sterling and fitz came back from the hamptons with tons of food and bunches of flowers.

"we couldn't leave anything," fitz explained, as he balanced a pie dish in one hand and an overflowing grocery bag in the other. he was smoking hundreds again. the long white cigarettes changed his overall composition, heightening the contrast between his butchy leather jacket and his faggy, perfectly coiffed head.

i was on the couch, watching the fourth season of the sopranos on DVD. i had been in europe when it was on TV last year.

sterling stood over me, wanting to say something. lately, we've been having a hard time understanding each other. i played it like tony would, and didn't look away from the screen. tony and ralph were in a steam room, about to make a sweetheart deal with an assembly man and his friend, a black guy who worked for a low income not-for-profit.

suddenly, i felt something fall on my chest. it rolled away as soon as it hit, so i couldn't tell what it was, but it made a crunching sound like a piece of lettuce.

there was another and another.

"hey!" I said, sitting up and looking at sterling. she held in her hands a bunch of empty stalks.

"orchids," she said, reaching over and retrieving one of the wilted white heads from in between the back of the couch and the cushion. it had a dark lavendar stripe going down its bottom petal, making me think of warpaint or a fat, wagging tongue.

"why'd you pull of the heads?" i asked, noticing that my accent had reverted back to its jersey roots.

"they were overripe and starting to stink," she said.

she held the flower in her palm and stared at it.

"it's all too obvious, the way it's splayed open like that, wielding the power of its beauty at the same time that it's yearning with desire."

"what's obvious? it's a flower, fer chrissakes."

sterling looked at me and laughed a low, guttural laugh. then she closed her eyes and stuck the tip of her tongue down the center of the orchid.

"mmm, mmm," she moaned.

"oh my god, ewww!" fitz screeched from the kitchen, where he was assembling the fondue maker.

"sterling needs to get laid--she's been acting weird all week. tell TRUE what you made."

"you mean what we made," sterling said, as she crumpled the flower in her gloved hand. "fitz and i were fucking around with photoshop and we made all these porno shots out of pics of the mad pony girls. you have to see them. they're pretty fucking funny."

"OK," i said.

"they have an inordinate number of shots in which one or both of their mouths are open...oh, it's hilarious. it's the kind of thing that could get a lot of traffic," fitz said.

i turned and looked at him sternly.

"only if i let you post them," I pointed out.

"yeah, we figured you might not want to," sterling said.

"they're just kids," i said.

"but you've got to see these shots," she insisted.

"they're actually quite tasteful," fitz said.

"OK, so go ahead. why do you need my approval? start yr own fucking blog and post away. no one's making you stay on BRANDTRUEBOY."

"why don't you take a look at the pictures first," sterling said.

"you know what? i think i'll pass. keep yr little porno pictures to yourself."

"what the fuck? i knew you were a prude but give me a break," fitz said.

"it has nothing to do with being a prude."

"what is it then?" sterling said, her voice uncharacteristically demanding. "some of that 'the game is to be sold, not to be told' hip-hop bullshit?"

"fuck you," i said. "you don't understand."

"what don't i understand? why don't you try to explain it to me--to us. tell us what it is yr trying to do...what kind of art yr trying to make."

"fuck you," i said again, reaching for my pipe. there was complete silence as i flicked my lighter several times before the orange flame appeared.

i sparked my shit and inhaled deep.

"i'm tryin to put a message in the music," i said as shot a trail of silver-white smoke across the universe.

i read in the TIMES that 80% of americans eat turkey today. you figure there are about 100 million households across this trans-fatty land of ours, so that equals about 80 million turkeys. a veritable turkey holocaust...

whatevs...i'm on fatkins. pass the gravy, davey.

one love, party people.

About a year and a half ago, right before TRUE started the blog; I gave a giant Fuck You to all my fears of reprobation and risked a journey back to the old neighborhood in Jersey. I thought it was too lame and nostalgic to tell you about. Trust me--you didn’t miss much. The town, which was really always more like a strip mall than a town, was the same boring ugly that it used to be. The street signs were a bit more crooked, and the colors of the aluminum siding were more washed out. Everything I looked at weighed heavy on my eyes, but I guess that’s why I went back--to find an anchor for my shiftless gaze. It was a rainy, blustery day, but I remember driving around with the windows down (that's when I had the orange beamer—god how I miss that ride) and blasting Depeche Mode. The streets were mind-bogglingly narrow. I passed entire new cities of tract homes in the fields where we used to ride our bikes. I pulled up beneath the highway overpass and made the fateful right turn at the gas station (which is now a Shell, btw), and all at once I was irrevocably deep in it, with Nassau Park looming in front of me less than half a block away. This was the border...the edge of the kingdom. Just past it was my street and the streets that branched off from it. I made a hasty turn and rolled down towards my house. I didn’t feel anything in particular as I looked from my left to my right. Whatever powerful nostalgia had brought me here was now a smoked out ash curled up on the floor of the beamer. Instead of experiencing the moment, I imagined that I was a world famous anthropologist on a study of the The American Development in the Northeast, circa 1977, the year in which some wiseass had the bright idea to manufacture even cheaper "suburbs", so that all classes of people could walk around their little quarter acre in their underwear and burn some burgers and imagine that they had succeeded at something. These were people—my parents with their brand new twin babies among them—who had lived all their lives in industrial holes surrounded by concrete. The idea of their children having trees and fresh air was too much to pass up on. You can see it in pictures taken at that time—there’s a hyperactive glow to their grinning faces, as though the sacred mystery of happiness had somehow wandered into the room and brushed against them with the hem of its veil.

