easily drawn into others' emotional gravity.", "For a brief time he managed to translate the tone of an LSD high into exotic yet palatable songs.", "Sunset Boulevard curved to the left . . . right . . . left . . . right . . .", "Robert and Tracy were trading fierce, miserable winces encoded with tons of interpersonal bullshit.", "I would experience a shadowy form of the original freak-out, and the proximity thrilled me.", "As Luke drove, the freeway lost. . .something.", "What if the stars are the sky, and the sky is the stars?", "If the blackness is solid, a wall, and the white bits are speckles of light that have escaped from whatever's just past that black barrier.", "In that whiteness the sky keeps away from our knowledge.", "One of David's friends was a tall, blond, angelic punk rocker and part-time street hustler named Sniffles.", "He asked me to buy him, and maybe because I was lonely and sort of depressed at the time, I did.", "Thing is, he liked to be hit and slapped around, and even though my imagination's a freezer compartment for violent thoughts, I'm a wuss.", "Sniffles had just dropped some Ecstasy, so he was feeling all warm and invulnerable.", "Acid encourages us to embrace isolation, to disempower other human beings, especially their bodies.", "When he turned to wave bye, his friend's truck was a dot.", "Words just. . .formed, disconnected from everything else.", "I'll say this once. I'm extremely fucked up. It doesn't show, but I am.", "Suffice it to say that Chris is my type. Then factor in his death wish, which is nearly aligned with my aforementioned dreams.", "Problem is, now that my fantasy's so doable, I can tell how complex the thing is.", "Anyway, I’m sort of torn between Chris, who accesses the evil in me, and Luke, whom I’m beginning to love in a pure, unerotic, devotional way that I never would have thought myself capable of even four months ago.", "He has a delicate build and extremely black hair. Chris shoots him a look of, well … sadness, bewilderment, jealousy. Some combination of those.", "Scott saw through Luke. Literally. The guy was a multihued mist. Luke, staring back, noticed something elaborately off-key in the world.", "A purplish-red orb strobed intently somewhere in Luke’s universe.", "I’ve tried to reconstruct my acid-fueled nervous breakdown on Maui, because between brief bouts of horrified consciousness, wherein my difference from everyone else in the world seemed profound, I saw such intense things.", "The memories are weirdly inseparable, blurred, I don’t know why.", "Maybe there’s something to getting incredibly stoned, then having sex with self-destructive young guys, that resembles the world acid showed me.", "The skin on Luke’s face was a fog. Scott could see, or almost see, his friend’s skull or, more specifically, that curious object which certain historical types once so lazily labeled \"the skull.\"", "Words failed Scott. A filament? But weren’t words too complex to manipulate properly?", "If Scott could think clearly from morning till night every day of his life, he would never get cancer. Oh, my God. It was so fucking simple. No, it was.", "Luke’s eyes are the immediate clue to his greatness. Without them, he’d just be a sweet-looking raver—on first glance, at least. They’re large, multicolored, and often glazed over in serious thought.", "He could tell that what he’d envisioned was wrong on a technical level. Still, he believed it was real.", "Why would my mind construct this? How exactly does LSD work? Then the clarity would erode and he’d be watching a purplish-red orb flash rapidly on a depthless black field, thinking, Wow.", "He heard whooshing. Actually, the sound was extremely refined. Someone had obviously composed it.", "The surface of leaves was flimsier than it looked, and he plunged into the depths of the plant’s slightly springy brown skeleton, then had to claw his way out.", "He runs toward a Guided by Voices CD.", "Since he was my type, I’d developed a harmless, persistent little crush like one does.", "Let’s just say he was pliable. And with all that freedom, and fueled by his self-destructive urges, I guess I went sort of insane. I intend to go into the details, just not yet.", "Luke’s eyes are so mesmerizing they’re practically … what? I study their swirly, multiplicitous color for what seems like days, thinking, Wow.", "Scott stared into something beyond the constraints of human language.", "I’m practically gone. Luke and Scott are gone. There’s no point in describing their mental locales.", "Just accept that they’re in two very vast, complicated, non-narrative states. Me, I’m still flashing in and out of what we call reality.", "Luke, Scott: klvxmhspwwlqhx …", "Truth is dry. You’ll know the truth when everything in your world seems as if it’s been cooked until nothing is left but the exact information that separates it from other things in the world.", "On acid, you look at a thing, anything, with complete understanding. At the same time, everything’s more mind-boggling than ever.", "It’s as if the brain power you normally waste fantasizing re sex, love, et cetera, had been redistributed to your nonhuman contacts, i.e., between you and a … I don’t know, TV set or whatever. Something finite.", "So, hoping to stay in that half-aware state, I pulled out the notebook and pen I always carry around and began to take notes on my surroundings, occasionally adding a cryptic bit of analysis.", "Not that anything brilliant showed up on the page.", "A loud, repetitive, dense guitar riff made the store feel unreal and sort of sinister. It could have been old Spacemen 3."]>>
<<set $period = ["A little town made up of rickety shacks largely hidden away in some humongous oak trees that this thick fog enclosed almost all day sometimes so most residents stayed at home", "Nate was always so into his own crazy thoughts. It made others feel useless. Hence, the charisma.", "There couldn’t have been a more perilous moment. In the background, his boombox was playing the newest cassette by The Omen, a crappy Satanic rock band that he loved.", "Maybe Nate’s huge IQ was the problem.", "When the wind hits a treetop, it’s born.", "Leon unfocused his eyes on the swaying around of a tree outside the shack’s dusty window. Its limbs were entrancingly lighted.", "Finally he closed his own eyes and very neatly unlit everything in his mind ’til there was only the heat of the day—which was slow and very weighty with moisture, and laced like a shoe with the whirring of flies", "Thus he was left to himself. And to his imagination. And to the sizzly sun. And to the sounds of the jiggling tree.", "He was standing before an old shack where this outsider artist of no repute lived, worked, and sort of kept to himself.", "The slat door swung open so roughly it knocked loose a yellowish dust cloud from somewhere. Out piled this grizzled type, scrubbing his paint-spattered hands with a gross rag.", "These days, Bob did whatever bullshit it took to actualize the guy’s feel, from screwing near look-alikes to illustrating the past with his art like a ramshackle Disney.", "I