Lies and Libations

They Know Me Here

Wed, 08 May 2013 08:54:55 -0500

(For thelazystrippers)

Alone and besieged by emotion
I slide gently into a temple of darkness

They know me here

Five minutes in I am beset by a holy figure
a brunette of pierced steel and wrought ink

she slinks across the stage towards me smiling,
a g-string pulled aside to show pink skin shaven

As I slip the dollar inside
we both grin wolfishly

Neither one knowing
who is the worshiper
or the worshiped

A bald man, sinister
asks me what I am writing
and explains that some guys
from other clubs
come in to write up the girls
cherry picking the fruitful talent
but I demure
“It’s just bad poetry”
He laughs
and waves me onward

to a redhead

I have to tip her
even if I hate her music

because redheads are magic
dirty hot sexy magic

take my dollar
it’s all I have
I’m sorry you are alone
in the lights
ma’am

I smoke cloves and watch the women
as they prostrate themselves like dutiful priestesses
before an alter so profane
that men cannot admit its worship

the blondes drift by me, hesitant
in black
and shadow
they nod and smile
but don’t ask for a dance

I lay my scant offerings
at their feet
and pray

and then I’m driving home
with the last echos from the speakers
washing through my head
like waves
and I think of another

a beauty of my acquaintance
so profound she makes men
crumble
and shake
I want to call her up
and speak hot words of love, shards
so bright they tear asunder
the black roof of heaven

so she will know
she is not alone

like these priestesses
these strippers
swaying gentle
in the smokey darkness
of a lonely temple

I don’t know what the hell a Moon Moon is, but I just got...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:07:00 -0500

I don’t know what the hell a Moon Moon is, but I just got home and found this confused animal wandering around my apartment…

Situation in Boston has settled for now. Police have locked down and cordoned off several blocks,...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:46:44 -0500

Situation in Boston has settled for now. Police have locked down and cordoned off several blocks, investigation is ongoing, all information is being filtered through official channels, and the news media has fixed into their cycle of recycling everything, consulting “experts,” and generally making shit up to fill the wall to wall 24 hour cycle.

My mechanism for handling my own sort of PTSD is to immerse myself in information and analysis, so by now, I’m wore out.

We probably won’t know anything new for a while, barring sudden breaking stories. Please remember that there will be a lot of bad information on the internet, and a lot of people will take this terrible occurrence and try to use it for their own means. Check your sources, keep an eye on Snopes.com, and think twice before posting angry stuff about anybody. We’ll get through this again.

And hey, tell someone you love that you love them. Hug somebody you like. It’s okay to be scared or sad or angry. There are still good people in the world.

As for me, I’m going to the bar.

Drunk Advice from the Drunk

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 12:42:00 -0500

“I Don’t Give Out Much Advice,” he said in capitalized font, “But Here Is A Lesson I Will Share With You, My Friends, Or Whomever You Are; when suffering from the effects of anxiety or depression or the alcoholic infusion that follows the aforementioned, procrastination is your friend.”

“Repeat: Procrastination Is Your Friend.”

“Because sometimes you will find yourself standing there thinking things like, ‘Fuck this job, I quit’ or, ‘Yeah, I should marry this prostitute I just met’ or, ‘Adult circumcision can’t hurt that much, can it?’ or, ‘Screw everything, I’m driving to Florida to live with Stanfield MacCue’ or even, ‘I give up on it all.’”

“This is when you can rely on ol’ buddy Procrastination to kick in and tell you, ‘That is an awesome idea. Let’s do that tomorrow.’”

“Then, when you wake up from the chemical-induced supernova that was your brain at the time you can see the sense of things, and not make those life-altering decisions that seemed like such a good idea just a few short hours and shots of Jagermeister ago.”

And then he pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes, and passed blissfully into unconsciousness.

Dancing with Myself

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 13:58:21 -0500

“I wouldn’t recommend junk food, video games, or rampant masturbation for everyone dealing with depression, but they’ve always worked for me.” ~ Lorthos

Not, of course, to disparage other more active or intelligent methods of dealing with depression such as exercise, meditation, positive affirmation, or therapy. All of those are good things. It’s just that when I get depressed I absolutely have not the energy or tolerance for any of those.

Around here it’s much more like, “I got an 8-pack of fried chicken, a laptop full of World of Warcraft, and a TV remote so I can pause Law and Order any time Mariska Hargitay bends over. Let’s get through this.”