I see my father in a red tank top holding a small wet glass filled with beer.

There was my mother, with her eyes closed and her hair down, in front of an overexposed blue sky.

it was a Led Zeppelin, pot smoking, Watergate kind of sky

I look at these pictures with the shame of a scientist who had wanted so badly for everything in his little experiment to work. For years I suffered from an irrational feeling of responsibility for my parents’ failings. I’d even managed to chalk up their religious conversion to myself. I used to make myself sick with responsibility. I started drinking to numb the pain.

And now that I know what caused it, everything’s changed except the story itself—the facts of the case.

I had a twin brother.

His name was Sterling.

When we were three he drowned in a pool in front of me.

Something crossed over in my father and he transformed into a fire and brimstone born again.

My mother turned quiet as a mouse.

While I merely dissolved.

And went about the careful business of forgetting he ever existed.



Oh—I almost left out the most important fact. The one all the shrinks and student doctors liked to throw at me as the chink in the fence of whatever construct I’d come up with.
But there was nothing you could do…you were only a toddler yourself, and powerless to save him.

Ha! Yes, nothing I could do except never to have been born! I’ve never been able to shake the unsettling conviction that I am the master of my own destiny—that it was I alone who willed myself into existence and that my parents had little to do with it.

Guilt. Pure and sweet like an over ripened peach. That’s the force that brings all prodigal sons home—even the ones who are girls.

I tossed a cigarette butt at the car up on cinderblocks in the neighbor’s yard and stole quick, furtive glances at the house that was my former nemesis. It was still painted green. Other than that it looked nothing like I remembered. It was too small and droopy, as though invisible strings were gently tugging it towards the ground. Trees that I no longer recognized dwarfed it in size. The curtains in the picture window weren't my mother's, and that made everything look different. Someone had told me that an Indian family moved in when my parents moved out. There was a blue Caravan in the driveway. A small, gray DirectTV dish sat crookedly on the roof. This was not my house. The house I had known was a monster. I lived the beginning of my life in a constant state of anxiety, convinced, for every second I was within its walls that something bad was going to happen. I walked around like a ghost, silent and scared, there but not really, like that little blond girl in Poltergeist.

I stood like I used to stand, frozen stiff in the middle of the empty street, with only the yawning exhalations of the highway in the distance and the occasional jet overhead to remind me that I wasn’t the only person in the world.

I used to stand still for a half hour or more, repenting for my life, trying to appease the invisible god who i imagined hovering above the heavy headed pine trees and the fancy brass cross of the Ukrainian church, the one that always made me think of a queen on a chess board. i imagined this god to be as intolerant as the gusts of wind that howled in my ears or as the lit-up windows of the house in front of me that turned into demon eyes glaring down at me with all the force of hell. I stood like a statue as the cars passed behind me, one after another as the fathers came home from work, the ebb and flow of engines turning into the passing of time itself, as it was actually happening, somewhere far away.

(my house…our house)

(his house)

(sterling's house)

As I’m about to tell it to you, I realize that this current secret story has (of course) to do with the other secret story, the one I’m obviously too ashamed to tell. The one that includes the scene in which I wake up after a 12 hour alcoholic blackout with my life smashed into a million pieces. During all this time, after all these posts, I kept meaning to relate the sad and beautiful sequence of events that went down on that cold and blank winter’s morning. The quote unquote fucked up story of how all my drug and drinking shit came to a grinding halt...

I come close, but it always ends in self-sabatoge. I can't bring myself to hit Publish.

For awhile I deluded myself into believing that the things I wanted most to put into words would just blossom forth by their own accord if I hung around long enough and kept trying.

As if anything happens on its own.

As if anyone ever got anywhere by trying.

I told myself I was getting closer, closer still, but all I was doing was climbing up and down the same prison tree.

At the end of the day each one of us is a tree of secrets with interconnecting branches and waving, overlapping lies for leaves.