want to see that new thing you’re making up in the hills. Word around town was the guy had gone totally evil or nuts, on account of how freakish it looked next to everything else.", "9:02: Leaf shaking, tree to the right.", "10:12: Deer on the hill.", "The necklaces, watches, and pins formed a garish-ass pile in the grass. It looked for all the world like Satan’s hatchet face laughing or yelling in profile, from their angle at least.", "Leon felt nothing but horny for Nate by this point. That hurt. Everything was hateful apart from how wildly he longed for the fucker.", "Leon shut his eyes, reopened them, and made himself look available. He never could figure out how he did that. Except that it came maybe ninety percent from the way he was built.", "Nate removed article after article of clothing until there was technical human perfection, as far as Leon was concerned. There shouldn’t have been anyone in the world that important. It killed him.", "Satan, it’s us. We’re calling you. Shit, it’s fucking cold out here.", "Okay. Satan we’re calling you. Come into the circle of candles. We got a little gift for you.", "We love you, Satan. You’re the coolest.", "We want Dagger to be Leon’s sex slave, so he can do what he wants. Can you do that for us?", "Turns out that inside the hospitable front there was zip, inkiness.", "It’s a hellmouth, isn’t it? Nate said. ’Cos there was a definite essence of Satan inside. Some sort of creepy crawly glow.", "4:08: Lake. Nothing else.", "4:19: His lips said, Come back to my shack with me.", "But it’s scary. I think I’m in love with him. We must have fucked up the spell.", "The shack’s walls were covered with dusty oil paintings that easily could have been portraits of Nate, if it weren’t for the eyes.", "But as far as you’re concerned, it’s art. It’s just a house painted black inside.", "I told you. Watch. Abracadabra.", "Satan, we call you. We offer you the sacrifice of this boy’s life. Take it and please stop fucking around with our minds.", "1:29: One’s kicking my ass. One’s kissing my face.", "Turns out there was only a head wound too lite to be fatal, yet too reminiscent of George’s to leave him alone. Sorry.", "Concentrate. Gone out of the venture, the love, sex, murder, Satanism, robberies, okay? Like that.", "He’s been here for hours, partly obscured by the brush, awaiting the right car to pass, and a nice passerby. Someone in elegant clothes, whom he can fleece. God forgive him, he’s broke.", "The sun’s creepy, a hard piece of scalding red shit that has no consciousness of its own, so Nate can’t tell it anything real like, Go away.", "Everything should have a mind. So he could communicate with it. So he could say, Grass, get taller and cover me better.", "Or if he could say to this road, Hey, can you glisten a little? ’Cos that would look so unbelievable.", "Maybe that’s what will happen at world’s end, after one of the millions of viruses sneaks in folks’ bodies, and no one, no matter how total a genius, can cure them. They’ll just … collapse where they are", "Lumps of nature.", "He had stoned eyes, long hair, ripped blue jeans, and a t-shirt with two faded words on the chest.", "This fog’s too thick. It’s creeping me out. Not to mention the cold. Hint, hint.", "Look at me. I look electrified, right? That’s his effect. And look at him. Look what I’m doing to him.", "He’s less cute. You made him ugly. Consequently, you feel like you’re seeing the real him, the deep, incontrovertible him. Blah blah blah.", "I just need some information. Tell me, are you posing inside this deathliness, or do you honestly wish to send your soul into the Hell of our music?", "Are you just trendy, or are you a poem?", "Shh. You’re not our fan right now, you’re our subject. Do you want to be absorbed into our imaginations? Do you want to become something that can only be identified through our descriptive powers?", "You want to shed your body and become the blackest butterfly in the world?", "Choose between your life and our art. Which is more important, the poetry mapped by our songs, or the slow accumulation of meaningless detail that constitutes your specific identity?", "See, look at his face now. That’s the deep, deep him. And what does it say? Zilch.", "You don’t matter. You just have to look cold and consumed, and you do.", "My nickname was Calculus. You know what I’m talking about. You know about the voices.", "Yeah, they’re in the Internet. That’s where they come from. They should never have made the Internet. That’s the way they control everything.", "I can’t be near computers. That’s why I live in the park.", "You’re not cold. You’re something else. It just feels like cold. Duke, give me the knife.", "Okay, that looks like a guy at first, sure. But the longer you look, you realize that can’t be a guy. It doesn’t meet the criteria.", "Well, you remember that chunk of Mars they found in the Antarctic? It’s like that. It’s a crude piece of something that we can’t understand. It only strikes us as a guy because that’s our best point of reference.", "It sounds kind of pretentious, but we’re into Satan. Not as heavily as you guys.", "We did this sort of spell where I sacrificed a guy we knew to Satan in return for him making me immortal. I don’t know if it worked, though. Maybe it did work. Jesus, now I don’t know if I’m immortal or not.", "Could you tell if I’m immortal or not? I don’t mean by killing me or anything. I mean just from looking.", "Calm down. You’re such an odd guy. Don’t go conventional now.", "You’re going to learn so much about death, and then you’ll come back to life. You said you’re a fan of our music. So you must know what I mean.", "Self-understanding. That’s what this is about. It’s not sex. Don’t demean yourself, because we don’t. We’re like monks.", "The words are just the ink that the map’s printed with.", "Look, over there. Through those trees. See that? That glimmer.", "Thing is, the semicute one never seemed to get bored.", "I guess since the cute one kept growing and cutting and dyeing his hair, the other one could pretend he was fucking a new guy each time. I can’t explain the cute one’s reaction.", "They couldn’t translate the guy’s reaction at all. I don’t mean his specific features couldn’t. I mean human features in general. It was beyond them. It was something really new.", "2:13: My lips said, I have so many problems. I hate it.", "2:19: My lips said, My name’s George.", "See that mirror? George said. That’s the way into a different dimension.", "Well, I’m living in two worlds. I’m here like this, and I’m somewhere else, too. In there.", "I could open the other dimension right now if I wanted. Or I could stay here with you. I’m kind of like a god.", "But you don’t understand what this is doing to me. I’m in the middle, and that’s very confusing. I’m not like you. I’m fucked up.", "You never call me back. And you wrote this scary book about me. I can’t believe it. It’s like a horror movie.", "You do realize that’s what you’re doing. You know this whole mirror thing’s straight from my novel. I’m sorry you read it. I am.", "So there’s someone exactly