LASF

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 08:19:07 -0500

I am going to invent the next big obscure nerd-thing trend that the other nerd-trends can talk trash about but secretly engage in and then I’m going to make a nerd-load of money (rule of three with hyphens - check). Because first it was Wargamers looking down on RPGers looking down on Magic players looking down on Vampire Masquerade LARPers looking down on all other LARPers looking down on Furries looking down on Bronies. I have come up with an idea to fill the new lowest slot on the Nerdy Totem Pole:

LASF - Live Action Slash Fiction

Think about it! Costuming, bad acting, unnecessary sexual content, copyright infringement, it has all the dramatic tropes needed to be a hit at your next convention. We can copy some old Vampire LARP rules and badly smudge out about half of them and then make up house rules on the spot for people to argue about when they aren’t trying frantically to hump each other.

GM - Okay, everybody take off your pants. Scene is “Only One Pair of Pants in the Universe Can Save Us,” and… GO!

LASFer #1 as 9th Doctor - “Those pants are clearly sized for a Doctor!” *sprints across room*
LASFer #2 as Captain Jack Harkness - “I’ll wrestle you for ‘em!” *runs after Doctor*
LASFer #3 as James T Kirk - “Gentlemen, you got room for a Federation Captain in there?” *waves penis*

(Two hour argument ensues about whether or not Captain Kirk is canon to this timeline and whether or not Captain Jack can use his “Fishook” card to gain an advantage over the Doctor because it was taken out of the third edition of the rules.)

I’m not positive but I am pretty sure this idea will make me rich. Who’s with me?

The Muse and I

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 05:01:56 -0500

You know, sometimes, just sometimes, I will get home after a night of drinking and find the Muse a wanting. A writhing creature in my brain. But she can’t always tell me what she wants, or how she wants it. And so I must listen to the music, watch her dance there in the lonely spotlight of my brain as she tries desperately to tell me what I should feel.

We have a pretty fucked-up relationship, my Muse and I. But, I love her, and I know she loves me, and sooner or later, as long as I keep watching her and listening to the music, she and I will make something together that is better than the sum of us.

Yes.

This is the thing of an artist, always.

Condum Conundrum

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 16:12:00 -0500

Dear Walgreens,

As a forty-something-year-old young man, I do occasionally find myself fortunate enough to have to still purchase prophylactics from your chain of stores. This act has been the source of much strange embarrassment for men since the very establishment of the pharmacy model in Baghdad in 754AD, when a young man blushingly sidled up to a marble counter, asked for a packet of sheep’s bladders, and was promptly beheaded.

Now, I do appreciate the fact that you have moved your colorful condom display case from the clinic section of the store (where everyone looks like my mother and is judging me) to the health and beauty section (where everyone looks like a hot college girl and is judging me), but the inclusion of a “push button for service” button, which lights up and loudly announces to the store that a “customer” needs “service” in the “health section” and then summons a giggling sixteen year old to unlock the plastic Fort Knox bank vault that insures I won’t steal a six-dollar pack of Trojans, is well… a bit much.

I know condoms are among the most shoplifted items in any store, but seriously? What’s next? You push the button and a spotlight goes off and a clown unicycles up to you honking his horn and yelling, “Looky looky here folks! This old guy thinks he’s getting laid! Don’t throw out a hip, pops! You want I should make a balloon animal outta that for ya?” And then he throws confetti and there are disco lights and rave music.

Bring that up at the next board meeting, I’m sure you can manage to get it within the budget limits after all the money you save on preventing rubber theft.

Your loyal customer,

Lorthos

From: http://durkinworks.blogspot.com/2011/12/big-bowwowski.html

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 09:42:14 -0600

From: http://durkinworks.blogspot.com/2011/12/big-bowwowski.html

Future Fight The

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 07:32:00 -0600

“I’m not going to worry about the Future, I don’t care what it says to me through time traveling robots or false precognitions delivered in late night television programming or small computer chips implanted in my brain during the war no one remembers. I have the Words and the Music and the Beer, and that is enough to keep me safe. I think.”

“Paranoid?” you ask.

“Paradeez,” I reply.

“What?”

“PARADEEZ NUTS!” I yell and then dive out the window, tuck and roll across the ground, and spring to my feet to disappear cackling into the morning fog.