As it seems that I’m going to keep writing for this psychofest, I think it’s only right that we should go a little deeper. I want to grind my sharpened heel into the heart of the heart of the matter. I’m not saying I didn’t write about a lot of personal crap in the past but now I want you to know the whole Sterling Fassbinder shebang, the entire burrito gordito. The thing is, i.e., the caveat standing in the way of a true intimacy sparking between us, is that you’re never ever ever going to see my face. There. You have it in writing. I won’t ever be pulling a TRUE on you, so don’t get your hopes up.

( I know you heard I was beautiful.)

and, well, maybe I am…sometimes…

Jamie shhhhh!

Here’s the story, AKA “The Mess I’m In”, AKA “Why I can never show you my greasy mug”. There are too many things that I did back in the day that I still have to pay for and my continued not paying for them depends upon certain municipal authorities not finding out where I am currently residing. Ya dig?


Let’s leave it at that for now. I want to start with a different secret.


See if you can stay with me.

A couple of hours ago, I received an email from TRUE with this pic and a new password for posting (as my old one had been unceremoniously retired).

"I need yr help in getting my shit stuffed," she wrote.

So against all my better judgement, here I am...sleeves rolled up, ready to bake this BRANDTRUEBOY bird...

hope you're all doing well.


now buckle up...

Yeah, I think it was Tolstoy who said he wanted to describe the universe as he saw it reflected in an oily, rainbow-swirled puddle. Cut to a hundred and whatever years later and I’m on some next level, tryin to describe the universe as it is signified by the tiny flecks of shit on a lower east side toilet seat.

Smells like teen spirit. Yep. Yep.

you're it

...no, you're it...

From: "TRUEBOY *" [Save Address] [Block Sender]
To: jxxxxxxxxx@xxxx.ca
CC:
Subject: Re: dude
Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2003 05:35:45 +0800

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hey man,

i'm all about experiments, feel free to use me any time for
whatever's clever as long as you don't broadcast that address i gave
you.

love,

paris
----- Original Message -----

oh, no.

no, no, no, no, no, NO!

do not send me viruses disquised as mp3 downloads.

no matter how apropos the lyrics might be.

it only disrupts the space/time continuum

and prevents me from using my google sub-router to redirect thousands of hits to antonio's site.

and we wouldn't want him to be without his hits, party people.

that would be like stacey without his stash

or me without my mask

(we're not the same person, btw. we merely surf the same busted brain wave)



fuckit sterling's yelling at me to get off



p.s. i didn't mean it like that

p.p.s. although her horny dyke ass prolly did

welcome to the real world

That's me, btw. No smoke, no mirrors, no photoshop filters.

I wish I could front with a pair of frameless shades and say, "All I am offering is the truth," in my best Larry Fishburne voice, but we all know that I can offer you much, much, more than that...

(...lies and betrayals, fruit-covered nails
electricity and lust...)

I'm leaving it up to you, party people.

Do you want to click on your little link to BRANDTRUEBOY and have everything just the way it always is, with the three of us running around and getting into fucked-up adventures?

Or do you want to know just how far down this rabbit hole goes?

In other words, I'm asking, do you want the red pill or the blue?

Old skewl or new?

The brand or the true?

Werd.

I feel like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, when he gets up to karaoke to "More Than This".

"OK, this is hard," he says.

It is.


hey alana

"It was on sleepless nights that you had thought it all out, in a state of great excitement, with palpitations of the heart and supressed enthusiasm. And this supressed, proud enthusiasm is a dangerous thing in young people."_crime and punishment P463.


...run a carbon black test on my jaw, and you will find
it's all been said before...

only now i have a sheepish grin

like a silver fence threaded with shiney green vinyl,

in front of which little girls in old navy jeans

ride scooters and talk to one another on walkie-talkies.

"what the fuck? what the fuck?" they shout into the sad, neon colored things.

i'm standing beneath the blue streetlight

i'm waiting for it to rain

Rain down

All the pain

All the hurt and pain


(BRAND MARYBOY®)

"making people to make art to make people to".



raymi
jamie
anti

represent.


subj

i like this--"industrialized,with a modern coat", as though to say that being industrialized is no longer modern. well, i suppose it isn't, if by modern you mean contemporary, and not the era of art and literature in the early 20th century (Wolf, Mann, Joyce, Jazz).

it's true that the west is post-industrial, party people. the factories are closing down and moving east, where it's cheaper. in the space where we used to make things we're instead post-modern, post-colonial and definitely post-production. we pay our farmers to produce food that sits in warehouses and rots because we couldn't possibly consume all of it.

(they'll stuff as much cheap corn as they can into that malt liquour, or that happy meal...they feed it to the millions of rows of mutated chickens and mass produced pigs and lambs to the slaughter and STILL they'll have tons left over to rot to be burnt or made into stuffed animals... i don't know what the fuck they do with it, not give it to the starving people of the world, that's fer sure. i mean, that would require airplanes, it would cost money)

and anyway i imagine what the people of the starving nations really want is a chance to compete in the markets, fair and square, but how can they hope to compete with subsidized farmers in rich ass countries in the EU let alone the U.S.

and anyway, who's got the new britney?