like you. In that mirror. Am I right? Another you.", "He says where he lives, strange things go on all the time. Magic things, evil things.", "I’m somewhere else looking at this in a mirror. This is where I wish I could live, but I’m not strong enough to survive here.", "Then go ahead, George. Seriously. Ask your other self what he thinks you should do. How about that?", "The last time George phones, I’m updating his page on my website devoted to Walker Crane’s Period, oddly enough.", "The George Miles Zone is nondesigned, like a high school year book. It’s a square grid of thumbnails, showing \"George\" in several outfits, locales, and emotional states.", "I turn off the cellphone, write a note to myself, save the updates, close Netscape Composer, shut down my computer, switch off the modem, then walk into the living room, fishing around in a pants pocket.", "I saw this thing that was kind of gray. It was hanging in the air, and then it just … moved inside me, like disappeared inside me.", "Let me just get an initial reading here. Think about the subject of these pictures. Clear your mind of everything else. Have you turned off the lights?", "Cyberspace is a mystical zone where time doesn’t exist. Binary code is an artificial form of human mental energy. That’s been proven.", "By simultaneously keeping in contact with you in this Instant Message format, and reading this boy’s energy through these JPEGs, I can create a psychic link between all three of us that would be impossible anywhere else.", "\"Can you hear me?\" I say, and look into EgoreG’s eyes. They’re jiggling over some inky locale that I couldn’t begin to imagine.", "It’s an ickily heart-tugging quest that defies nature’s laws and conventional logic, but it does end up serving a purpose.", "He seemed mesmerizingly studied, a cute poseur doing whatever he could to remain one-dimensional.", "Wow. Yeah, I saw those pictures of him on the website. He’s a total babe. You really scored.", "Most people think there is something, but I don’t think anybody knows what it is. I think there’s a Hell. I think Hell is the answer to all of our stupid human questions.", "He attached a self-portrait to bolster his theory. Unfortunately, it was such a cute shot that I threw away logic, and sprung for his airfare.", "More importantly, boys in the mirror’s world-ette can’t be killed, which is why I’m fixated on mine.", "But Henry’s lost in The George Miles Zone, clicking open and closing some JPEGs.", "I get sick of fiction. I’ll be sick of George too, I’m sure, but never of myself. I hate how that works.", "I’m just floating away to wherever.", "People say death is the ultimate. So I’ve heard. Not my decision. People say life is the ultimate. It might be. I don’t remember.", "When you were here, I thought only of you, and went to bed with any boy who resembled you, I was so haunted.", "I can’t stumble backwards. Not even a daydream will light my way there.", "To spend one afternoon like I did when George lived, his beauty astonishing me, my interest frightening him, being too far from home.", "The Omen’s rustic van turned down a battered dirt road, into woods made unreal by a low, swishy fog.", "Etan saw a dim ghost off their one, crooked headlight, and stuck out his thumb. He had long hair, girlish cheekbones, no build, and a t-shirt inscribed with The Omen.", "5:40: Birds, wind. Fog a ways off.", "Satan rules?", "I thought, what do I want from him? I went down the list. Friendship, sex, boyfriend, mentor.", "Okay. Skinny, pale. Gawky. Turned up nose, long brown hair. You know, imagine my usual type without any Goth trappings.", "Well, looking at him, and removing a few years, I’d say … the young Richard Lloyd. Marquee Moon, or just before.", "I’ve practiced, I’ve learned, I’ve fucked up, and now I’m ready for him. Square one. Full circle. It’s perfect.", "6:43: Strange leaves, too.", "The world’s here. It’s doing fine. Nothing important is missing. Just little things, personal things.", "7:44: Just nicer and nicer trees.", "Satan rules? It’s kind of a joke, all that. Religion. It’s just like a tone, isn’t it? Sometimes I half believe in fate, which is sort of spiritual.", "You’ve experienced the future. You know his death’s a little blip.", "So Etan walks around the casino, goes into the arcade, plays House of the Dead for an hour, and leaves.", "The backgrounds change, but the guys are identical. Same long hair, same big lips, same turned up nose, same skinny body, same—", "Cross my heart. Look. Cross, cross.", "9:01: Like a maze.", "Etan’s sort of asleep by the scribbly dirt road.", "Everything’s just a result of the sun gradually eating the earth, he guesses.", "The batteries died in his boombox. Now it’s him and the world again.", "He means the world down this road, past those far off, unclimbable, fogged-over mountains. A place where folks merely exist, he figures. A place where folks merely exist, he figures.", "Everything would have the same consciousness, and pretty close to the same flat voice. No individual minds, no hearts, no instinctual shit, just movements and ideas that fit in a pattern too simple to notice.", "Noel lies in the slanted rectangle of light tossed away by a high, square, barred window. It spotlights his hand, pencil, white sheet of paper, leaking far enough into the cell to put this glow on the page. He’s drawing a picture of Dagger.", "Too bad he’s untalented, ’cos he can’t manage a likeness. Just messy lines trying to add up to something important, in his mind. Anyway, done.", "No, forget it. He crumples the paper.", "Noel lies unbelievably motionless under the window. Its daylight feels warmer than anything anyone’s touch ever gave him before, to think of life logically.", "Maybe the sun’s an incompetent artist like him, who drew the world in hopes of replicating some idea a million times better.", "Maybe Noel and Dagger were drawn on the earth in hopes of nailing some love too profound to exist outside a mind so far away or psychotic.", "Maybe Noel is a sketch of someone he doesn’t start to resemble, being too crude relative to the sun’s imagination.", "There was a clearing, just past this slight crease in the woods where two deformed, leafless oaks twisted into a skull, if the sun and one’s drugs were in gear.", "Seeing a flash in the skull’s deep-set eyes, Etan refocused his own. They held out the usual hope for whatever.", "Luckily, there was a rasp to his voice, so he came off bored. But it was just some dust left in his throat from those days by the road.", "He threw away his ax, slid his less calloused hand down Etan’s jeans, and recaptured that flat as Hell ass.", "10:34: A white dot.", "I was thinking. We traded with Satan, right? That’s why I’m immortal, and got to hang with The Omen.", "Dagger was a gazillion times cuter than this guy.", "I asked Satan to make me immune to you. It’s too late. Give it up.", "3:21: Waiting on some ripples.", "Etan jacks off in his secret campsite, helped along by The Omen on boombox.", "Satan, it’s Etan. I don’t know where Noel went. He flaked. He’s fucking lost it. I don’t think he’s into you anymore. I’m sorry.", "Okay, I call to you, Satan. I can’t fucking deal with this world anymore. It’s so intense right now.", "Death is so black, black, black, black, black, black.", "Maybe the place had some vibe, strange. Maybe things fell together a certain way, either by artistry, or by nature’s vast accident, and worked the feelings of simpler folk, say these guys.", "He possessed Dagger’s pale, meatless body, or almost.", "I can’t believe we’re doing this. Brr.", "Light the candles. Be cool.", "Shut up. Satan, make yourself known. Do your thing. Do something trippy like put out the candles, or screw Noel, or something, so we’ll know.", "2:27: Those two guys again. By the creek.", "It was cribbing together a face out of some swirled, crushing memory that made its way through a dense feeling, possibly love.", "Etan studied Noel’s crotch. It was way too meaningful, being Noel’s. So he concentrated on George, who was nearly as cute, if nothing else."]>>