Photo

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 19:05:27 -0600

Death Rides a Palomino

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 07:09:00 -0600

A slow day at the Palomino, somewhere deep inside of Texas, on a hot afternoon.

The girls halfheartedly spiraled listless around the poles. The bikers from Cablallo de hierro, a local “club,” lounged in ruthless lazy fashion about the place, drinking their cerveza and fondling the putas. Even the flies could barely be bothered to stir.

At the bar, Destiny slapped down cards.

“Oh!” she said, excitedly surveying the landscape of the tarot cards she had built, “That’s the Wheel of Fortune, inverted. It’s like, you know, Fate, right? That could be a problem for you.”

“Really?” Donny Brooks, bartender and daytime manager at the Palomino, half-eyeballed the naked girl on stage while he listened to Destiny’s pratter. God, she would go on and on about the goddamned cards and he could care less. He figured he was just making the time until she gave up the goods. Yeah. She was a cute little blonde thing, not a good earner, but more attractive than most of these whores. Donny figured if it would get him a little closer to that ass he could put up with some mystic mumbo jumbo bullshit for a while about some cards. So he sort of paid attention as she put ornate plastic rectangles down in front of him and tried, in her Louisiana swamp accent, to explain their meaning.

“See honey, since this is inverted, or upside-down, you know, it means you could be coming into a reversal of fortune, right? Like maybe things are gonna change, yeah? And so this next card should tell you where things are gonna go, okay?” Destiny nervously stroked the pack of cards with her fingertips.

Of course, Destiny wasn’t her real name, her parents, fucking hippies, had named her “Angel Epiphany Serendipity Johnson” and really what the hell kind of name was that for a child? She’d run off from their trailer at the tender age of sixteen and been making her own way ever since.

Even if that way did sometimes involve bumping and grinding on fat old guys in a dark corner for forty dollars. Such was the life of a stripper, and Destiny knew that when she told the club owner her name. And she made okay money, right? With a little on the side from reading cards for people, which was just something her mom had shown her when she was little, that she had a kind of knack for, but you know, it wasn’t any big deal. Just tricks, mostly, just listening to people and telling them what they want to hear.

Usually, yeah.

Sometimes, maybe, just sometimes, it was something else. A flash of color around the edges of some people she looked at. Helped her avoid the real creeps, the kind that liked to take a girl in the back, maybe mess her up a little for extra money. Donny would look the other way, she knew, if he got paid. That was the business. But whatever it was, it helped her now and then, even if she didn’t really believe in the second sight, as her mother called it.

Destiny slid the next card from the top of the pack with slender fingers.

“See, this one is your future, right? But you know, it’s not set in stone or anything. It’s just a possibility, so if you don’t like it you can change it, okay?” She laughed nervously at Donny, who wasn’t really paying attention to her anyhow, being as he was fixated on the bare breasts of the dancer on stage. That suited her just fine, so she turned over the card and laid it on the worn wooden bar top with a snap. The card depicted a robed, skeletal figure, scythe held high.

Death.

Destiny stuttered and paled as a shadow fell across the bar from the doorway and she felt the world grow colder around her. Donny looked up as the stranger entered the Palomino.

He was a man. Maybe. He was enormous in size and stature and dark. Not his skin, which was a pale white, but his demeanor. So much in fact that the lights of the club, dim even at midday, seemed to bend and twist around him. His face was worn and hard, with a day’s worth of scrubby beard. His black hair was long and he wore a dark leather coat that dragged at the floor as he entered.

His eyes you couldn’t see, almost like the light itself was afraid to reveal his features. And he strode across the bar to the old jukebox in the corner as the eyes of the bikers followed him. After him came a short man in an expensive looking outfit.

Red silk suit and shifty eyes with a broad grin, the tiny man sidled up to the bar and waved at Donny. His eyes, Destiny saw, were red rimmed and mismatched, one of them milky white and useless and both of them weirdly different sizes. Made his whole head seem lopsided and off-angle, and he was hard to look upon.

He leered at Destiny with one eye, favored Donny with the other, and began to talk, rapid fire.