I want my empty v.

Sterling and I were high above the city in a glass atrium filled with invisible trees. Digitalized birds sung renditions of the iTunes I bought for the occasion. A waiter who looked like a young Al Pacino served us coffee in gold trimmed, white porcelain cups.

“You can tell it’s real gold because it isn’t perfect,” Sterling said, as she turned the cup in her hands.

She wasn’t wearing a glove. It was the first time I’d seen her naked hand in months. It looked picked over—a bit too clean and pink, especially at the stumps.

I’ve got to tell you it was a heartbreakingly beautiful scene, to watch her quirky, crippled grace play itself out through the handling of that very thin, expensive little vessel.

She downed the coffee in one gulp. The all-sugar bottom of the cup flashed like moon sand as she placed it on the table.

“So,” she said.

“Yeah, well, here we are,” I said, unable to make eye contact. Instead I looked up at the glass ceiling. Above us were only clouds. White passing over white, an endless shadow play that was constantly changing, constantly revealing.

Sterling sat with her legs spread. Her brown Timbs were untied. She wore baggie blue jeans and a plain blue hoodie, but as always her clothes looked as though they had been tailored to the exact specifications of her body.

I watched as she slid her hands into the sweatshirt pockets.

“It’s finally come full circle,” she said.

I rubbed my forehead and took out a cigarette.

“What has?”

“The pain and humiliation of not being who you pretended to be.”

“Oh, that,” I said, as I concentrated on bringing the lighter flame to the end of my cigarette. I was shaking like a stroke victim. Finally, I gave up and grabbed my wrist with my other hand to steady it.

“They’re totally on to you,” she said.

“Whatever,” I said.

“Whatever, what?”

“Whatever’s clever.”

“Seriously, now. What’s the plan?”

“Plan? What plan? Fuck a plan..”

“This whole thing has gone far enough, don’t you think? I mean, shouldn’t you start considering what happens next?”

“The future’s what happens next. And I’m looking forward to it.”

“Are you really?”

“Yes. I refuse to live in the past.”

“Like I do.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.” She sat up and reached over for my pack of cigarettes. I pretended to be engrossed by the single malt menu.

“What do you say to a four hundred dollar shot? Just for old times sake?”

“No thanks,” she said, lighting a smoke and waving out the match.

“Listen, Sterling, everything is happening exactly as I knew it would. Keep in mind that I’m the one who linked to them.”

“So?”

“So—I wanted a back door, man. I wanted a way out.”

I lifted my head and finally met her stare. Her eyes looked magnified, like cute cartoon girl eyes.

I exhaled slowly. The ringing in my ear grew louder. Feedback from the birds, perhaps. I looked at my watch and saw that our time was almost up.

“I say ‘bring it on’, man. I’ll eat those puppies for breakfast.”

Nothingness. The Void. A wind whips back and forth. We can tell that it is a computer generated electronic wind because it repeats at regular intervals and sounds exactly the same each time.

Suddenly, we hear a voice.

{an ethereal falsetto, somewhere out in the distance}:

I want my mtv…

There are a couple of deep, dramatic drumbeats, followed by a cheesy synth trumpet. The voice is heard again:

I want my MTV…I want my m…t…Veeeee

The drumbeats pick up speed and jump between the speakers, there’s the sound of a guitar tuning up—a power chord is struck as the “wind” grows stronger and turns into a rushing vortex of anticipation …

…by now we’ve recognized the voice as Sting’s…the white-spark thrill of hearing him sing the catch phrase of our new addiction is only slightly lessened when the actual song begins, a boring cock rock guitar jam by some guys called Dire Straits. Whatever. We ride our bikes to Kmart and spring for the tape anyway. We play the beginning of that one song, over and over, until we’ve memorized exactly how long to let it rewind before slapping the Stop button and hitting Play. It becomes a reflex—a call and response that sends us into the same dream each time we hear it. Sting is no longer Sting, in fact, he’s no longer a man at all but a by-product, a glitch or blip in the machine turned ghostly harbinger, announcing with all the withering gravitas of one who has come to BELIEVE, the coming of The MTV Afterworld…

{the wheels turn, the tape sighs, we catch a crimson glimpse when we close our eyes, giving us the barest peek at which way the future lies…}

We see videos without songs

Rock stars without bands

Special effects without movies

Cars without gas

TVs without buttons

Characters in search of a plot…

Games in which the rules are revealed after you win

And millions of duplicated lives that will never end…

i'm gonna set it straight this watergate

that's right. i'm an asshole. in high school i got my kicks by running up behind people and beaning them with an egg. "it's a yolk, don't you get it?" i'd shout, laughing hysterically.