<<set $godjr = ["Usually, I'm stuck on the computer taking orders. If it weren't for the internet, we'd be dead.", "He's a country-music purist. I'm basically indifferent.", "We may look like poignant triplets, but our pasts have different soundtracks.", "People seem to need tragic strangers in their lives.", "We're squarely in the shadow of the monument-in-progress. It used to resemble a concise roller coaster that had partially collapsed.", "\"Dateline is doing some kind of special on Nintendo. It's their whateverth anniversary.\"", "After Tommy died, she seemed bewildered by me. It's as though her mind scrambled my image in order to protect her.", "On TV, a goofy-looking bear dutifully throws itself against a gate over and over.", "It zigzags through a series of tall purple stalagmites. It skids to a halt. Directly in front of it is the monument. There's no doubt about that.", "Between it and us are all sorts of dangers, both quasi-living and organic.", "I remember the evil bees. I don't remember the club-wielding ferrets.", "I make the bear run. A swarm of bees dive-bomb his head.", "His life is a caption of five tiny honeycombs. My naivete has reduced them to one strobing shard.", "The psychic is sending us a Microsoft Word file of Tommy's speech from the beyond.", "These days sex is so hypothetical and littered with stars it might as well be astronomy.", "I want him to be something I'm vaguely scared will make me never feel a thing again", "She studies the crude plastic figurines inside the globe and shakes it.", "What made this globe collectible was the snow. It was fluorescent orange when Tommy bought it. Now it looks like an underwater ashtray.", "We tried to domesticate the bear. We gave him our values.", "After every creature in the level is dead, the bear hops, spins, does cartwheels, and backflips all the way to the monument.", "What if this game started life as a very different product? What if it were a real work of art that would have changed the gaming world forever?", "What if it totally freaked Nintendo out?", "Maybe it's a whole world in there like, say, Zion in The Matrix. Or maybe I'm just stoned and it's just a bunch of fucked-up pixels.", "After I heard the original, Zeppelin's copy seemed overstated and weak. But I didn't change my mind. I just decided I was weak for continuing to love it", "I'm hoping the therapist might say it's a picture of God or something great and I should have been an artist.", "My original goal was to be famous as an ambitious loser.", "The bear is a jewel among millions in a broochlike world.", "When he moves, my ideas slosh around and cause his legs to lope toward whatever I want.", "...I aim him at a grumpy-looking ferret in a Sergeant Pepper jacket and puffy clown pants who's guarding a random postage stamp of sun-stained glass.", "'I wasn't programmed to wonder, but you can't live through something like that and not wonder. This is a level full of rumors and myths.'", "His eyes feel hooked by a coppery, glowing something or other in the distance. He understands the glow instinctively.", "I need to squint to see a wooden chest, jimmied open and sparkling like a flake of some gimmicky cereal.", "'Well first of all, badmouth Tommy again and we'll shred you like a document.'", "I'd stomach my picnics and vacations by reimagining my environs. Id' wish away ninety percent of the rural graffiti, then pencil in a mansion or lucrative casino, preserving every sixth or seventh tree for effect.", "I'm just some fingers resting lightly on a cursor as it slides magically around like a kind of Ouija board.", "We land squarely on a corrugated terrace. It's smeared with buttery moss and some tiny stained-glass lamps that the bear recognizes as flowers.", "Two stylized paw prints, evidence of some larger bear or passing Yeti, face a gargantuan tropical plant that someone or something has dressed in thirft-store castoffs like a scarecrow.", "A tune of buzzing, grousing voices rings from the fjord, and the sky is so low that I can pick up every brushstroke.", "I walk the bear into the appointed prints. The second we’re aligned, the plant untangles its torso into something more flowery, then rips its blossom open like a Christmas gift.", "Your eyes are one degree livelier than the pattern on a teacup. You walk, you trot. You kill, you solve puzzles. There’s just not a lot to you.", "Imagine if you were born to spend ten to fifteen minutes interacting with a stranger and then he never arrives.", "When we’re paused, we’re half dead, we’re death looky-lous. If the bear ever wins this game, that’s where we’ll go.", "I don’t know why a bear that can’t sit down is confused with the Almighty by everyone around him. I know why everyone in a false world would think a boy who spent his whole life doing nothing is God.", "Granted, pixels and painted wood are like diamonds and disco balls, but our monument looks so unbelievably deformed.", "Briefly, the plant said we should pretend to be God when I played the higher levels. Since those levels’ inhabitants never saw God, any bear would do the trick.", "When the bear’s pose struck me as godlike, meaning sort of officious and lawyer-like, I walked him toward the exit.", "The bees hung politely by their hive like an asteroid belt.", "When we stepped on these trinkets, they were magically absorbed into our body and made a tinkling sound like when you enter a gift shop.", "Even the scorpions were cute as candy wrappers, and when they realized we were holy, they flopped right over on their backs.", "We must have spent an hour breaking rocks, punching holes in cacti, crushing scorpions, and everything we harmed or killed gave us a present.", "The flower unfurled one leafy arm, which flexed a bulging, tattooed bicep. It was cradling a basketball-like seed that started bouncing on the ground.", "We’d disturbed a sleeping snake. It rose dramatically from a giant crack we hadn’t seen, complete with so much billowing, dry-ice-like dust it made a Cure concert seem hygienic", "I explained how I’d made the world out of this stuff called computer code and could so easily delete