“Donny, Donny, Donny, my boy, my man, my main bitch ass bitch in Texas. Donny. How you doin’ now, huh? Let’s talk business Donny, come on now, we got a lot of business to talk Donny, yes, yes, yes, Donny. Talk to me.” He slapped a thick brown leather briefcase on the bar, hiked his butt on a stool next to Destiny, and started pulling out reams of papers and stapled forms. He smelled like B.O. and hair gel, Destiny thought. Ugh.

“Take off, Des.” Donny waved her away, all business now and, she thought, kind of scared. She scooped up her cards and slipped over to a table by the satellite stage but kept watching the bar as the little man in red and Donny bent over a whole lot of paper. She glanced over to the big stranger with his black leather. He was bent over the jukebox, reading the old titles there. Some of the Cablallo de hierro had taken notice of him, hard not too, she thought, he ate up all the space in the room.

But their notice was never something you wanted, not here.

The little man in red was angry, standing half on his barstool and arguing with Donny now, shaking papers in his face. Donny still looked scared, but pissed off too, and Destiny could see his hand inching toward the baseball bat he had under the bar, a lead-weighted thing that only came out when the customers got too touchy-feely with the girls and couldn’t pay for it. The bikers were starting to stir, the biggest meanest one hiking his big belt buckle up over his beer belly and lurching out of his seat to approach the stranger at the jukebox. The girl on the main stage was just winding her set down, some awful rap-rock number coming to a stuttering grinding halt.

“Goddammit Donny, we had a deal here!” the little red man shrieked from the bar.

The bikers took notice, hands slid down and across to weapons in pockets and boots.

“Hey fuck you, you fucking little bastard shit fuck. I don’t give a fuck!” Donny screamed back.

Her music done, the stripper on the main stage got the hell out of there, with most of the girls in the joint. Destiny was paralyzed by something she couldn’t explain, this feeling of the terrible and inevitable, staring as the lead biker walked up behind the large dark man.

“Fuck me? FUCK ME? Okay then, you fucking (and here the little red man said a word in a language Destiny never heard before, Cambion). We’re done here, we’re done Donny. I’m done. I’m calling your due, that’s right, I’m calling your due.”

“Go ahead motherfucker! You call that shit then!” Donny snatched the weighted baseball bat from behind the bar and waved it threateningly.

In that quiet moment the large dark man all dressed in leather pressed two buttons on the old jukebox, and a song began to play.

Johnny somebody, Destiny thought, even in her panic and fear, my daddy used to listen to that, yeah. Cash, she thought it was, maybe.

The big biker behind him sneered and spoke, “Hey bitch, we don’t listen to that country shit around here. Hey. Hey puta. Hey!”

The tall dark man turned around.

And he smiled

He hit the biker in the chest. Hard. So hard Destiny could feel the impact, like a whuf of air that blew her hair around her shoulders and she heard the heavy thump of his fist on the leather and the crack of the biker’s sternum and the crash as his body slammed into the tables on the other end of the bar.

Destiny dropped to the ground and curled up under the heavy bar table as the other members of Cablallo de hierro pulled knives and chains and rushed the stranger as a mass. From her vantage she could only see part of what happened then. Bikers everywhere. Shouts and curses over the music. Bodies flying, some through windows. Cries of pain and surprise. Screams from the bar sounded like Donny. Sounded like he was hurting, like he was on fire. A couple of gunshots, then more screams, then silence. Just a couple of minutes of sounds, just an eternity, that’s all.

Then then booted feet of the dark stranger, walking over to her table. Stopping. The creak of a leather coat as a gloved hand reached down.

For her.

The little red man spoke from somewhere over near the bar. “No, no, no, goddammit no. Leave that, I got what we need here, leave that alone.”

Destiny smelled smoke then, saw the flickering light of the fires against the far wall. The red man was closer now, “I said no, dammit. NO. We don’t need that with us, she’s a seer, you get me? Too much trouble. We have to go now, come on. COME ON.” But the dark man knelt down, and the shadows that lined his face shifted, just a little, and Destiny saw his eyes.

Black eyes. Black like the end times, black like the grave, black like the light turned out on the last day, black like the final peace.

Then he smiled. Tentatively, at her. Some impulse deep in her soul shook her body, she reached out and took his hand.

The red man sighed an exaggerated sigh.

“Oh my god. Seriously I cannot believe you. I don’t believe you. Come on, fuck, come on, we have to go now. Go, go, go, let’s go.”

And he led the dark man and Destiny through the spreading flames of the Palomino.

Into the sunlight.