they never did.

fuck it, party people. maybe i'm too ahead of my time. or maybe i was just hungover and pissed off. at any rate, stacey's his own, real person, as far as i can tell. i was just fucking around and trying to say that he's my boy. i like his hazy daisy style. whatever.

i have to say that it's kind of flattering that people thought i could, like, pull off being more than one person at once. that's some jedi master shit.

but the part about minneapolis...that part's true, it doesn't exist. that whole twin cities thing is a big myth, yo. go see for yourself: all that's there is an airport, y'all, a big monster of a mall and some little shithole called st. paul.

i kick rhymes, just for fun

brooklyn, new york is where i'm from...

if you don't know, now you know...

werd werd

I love the airbrush tool in Photoshop. I like to just sit there and smoke a Dunhill menthol and wave the mouse back and forth. I find it very therapeutic. I used it on this picture of Sterling which turned out OK.

Those two golden dots are her ovaries.

The thing about blogs is they’re a lot like sitcoms, sometimes. And if there’s one thing that I hate about TV, it’s sitcoms. All those cutesy, web designer wannabe sites with the “me against the world” posts where everything is so neatly resolved in the end remind me of 22 minute plots and lame narrative arcs and fake sets with the sliding glass doors leading out to the fake grass and the fake sky...

The links are the commercials, and the comments are the laugh track…always obligingly amused.

Fuck all that shit. I’m eating a cookie Twix and half-voqueing on the chair while I type. I’m having one of those shiny, shiny moments of clarity that sometimes come over me post binge when my mind hangs limp and untethered and all my organs feel smooth and hard like stones on the bottom of a lake.

I want to clear out all the excess I want to stop fronting with nerd cool, art house, and emo punk. I no longer want to be all about the benjamins. I want to stop being concerned about my lack of moral clarity regarding the war in Iraq. I need to realize that it’s a waste of time to obsessively read and clip out articles about guatonomo bay and foster care services in NJ. Who cares about multilateralism or pop song proclamations or a cashmere, suede-lined paradigm shift? Why should I give a damn if the most exquisite levels of metaphor and symbolism are being flattened out of the English language and replaced with awful, self-obsessed first person confessional narratives like this one? What’s it to me if we all forget how to think beyond simple, one-to-one correspondences? At least we have easy pour lids and reinforced laces and gadgety jackets and WiFi on our still too slow laptops, and let’s not forget the sitcoms, let’s not forget the blank sex reflected in mirrored ceilings, the paramount importance of being against bush, of being against a war for oil, as if any single one of us could imagine living for two days without it

Fuck this shit it’s high time that I was straight with you guys. A couple of you already know this, but it isn’t fair to everyone else…

shit, this is hard…

OK, here goes. Stacey and I are the same person. That's why we talk about all the same shit and tend to comment one after the other in people's boxes. Do you think I have the time to keep revisting all y'all's sites, over and over, from different computers, just to make it look like I'm different people? Of course I don't. Just check the IP addresses. IP doesn't lie, even if I do.

Whew! There, I said it. I’m truly very sorry for having led you all on. That was a fucked up thing to do, even if it was fun.

Oh, and there’s no such place as Minneapolis. I made that shit up.





Sorry.

god looks after small children and drunks. yep.

thx godmoney.

Heroin nearly killed me, but I’m an alcoholic, first and foremost. All the truly wonderful and terrible things in my life happened when I was drunk.

It’s been almost three years, but I still have dreams in which I’m having a drink. Last night, for instance. I had a dream that TRUE and I were lifting beautifully clear, proper Scotch glasses filled to the rim with glowing amber liquid. We faced each other and made a toast. I couldn’t see her eyes, there was something dark over them. A shadow or a mask. I remember thinking, fuck me, it’s only 6 in the morning, what am I going to do about work? It was so real that I could feel the ice cubes sloshing around…I could smell the whiskey, that strong, unwavering fume that filled me with terror and promised to keep me far away from god.

I took a sip and even though it was a dream, I felt like I was awake for the first time in years.

HARDER...FASTER

there's a city in my mind c'mon and take that ride and

it's alright

baby it's alright


My high hasn’t kicked in yet. The licorice taste of the pill is still on the back of my tongue. My legs still feel like mine.

I'm going to put on my coat and probably stare at the buttons before I button them just like i'm staring at the letters on the keyboard before I press them, waiting for that satisfying, slightly muffled click (it never lets me down!) and then i'm going to unbolt the series of doors that lead to the outside and i'm going to walk down the street under a sky of dull blue linoleum until i get to the bar, where i'll put my head on the bar...