him.", "We were standing on the fringe of a garden, circular and akin to Versailles in its elegance, and isolated from the other levels by crumbling walls like a castle’s backyard.", "Its fussy cobblestone paths were cartoon classical, but the flower beds were pure Rose Parade float, and the whole property was as shiny as a contact lens.", "The drafty sky was juggling some birds or loose kites and looked about a hue this side of storming.", "The maze of paths led and misled to a central oasis of sorts where we could barely see a kind of jungle gym of spurting turquoise water. I chose one path arbitrarily.", "He didn’t know what awaited us below, but he was sure it would be evil and offer no competition for God.", "News of our deity status appeared to have spread throughout the kingdom by whatever telepathic means the game employs.", "The fountain’s faux marble base was flanked by several statues of hypnotized-looking bears, all with perfect posture and recently brushed coats.", "I’ve never completed a jigsaw puzzle in my life. So we were forced into a macho standoff", "There was a Zippo lighter balanced on one corner and spinning like an Olympic athlete’s ice skate. We walked toward it and, ding-a-ling, it reappeared flaming in our paw.", "Apparently, it was not only quote-unquote a blast and far more labyrinthine than it looked, but bombs grew there in flourishes, and we could have plucked a few.", "The psychic has petted Tommy’s snow globes as if they were cats. He has leafed through every issue of Thrasher as if it were a fragile first edition.", "I think I knew him superficially enough to understand what I would have to do to make this eyesore, quote, fucking awesome, end quote.", "The ground is packed with snow that has no temperature to speak of and sticks to our furry feet like sand.", "His fur coat crumples on the ground. It expends a crazy fractal that evaporates to mist.", "A polar wind sculpts the block of ice into a pointy souvenir. The bear wishes he could keep it safe in a refrigerated pocket, or I do.", "I shut my eyes and disinfect him of my short, ungodlike temper. By the time I reopen them, we’re both hopelessly lost.", "I recommend you use this third cheat and aim for level three, because paganism is running rampant, and you’re a marked bear.", "I wring and yank on the controller, but I might as well be a guy with a fishing pole trying to haul in Atlantis.", "Let’s say the extremely smooth grass in cemeteries is fake grass, and there is no one and nothing underneath it.", "Let’s say I’ve just erased the world and not destroyed mine."]>>
<<set $thesluts = ["I took him back to my place. He was very quiet and didn't seem to want to talk.", "There were warning signs everywhere but Brad was so hot that I just ignored them.", "All the time his cute boy face looked at me with his mouth wide open and made these sounds like he was scared to death and turned on at the same time.", "It was very spooky. I didn't know what to do with him.", "Something the previous reviewers are right about is that he's extraordinarily cute. Brad is one of the cutest twinks I've ever seen in fact.", "It sounds frightening, and it was, but it was also incredibly hot to see a boy that cute lose control.", "However, due to your overwhelming interest in the Brad saga, I will continue to post any reviews and updates that come in.", "I also starred in a whole bunch of porn videos under the name Stevie Sexed. I'm a website designer now, but I have good memories of those days.", "I advise our loyal Boys-Next-Door customers that any dealings with Stevie should be carried out with caution.", "I'd asked him to wear clothes he didn't need anymore, and he was wearing an old t-shirt and holey jeans through which I could see hints of his completely hairless and porcelain looking legs and ass.", "He gave me the coldest look I've ever seen, and it was very clear to me what it meant.", "The review posted by secretlifer34 was full of lies and deceit.", "Regardless of what any of you think of me, Brad and I are in a relationship as sacred as any marriage.", "Gorgeous, hunky top, 24, 6 feet, 185 lbs, blond, blue eyes, hung, bubble butt."]>>
<<set $themarbledswarm = ["I don’t foresee a need to be explicit about the ping this death left in my irreparable imagination, as the consequences will speak out of turn and continually for themselves.", " I’m at a loss to say why certain deaths strike me as secretive while others not so much.", "Had he been singled out as a, oh, doer of good deeds, I might have sighed at his meaningless plot and turned the page.", "I’m told my vibe suggests a cosmopolitan sixteen rather than the twenty-two-year-old worrywart I am.", "...a short shelf full of DVDs and novels so anonymously trendy they’re too out of print to even bother listing.", "Jean-Paul singled out the wall where his son’s paranormal image had been spotted distinctly if blurrily in the paint, and although I squinted, it remained a dead blank for the duration of my initial peek and show of concentration.", "They’d teased out a pleasant nature trail while wisely sparing their grounds the aesthetic lock and key that might have buried it in Frisbees and croquet sets.", "With each footnote I ascribed to them, the more eerily he epitomized one of my “types,” as those who shrink-wrap their opinions in set phrases like to put it.", "...limp, unimaginatively brown, forgotten-esque hair...", "his downcast eyes seemed increasingly taken with something about me, if that mixture of recalcitrance and focus is even possible.", "I could spend many numbing if prettily over-written pages counting the ways in which my beauty is a fact, disputed by no one I’ve ever met, although I suspect a simple background check might do", "Given the freedoms of that face, it’s not difficult to flirt, or rather fake the act of flirting, when it’s absolutely necessary, and so I did", "...his new erection, plain as day and on the scrawny side, gave me the confidence to leer in his direction with ever greater effervescence.", "While God is an idiotic premise, I often half wonder why it is that life, or mine at least, seems less to change from day to day than to be solved like an equation.", "...let me add that this assessment stood beyond his death, there was literally nothing worth archiving in the boy’s head whatsoever.", "Had Serge been a sculpture, he would not have been a sculpture in the first place but a simple pedestal", "...cooking from scratch, and by scratch I mean from autopsy to dishwasher...", "Truth is, my wealth is psychological as well as moneyed, and, in order to spare you some crushing verbiage, I’ll ask you to witness my cruel-in-quotes decision for yourself and trust me when I say the bitch just simply had to die.", "Claude...was led astray into the dreaded Emo nonsense by an evil girlfriend", "Although unsigned, the seismic script appeared to finger Serge’s hand, and while the writing blackened into folk art every time it promised to get juicy, the author’s point was unmistakable"]>>
<<set $theweaklings = ["I hug my friends until we're bruised", "Everyone's fantastic every second", "I wanted her, not to lick my dick but my life.", "Whatever this is, I rule", "This is an immaterial poem about a ghost, name of Dennis", "I'm still myself but inspire no illusions no matter how I'm executed.", "To believe a ghost was small potatoes next to the fear in your eyes.", "All I was is this marked up white sheet, so I ask you again. Read into my black holes.", "Stand back. I'm going to destroy the idea of you.", "I realize Tim fucked me because he felt flattered. He thinks less of me now.", "His neck was stiff from cruising any driver old enough to buy him.", "\"I've been nothing all night,\" he said.", "Of that great catch, just this ad survives like some fossil a long extinct species leaned casually against.", "The trick wasn't in my cards. I used them too loosely and missed the magic they had promised to impart.", "But it's the boy's love that I wanted, its little hint within the sex, not great sex itself", "Take that spot back in his teens when words built stars within him, a secret milky way so dense no drugs competed with their score.", "When you were here, I never thought about you, but fell in love with anyone who resembled you, I was so haunted.", "...your skin as tight as a tree's, though your life was shorter and more exciting than its.", "...your deep eyes, your long hair, how it swished on your shoulders…", "I just wish you were too, too far away, but okay.", "It's on its feet in the rear view. Its head is as flat as a magazine. Still, it runs.", "Sometimes I think he knows his name but he's so faint it could be anything", "~~ I am very tall and thin, VERY WEAK.", "The silence of a boy is hard to endure but endure mine i beg you", "EVERYONE SAYS IM CUTE, IM F**KING SO TIRED OF IT!", "It reduced him to a speck. The storm helped. That snowball hid a rock.", "It took years, this glass of scotch, and a cheap crystal ball to find the body.", "He hobbled through a blur and hurled his snowball at my head. That missed.", "Once this ugly little globe was the whole earth.", "This is our last song for eternity. I think you know it.", "When I started writing I was a sick teenaged fuck inside who partly thought I was the new Marquis de Sade, a body ready to communicate with Satan", "How cool would it have been to live back when the wind and birds and avalanches sounded like Black Sabbath, and killing gave people these huge fucking hard-ons?", "If I rubbed a magic lamp and some genie smoked out and granted me three wishes, I'd wish for a zillion euros, infinite wishes, and that the lamp was your cock.", "What do you want to be? I mean besides me sex slave slut.", "Me growing up is such an oxymoron it makes the Flintstones seem like the Dead Sea Scrolls.", "The problem with pretending your ass was my right hand all these years is fist-fucking you is like playing 'Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.'", "I have the world's largest collection of Todd Rundgren vinyl and rarities including the original pressing of 'Runt' with two extra tracks that were deleted before the album was officially released in mint condition if anyone wants to buy it.", "He sucks as a rock music legend. He sucked from the minute he was born. I have the proof. Think big, bitch.", "It looked like a camera. It took photographs. But it wasn't a camera, 1994.", "It observes the table on which it will be served, 1995.", "I don't know what universe it thought it was God in, 1998.", "It was told to draw a picture of its future. Not bad, 2004.", "Out her they're so weird looking, thin and loud, their thoughts open to the world like postcards.", "I am heavier than my constructions understand.", "So he works the lack of love into his usual feelings and calls it friendship.", "I head outside. I drive until I reach a town with black air and blacker buildings.", "I'm me, and you won't be anything if you don't stop.", "This poem is me and it's nothing but words about you. I hope you like it."]>>
<<set $iwished = ["He still looks teenaged in his early 30s except when he takes off his shirt, because there’s something too dog-eared about his muscles.", "Donald Duck and his preposterous cohorts are like dolphins signaling their happiness to Russians through a bleak, indifferent surface.", "One of George’s bandmates is a fried, revered guitarist who still picks out flabbergasting notes, but they’re strange now.", "He’s a skinny 16-year-old prodigy from Brixton drinking gin and watching dead guitarists play the blues with old acoustic instruments on some TV thing.", "The blues’ originators could be dolphins signaling their primitive unhappiness to more experimental artists.", "The fact that even innovative art grows cordial over time is a catastrophe that makes groundbreaking young musicians with drinking problems for good reasons know they can’t be gods with giant amps despite the bliss that animates them when they’re trying hard.", "George is playing his unplugged Strat with the TV’s ghosts and hoping his bandmate hasn’t quit their band despite the recent hellishness of being with him.", "George isn’t bold enough to be the leader of the band or play the notes alone without lessening their vistas.", "The leader of a critically anointed band that played electric blues observed him bend strings incongruously and fit him in their higher ranks.", "But George’s bandmate wanted to rewire the way sound whistles through guitars, which needed psychedelic drugs, he thought.", "...even on a muted Strat, there’s something cold in George’s tone that, say, the legends just unleash into their music like hysteria.", "...it could expose his young friend’s insufficiencies and so detach his risky notes from the cohesion George’s playing lent them that he’ll just end up scribbling obscure crap.", "\"You’re not inside yourself,\" says George’s bandmate. He tries to twist his guilt into an interstellar note.", "\"Do you still believe in reinventing sound?\" asks George’s bandmate. By now, his soloing has edged into a string of noise.", "To guess, they’re in their teens or early 20s—two needy losers or ironic raconteurs using punctuation marks and letters on their keyboards like little shovels as though the English language is a bunch of dirt so they’ll sound as convoluted as they really are.", "Every website’s chat room hauls in lonesome people editing their vibes into emoticons and cramping up their sentences", "George is like a dolphin flagging humans from beneath articulation’s choppy surface.", "It’s a form of operatic laziness about the rules of composition dating back to when the Internet freed every word that has eroded or been tortured over time into a jewel-like, pleading noise", "There’s just the trace of intake in the guy’s harangue—dents or dings or maybe even wounds as codependent as those calling and responding bleats that saxophonists traded in the jazz records his father played incessantly", "If all the chatters, George included, were just segments in a kind of typist choir, each performing a distinctive tonal fraction of some abrasive score, then…", "...maybe if their heated ramblings are just linguistic shreds