(and if only i could be sure, that the head on the door was a dr-dr-dream)

sterling's in charge until i get back.

i think this is it, this is the end this time.

do you think it's possible that you could scrape a sliver of glass off a bowl with the edge of a paper clip and get it gobbed up in the resin you were fishing out? what would happen if you smoked that shit? would it like, crystallize in yr lungs like asbestos? bloom into zillions of micro glass flowers and form a frozen garden in yr chest? or would it leave yr shit working but scorched forever, like from a puff of world trade center air?

(before they vanished from this earth forever, all the anonymous, ground-up wall-to-wall carpet fibers and human bone fragments and copy machine vapor and vinyl chair dust and board room projector bits made certain that they secretly signed their names, zoro style, in the lungs of the living who dared to breathe in their essence--bellee dat!)

i feel like there's something tickling in there, deep down, every time i take a breath.

fuck it. enough with the psychodrama. it's that closing in feeling again, that's what it is. i'm fucked up to be having it but not fucked up enough not to know what it is. a couple of deals have fallen through; meanwhile, i'm trying but failing to find a valid way to make it in the straight world. i'm struggling to make shit connect, but it's so much work, i feel there would have to be at least two of me in order to make it really happen.

to top it all off, someone's fucking with my page, man. little things, shit maybe only i notice. cuz i notice everything, party people. it's my life's great blessing as well as its curse. this afternoon, for instance, the b&w drawing of the girls fucking was gone. the one on the left. in its place was a jpg depicting a square of cracked rock with this written over it:

ob
dnt

is that supposed to mean "obedient"? wtf, i'm thinking it might be the christians. or someone playing off of that. i went to check my stats and when i came back the pic was back.

fitz if this is you again, i just want you to know that i'm really going to stop talking to you this time. if yr going to hack the site at least do something cool. i mean, really.

but i don't think it's fitz...i don't know who it is...sterling told me to cool it on the blog for a bit...she said i should look at whatever was happening as a compliment...

but that's just her and her fucked up way of seeing things



daddy's home

Fuck Bandwidth.

a part of me feels like takin a sledgehammer to this place

i want to turn it into digital dust that i blow across the internet

yo ho ho

dissemination, baby...

i am BRANDTRUEBOY

BRANDAGENT

iamiamiamiam

the judge and the jury

fists of fury

last night i got into a fight with these college assholes at a downtown bar. i should learn my lesson and avoid going out on saturday nights. i don't have anything to prove, like the rest of these wage slaves. everyday is like sunday, for me. fucking losers. and downtown is the worst. i had just met up with a business associate who lived in the neighborhood, so i decided to stop in at one of those bars that look like someone's basement for a pint. you know the scene--wall to wall carpeting, wood paneling, a dj wearing thick eye glasses and a turtleneck, blatant defiance of the smoking law... whatever. this nyu bitch with hip-hugging, dirty denim jeans and the atrocious chemically straightened hair started looking at me the wrong way so i put my hand in her face and asked her if she had a fucking problem. next thing you know, two muscle bound dudes with greasy spikes have me pinned to the wall. it was like being run over by a truck. whuh? whuh now? they grunted, as they pushed their fat chins (as well as other parts of their bodies) up against me.

i don't even think they were real bouncers and i told them as much as i called everyone in the place a cunt at the top of my lungs. people leered and made faces as the two neandrathals pulled me away. you'll pay for this, i'll have your asses kicked! i screamed. they laughed and winked at each other, like the closet queens that they were and joked good naturedly that if i didn't shut the hell up they were going to throw me through the plate glass front window.

what the fuck, what the fuck, just let me go, i'm leaving, fucking let me go...please...please...pretty please...i carried on a bit at the door until the girl act worked and they relented. as soon as they let go i leaned over and grabbed a can of PBR off some silly hipster's table and with my thumb over the spout I shook it virorously.

fuck you, motherfuckers! i screamed, and before the fake bouncers could grab me and push me out the door, i let go and sprayed a foamy white arc over as much of the room as i could, laughing hysterically. people shouted, the bouncers lunged, and i had just a second to toss the empty silver can at their faces, turn and run the hell out of there.

fuck saturday night.

i've got all these ideas.

ila;]'ve got all these ideas (up in my brain) and i'm goinng to be puttin all these ideas out as fast as i can


"is it already lighted?"


nexx skewl...

wessssside 8tracks

Brazil...

Where hearts were entertaining June

We stood beneath an amber moon

And softly murmured someday soon...

We kissed...

And clung together

Then...

Tomorrow was another day

The morning found me miles away

With still a million things to say

Now...

When twilight dims the skies above

Recalling thrills of our love

There's one thing I'm certain of

Return...

I will...

to old...

BRAZIL.





i'm having my own private friday...a friday of the mind...wanna come along? click here

then follow me here

here

and finally (in honor of TRUE and her recent spam) hook-up with me here.