dispensing outward from some disco ball–like application embedded in the website, which could possibly be true, then…", "...they’re only true when fighting one another for attention with a font’s cache of modifiers as their weaponry.", "Maybe they’re goths or emos who have gussied up life’s hellishness into a daily Halloween.", "Maybe their trendiness solved people’s meanness into an issue of conflicting tastes in fashion, which hurts less but makes it extremely difficult for them to make close friends.", "Maybe they write poetry about their feelings and read that to one another while imagining their listeners are attach s or scouts from lyrically impaired but otherwise amazing bands.", "Maybe they grew bold enough one day to post their poems on websites set aside for gloomy, unsophisticated artists and admirers of incompetent, cathartic art.", "Everyone who loves Drake thinks they share what made his early records sound so sad, then grow so bleak, but George extremely does.", "Maybe if he had unleashed his pain artistically he would feel different, but for now it’s like Drake’s lyrics are his thoughts after being edited and scored by someone just like him but more important.", "Nick Drake’s songs are like a pack of dolphins signaling his solitude incoherently to George and other introverted messes.", "When everyone you know is either very far away from you or hides, you find someone dead to love.", "Maybe he admired their love of almost dying. Maybe he was studying the painless things they said when they were almost dead.", "...the movie’s details were erased, or largely so, like preliminary pencil marks or powers of suggestion whose only purpose was to float a revelation I’d experienced while watching it.", "I would have to be like Dennis in the movie and write it as a sacrificial gift to someone whom I loved so much that I would do this hardest thing I could ever do as an act of love for him.", "Dennis recounted everything they’d done and said as honestly and artlessly as he could write, hoping that his pain and lack of stylishness would read as hugely more than them.", "He knows a billion people telepathically, but they don’t realize he’s overhearing them. He’s like a hidden microphone.", "To nearly everyone, Santa Claus is a self-sustaining bore of vast utility, a kind of machine padded and disguised with human attributes that gives out treats as blindingly and without meaning as the sun.", "He’s like the sun dressed up for Halloween: more fattening than fat, unconscionably jolly, with stop sign–colored clothing and no sexual inference whatsoever", "They think his brain is almost a computer and his heart is like a Christian church. Actually, they don’t even think that. They just think about gifts or no gifts.", "This is a secret, but Santa Claus does in fact evaluate his audience and pick out favorites.", "His mind grows hopelessly enamored with the twists of certain minds he reads on rare occasions, just as we real humans fall for dreamy bodies that have someone else coincidentally inside them.", "Since Santa Claus is a kind of genius, he needs to love someone who’s very complicated. Yeah, his generosity is actually love. That’s not a typo or a slip.", "One day, to stave off a depression, Santa Claus decides he’s an artist.", "Art upgrades Santa’s self-defeating kindness into an associative conceit and makes him feel even more connected to his favorite human, who is, like him, an artist by default.", "George counts as Artist by Santa’s self-serving definition because the things he wants are physical impossibilities, and his wishes are too misappropriated to qualify as anything but art that’s… what’s that term…conceptual.", "His ideas remain construction sites, either eking out on a guitar that he can barely play or over-embroiling in his mind.", "Sussing George’s fantasies for reciprocating doodads with a checklist in his mitt is the most invigorating thing that Santa Claus has ever felt.", "George is asking, in effect, to have his body formed into a kind of introverted or inverted Santa Claus, but one whose altruism is entirely focused on himself rather than on a billion people.", "Dennis finally wants something that Santa doesn’t have to rack his brains to match. A book.", "He writes George a make-believe email, meaning George thinks idly about the myth of Santa Claus, edits out the corny parts, and imagines what Santa would say to him if they could correspond.", "love that, just like me, your art flies over people’s heads, ha ha.", "I’d really like to know you, face to face, but being made-up leaves me stuck in a supposed mulch.", "We all agree that George deserves as much happiness as anyone on earth could ever feel without physically shattering or something.", "Reality’s a line where unrealistic things dissipate into sci-fi or become explosives, and I’m that boundary’s bitch.", "Nothing here is circumscribed. At the same time, everything is very simple, right or wrong, and Dennis wants answers.", "To you, the fairy tale’s a cheesy medium that builds physically unsound worlds that one eventually outgrows, and to me a fairy tale is city planning.", "Roden was an old volcanic crater situated in an arid patch of Arizona that had been tagged \"the Painted Desert\" by early settlers of the area.", "Although the region’s coloration was perplexing, humans are impatient with the unknown, and they’re quick to dash all mysteries with names.", "Roden had been unearthed or carved or born 400,000 years ago by an eruption. It had looked its best when nothing was alive with the IQ to appreciate it other than as something to be scaled or walked around.", "It was in the late fall, and a Thursday, as it happens, when the intern standing guard at Roden’s entrance turned his head and thought he saw a figurative cloud or anthropoidal ball of dust materialize upon the crater’s rim.", "He was in his early teens, brown hair, shoulder-length, with blue eyes so visibly unused to his surroundings they looked compulsory to observe, like lakes that you’ve been told are bottomless.", "He seemed delighted by the crater, madly pushing windblown strands of hair out of his way to get a look, which was good because it and everything inside this tale were gifts to him from Dennis", "Dennis is only relevant within this story in the sense that, at this very moment, he is sitting at his laptop in an apartment in the 8th arrondissement of Paris writing it.", "At times, it looked as empty and deflated as a corpse’s ventilator, and, at others, stormy like a bag in which some monkey was imprisoned, and, at still others, tightened and balloon-esque or like what you’d get if someone trash-compacted Santa Claus.", "In the vestibules that formed the tunnels’ intersections, he stood or sat, staring up and through the apertures that monopolized each ceiling.", "He felt that he was seeing light as he previously knew it but had never seen, even when his eyes were stoned.", "He was his eyes’ investigator, and they, internally enriched, grew beautiful, distracting every passerby who noticed him. There were even whispers that his eyes must