(now get up, go out and get some...it's friday for fuck's sake...)

Warm Regards,

S to the F

i just want you to know that since I wrote that thing about the born again christian blog and catholicism, i’ve been receiving major jesus freak spam in my graffiti account, imploring me to save my soul, read the bible, have a talk with god, send in 19.95, etc. coincidence? i think not.

Motherfuckers. they probably have jesus bots out there, crawling the web for keywords and evidence of low self-esteem.

They want to plug me in, make me over and sell my stock. They want me to record a clean version for wallmart. They want me to tune in tomorrow. They want to give me my first 8000 hours for free.

They want to obtain a copy of my CGI and turn it into a life-sized action figure with the American flag draped over its shiny plastic shoulders.

They want to suck my dick but they don’t want to swallow


thelightsareoff

My preferred way to travel around the city is by yellow cab. I ride the subway only every once and awhile, usually late at night when I'm drunk. Most people seem to do it the other way around, which is fine, I suppose. But I do believe they're missing the point. I like the train when it's empty and I'm drunk. I like platforms and the acoustics and the shadows and the timelesness of the constant coming and going, even at this hour. When the moon is full and the tide is high, you might even find me down on the tracks, standing with my walkman on and my fist upraised as the yellow light of the train grows larger, slowly at first, like the fluttery yet persistent beginning of an old house record, building, layer upon tenacious layer, beam of light upon beam of light, until eventually it fills the tunnel with a blinding, hysterical purpose.

...fills the Tunnel. ha. well, it used to...house music all night long...

I let it get close, but not too close. Perception shifts. You can't trust your senses down there. Everything's lit up like a Kiss concert. Too bad my tongue isnt 't as impressive as Gene Simmons'. God damn now that would be a helluva pic for this little ol blog, don't you think?

(and if I died before I could take the picture?)

I wonder if that level of lighting would be flattering?

(cut in half like a deli sandwich)

The important thing would be to find a way to keep my bangs from flying up. I hate my forehead.

i left work early, complaining of a stomach ache. near my apartment, i turned and took a sidestreet that i normally don't go down. empty stoops sagged silently on either side of me, and soaked yellow flowers covered the sidewalk. it started misting. in the distance, i could hear the sound of a piano.

i passed by an ancient honda civic. a red hatchback with aluminum trim. in the back was a beautiful black leather jacket. the leather looked thin and soft. it was laid out across the seat like it was waiting to be put on.

i stopped and looked up and down the street.

"But anyone could take this," i thought, as my bangs slowly fell into my eyes.

i am bored and fucked up and sick of waiting for my man, who is always late (first thing you learn is you've always got to wait) so i'm killing time by clicking on blogs in the just updated list on blogger. there was one called "rocking with jesus" where i read about some born-again chick who talked about how she hated her school because they won't let her use MSN chat, and how hard it was to "witness" to catholics, who were so snotty and self-assured that by going to confession once or twice a year and sticking a piece of dried up wafer in their mouth every sunday they were going to get into heaven. yeah, right, i don't buy it either, hon, but i'll tell you i wouldn't mind going to confession right about now. i like the whole stylo of it, the vibe of repentance. i like how dark it is and how there's only this thin-ass screen separating your face from the face of this weird, quiet dude who's dressed all in black. you know i'd be pumping some depeche mode, surreptitiously (left ear only, right one's still fucked, btw). i'd cross myself real slow, just to emphasize how heavy with sin my heart is. fuck it, if i don't remember all the steps the dude will talk me through it, right? anyway, i'm not really going to go, mostly because the catholic church down the street only seems to operate in polish and it's raining out so fuck going any further than that. besides, my man should be here any minute.


first thing that makes me go to a blog is its name.

During one of those hideous office chit-chat moments in the kitchen, a couple of people referred to a story my boss had told them about having a flying squirrel trapped in his house over the weekend. A flying squirrel!, they shrieked, their chins shaking with astonishment as they sloppily dunked their donut holes. Isn't that just the craziest thing? Well, I felt like telling them, it's actually not as crazy as the fact that I think my boss is purposely not relating any information to me that has to do with his family. For instance, I didn't know his middle son was in a band, and I didn't know his wife went to high school with the Heart sisters out in Washington...and now this, the flyingsquirrelthathewasfirstconvincedwasabatshowingupjustintimeforhalloween story.

It's strange. We don't have any problems talking about anything job related...and we're fine with the occasional current events topic...but anything outside of that is a black hole.

Maybe it's because I'm gay...I think he feels he's protecting his family's sanctity from the overly critical, jaded perspective of the big, bad, childless dyke who would be audacious enough to snicker behind his back over some cutesy anecdote he told or to give the evil eye to a photograph he showed me...

Smart man.

Growing up with my real name

after Vic Chesnutt

That’s right, I never gave a shit about the Contras…or about saving the whales or farm aid or poor baby Jessica trapped down in that deep dark hole.

(i might have been a little jealous of all the attention she got, however)

The TV was on, but I was more interested in riding my bike down the old abandoned roads. Or getting some junk food to eat. Or reading a magazine.

Basically, I wanted to be left alone.

I had my stuffed animals who were in love and had big families and lived on islands such as my bed or the TV stand—when the rain fell in their world, I had them huddle in the area underneath where my mother saved the fat, impossibly glossy catalogues that came from stores where we couldn’t afford to shop.

I let them take shelter until the storm had passed.

I made a magic symbol appear in the sky, when it was safe for them to come out

(i craned the necks of my animals and looked up along with them at the crack in the plastic ceiling lamp. i stared unblinkingly as the exposed bulb singed purple lightening bolts across my vision)

i wasn't interested in the kids in my class.

i dreamed of a person coming along who had the same qualities as a plastic toy.

Of course he’d also be rich.

The other kids at school started going to parties. They were French kissing and taking down their pants behind the cinema.

They asked me to come along, but really I wanted no part of it

It has always been the case that I’d rather dream, dream, dream,

than fuck.

Apple martinis are the man. You might be under the impression that they’re girly and fey but let me tell you, that sugar rimmed shit is strictly for professionals…. Fitz and I got cranked out of our heads on them in the gayborhood on Saturday. Fuck Halloween. We were ripped open like it was xmas : I was in a skimpy black denim skirt and stilettos and Fitz was wearing his new pinstriped Purple Label suit. We both had white powder caked on our faces, old school, Andy Warhol style.

By midnight we were speaking in tongues and my heels were about to make me a liability. Thank god I had the foresight to bring along a pair of those two dollar plastic slippers that you see all the uptown bitches rocking. We stopped at a liquor store and bought an ancient sherry to take back to Brooklyn…I slid the dusty bottle into one of the stilettos and cradled it like a child. I had the Lost in Translation soundtrack blasting in my two hundred dollar teched-out, earbud headphones and it wasn’t until we got to Fitz’s place that I realized the protective plastic cushion had come off the one in my right ear. No wonder I had the volume at 9 and still couldn’t hear shit. Now I’ve got serious ringing in my ear. I can imagine the jagged tips of the nerves in there, buzzing and exposed and shaking with every little frequency like leaves in a storm.

I may never hear the sound of silence again. One night of apple martinis did what a hundred plus shows could not…now how’s that fer hardcore?


mama said canuck you out.

i just wrote to stacey about how i'm like that guy from the movie, american beauty. i'm the slightly stiff, mildly autistic yet good-looking stoner with the fat sack of moist and sticky gov-ment issue fer sale.

i could be traumatized

i could be crazy

(hazy swayze)



yep. i'm just like that dude, except i'm too lazy and self-conscious to take a camera outside and get all zen about an airborne plastic bag. por favor. nope, i'd much rather experience the sweet torture of walking down the street, seeing shit, and having to tell myself--over and over in that scolding, interior monologue voice of mine-"i should be filming this, goddammit, what the fuck is wrong with me i should be filming this".

(you see i get kicks from scolding myself)

(i even feel bad when i use parenthesis, like whatever i have to put in them isn't really worth it)

(hence i use parenthesis every chance i can get)

gorgeous, unbelievable things happen all the time in this city. each second contains millions of beginnings, middles and ends.

actually, an event doesn't happen as much as it revolves, slowly, like a piece of plastic floating in space

it reveals itself through an infinity of angles.

truth, after all, is a mirror ball.

and i'm doubled over on the dance floor.

split in half and disintegrated

calling forth the derivative personalities that colonize my life

with a teeming industriousness that's ENCODED.

they are like worker ants,

or show horses

each one overcome by a sense of cursed exhuberance

that is pre-installed at the factory.





route one auto mall

Designer drugs and Happy Meals. La, la, la…

TRUE points out the next area of the globe that will dominate...

We've decided that this is the beginning of the end of the American era. Which, as TRUE so eloquently stated, "Is going to suck in some ways but who cares because we won't be around to see it."

Like any great empire

It's idealogy has been thinly stretched

Across a twilight of it's own making...

(how best to play it out? i'm thinking of a hollywood exit sequence on repeat...complete with digitized evening shadows and a mournful new wave soundtrack... the camera will pan to a mcstarbucks full of earnest, polysexual young people gathered around fake plastic trees with their supersized coffee beverages and greasy hashbrown sticks, gently shaking their asymmetrical hairstyles to the beat as they strare up at the holograph sillhouette of an oilfield, which then fades into a grainy, fast paced mtv cinema verite montage of SUV car commercials)

which then fades into grand theft auto

dr. phil

sitcoms with their sets

dead people playing on game shows




i love bobbylove