be a facet of the artwork, perhaps hired performers.", "...he seemed to need to view the light’s fanfare by a more roundabout procedure, maybe like how viewers of solar eclipses must use mirrors or destroy their eyesight.", "James Turrell eventually felt defeated by himself and sat down on a nearby rock to watch things more dispassionately.", "Not long thereafter, George was seated in the cab of a yellow miniexcavator that was parked and rumbling on a ridge that overlooked the crater.", "Everywhere George looked, the cacti and brush were not so much as trembling, and the tourists he could see off in the distance walked as steadily as ever.", "He could only then conclude that the weird event was happening in his head.", "By now the yawn had disarranged itself into what sounded very like the kinds of stretched-out, muddled words pronounced by someone waking up.", "he felt uncomfortable that all the questions he’d been devising for the crater were as if it were the whole earth’s spokesman.", "faint earth rumbles, barks, words but not a lot of them in George’s case.", "The sparkliness and vaguely psychotropic mien that had given the location a sufficient dash of weirdness", "Everything was technically the same, with the possible exception of George’s backpack, which had noticeably sagged and looked no redder than a thousand stylish others", "At that, George and the crater reached an impasse, or, rather, my imagination reached an impasse, and I closed my laptop.", "to close my laptop’s lid would simply store the tale-in-progress, maybe slightly refrigerate it.", "For fairy tales are a form in which the characters and story, for all their falseness, are the sum and substance, and where language merely chisels them to some degree", "So the fairy tale adjusted, and, as my laptop’s lid descended, a massive UFO or sheet of metal plunged out of the sky above the crater.", "The first time I saw George, he was walking on his tiptoes with his arms straight out and waving them around as if his shoes were balanced on a tightrope and the asphalt was mist.", "I guessed his mind was off investigating some hallucination, and that my eyes were just like buttons on a shirt to him or else seemed very far away and safe like stars.", "Not being stoned, I didn’t have the expertise to use his eyes as microscopes to help me solve some mystery about the universe in which I formed particle.", "I tried to see myself as consciousness that looked like me and whose speaking voice was based herein and censored by my crappy English but also out of my control like my ventriloquist.", "And once I had decided on and made that perfect wish, didn’t get it, and accepted that my peace of mind was doomed, I thought I knew exactly who I was, and I stopped wishing for it.", "What the writing did was draw a stylized map to the general location where my wishes were impregnating.", "I think the wishes always courted love.", "When I never thought I could be loved, or not realistically, or not by anyone real who had a choice", "I’d think up situations where the horror of not being loved, of being rejected by someone I could ostensibly pick out of the lineup of Los Angeles’s cutest boys, for instance, would feel the most intense.", "I made my fantasies as scary and chaotic to everyone involved in them as possible, but especially to me since I was real.", "When I was really young, I wished quite warily, as if a wish was a new car and I its freshly licensed driver.", "According to my notes, my wish started its short, roiling life respectfully.", "The only tipoffs were in magazines like Tiger Beat, whose mission was to edit every star they lionized into the perfect chick bait", "That was where my wish was concentrated, trying with my magic powers to reorganize that horrible, depressing situation.", "Things got grittier and juicy over time but I’ll spare you.", "Eventually, I stopped wishing altogether, except for normal shit like money.", "...George, David, Kevin, Ziggy, Robin, Chris, Drew, Sniffles, Egore, Dagger, George.", "We tried to edit ourselves back into friends, which we’d never really been.", "Drawings can only hope to nail a character’s resemblance, and they’re just distractions from whatever wish was dying in the writer when he typed it.", "I wish I could type something that would immediately detail my love’s massive extent and indicate what love’s crippling effect on language has reduced or enlarged me to.", "I love him so much that I’m nothing but that. Everything else I feel and do is like a habit or a doomed revolution.", "Reality is so controlling, and I’ve never tried to stay there when I write before.", "I worship the flowing lava and whatever else a billion years ago that eventually formed the ground he walks on."]>><<set $allQuotes to $closer.concat($frisk, $try, $guide, $period, $godjr, $thesluts, $themarbledswarm, $theweaklings, $iwished)>>
<<set $currentQuote to $allQuotes.random()>>
<<print $currentQuote>><<if $closer.includes($currentQuote)>>
<h2><i>Closer</i> (1989)</h2>
<<run document.body.style.backgroundColor = "#b6b5dc">>
<<elseif $frisk.includes($currentQuote)>>
<h2><i>Frisk</i> (1991)</h2>
<<run document.body.style.backgroundColor = "#be7e50">>
<<elseif $try.includes($currentQuote)>>
<h2><i>Try</i> (1994)</h2>
<<run document.body.style.backgroundColor = "#d96c43">>
<<elseif $guide.includes($currentQuote)>>
<h2><i>Guide</i> (1997)</h2>
<<run document.body.style.backgroundColor = "#800000">>
<<elseif $period.includes($currentQuote)>>
<h2><i>Period</i> (2000)</h2>
<<run document.body.style.backgroundColor = "#b4bdb6">>
<<elseif $godjr.includes($currentQuote)>>
<h2><i>God Jr.</i> (2005)</h2>
<<run document.body.style.backgroundColor = "#596531">>
<<elseif $thesluts.includes($currentQuote)>>
<h2><i>The Sluts</i> (2005)</h2>
<<run document.body.style.backgroundColor = "#a53e28">>
<<elseif $themarbledswarm.includes($currentQuote)>>
<h2><i>The Marbled Swarm</i> (2011)</h2>
<<run document.body.style.backgroundColor = "#f3ebdc">>
<<elseif $theweaklings.includes($currentQuote)>>
<h2><i>The Weaklings (XL)</i> (2013)</h2>
<<run document.body.style.backgroundColor = "#546752">>
<<elseif $iwished.includes($currentQuote)>>
<h2><i>I Wished</i> (2021)</h2>
<<run document.body.style.backgroundColor = "#bcbab5">>
<<elseif $currentQuote is undefined>>
<<run document.body.style.backgroundColor = "#b6b5dc">>
<</if>>Dennis Cooper</div><</nobr>><div class="horizontalline"></div>
<center><<type 80ms element "span" keep>><<include "Generation">><</type>></center>
<center><div class="horizontalline"></div></center><div class="major-mono-regular"><center><b>[[Generate|Start]]</b>
<div class="horizontalline"></div></center> <center><<linkreplace "About">><div class="about-section">
About<br>
Version 1 released November 18th, 2024<br>
by [[Marilyn Roxie|https://marilynroxie.com/]]<br>
Made in Twine using SugarCube 2.21.0<br>
Originally released as [[DennisCooperTXT|https://twitter.com/denniscoopertxt]] on Twitter.<br>
Special thanks to [[Dennis Cooper|https://denniscooperblog.com/]] for his permission.
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