Terrible Fan Fiction

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:31:27 -0600

Watson surveyed the grisly scene as Holmes lit his pipe and puffed at it thoughtfully.

“A terrible thing here, Holmes. What do you make of this?” Watson asked.

“Seems simple enough, my man. He was attacked by a wolf, you see. Look at the marks here and here.” Holmes gestured to invisible spots in the carnage. “A wolf about six feet at the shoulder, weighing in excess of twenty-five stone, I’d say.”

“That’s amazing! How can you be so sure of that?”

“Because, of course, I’m the wolf who did it.”

“Indeed?”

“Quite.”

~ from “The Case Files of Sherwolf Holmes, Consulting Werewolf Detective”

Drunk as Cooter Brown

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 05:52:00 -0600

Now, I don’t know who you are, mysterious Tumblr person, but I can tell you this, if you get drunk in the South someone at some point will tell you that you are “Drunk as Cooter Brown.” And you will wonder, much like myself who was born here, who the hell Cooter Brown was and why is he such a legend and old country folks’ saying?

The truth, such as it may be, is possibly better than I ever imagined:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooter_Brown

MARDI GRAH

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 04:02:00 -0600

HAPPPY MARDI GRAS MOTHERBARFBARFBARF UGHBARF GRARF BARF OH GOD PLEASE DON’T LET ME BARFBARFBARFGODBARF AGAIN, SPIT.

BARF!

(EXTENDED BARFING)

I LOVE YOU ALL, TUMBLR PEOPLE.

BARF.

Happy Chinese New Year, folks. We now enter the Year of the Snake. I thought he was dead.

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 17:02:55 -0600

Happy Chinese New Year, folks. We now enter the Year of the Snake.

I thought he was dead.

Sunday Night Philosophy

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 07:21:00 -0600

“My opponent, if you can call him that, dares to say that reality is a self-constructed shared hallucination of the physical senses. I say to you, friends, that his ideas are the worst trailer-park trash philosophy I’ve ever heard. I cannot believe that this toothless, pencil-necked, scrawny geek calls himself a philosopher. If I had dared to ever postulate that reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, I never would have won the World Philosophizing Federation belt and become the people’s champion.

So I’m going to take this challenge and when the steel cage drops down from the heavens over the squared circle this Sunday, I am going to beat this idiot so bad that when he goes back to his trailer park that night, his sister won’t even want to hear his theories. I’m going to slap the taste out of his mouth so hard, he won’t be able to enjoy a mayonnaise sandwich, much less Hume’s Aesthetics. I am going to take the Socratic Method, shine it up all nice and pretty, turn that sumbitch sideways, and shove it straight up his rooty-poo, candy ass.

AND I WILL REMAIN THE WPF CHAMPION AND THE PEOPLE’S PHILOSOPHER, IF YOU SMELL WHAT DESCARTES IS COOKING!”

~Transcript of Darryl ‘The Rock Descartes’ Johnson’s challenge on the eve of WPF PHILOMANIA XXX.

Requiem for a Moon

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 00:40:00 -0600

(AKA: I Think I Might Be Part Galliard And Only 3 Of You Will Get That Joke)

There was a moon
up in the sky
and we danced with
it so high

It was a goddess
made of light
and we loved it
all through the night

And we danced
until the morn
and our body was
so tired and worn

For we were
the dancing fools
that dared to stand
among the pools

Of her reflected
love so bright
and we danced
on through the night

To see the sun
come up that day
but we fell
upon the way

And stared into
each other eyes
and admitted to
our own surprise

That we so loved
the argent moon
and would wait until
it came so soon

Around again
many days from now
but we’re lonely
so lonely
and it takes so long
that the rhymes break up
stupid fucking rhymes
and all we can do is
just sit here
and remember
the time that

There was a moon
up in the sky
and we danced with
it so high

We can only hope
it never comes down

10 years ago today I walked into a greasy diner in the bowels of...

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 16:41:02 -0600

10 years ago today I walked into a greasy diner in the bowels of Mississippi, cold of mind and hard of spirit. He didn’t look like I thought, maybe it was the cancer, maybe it was because I didn’t really know what to think. It was a hell of a thing, too bad it didn’t end like the song though. Just some words lost in the wind. No help for it, some people you can’t reach. But it had to be done.

Then I went to New Orleans to drink and think about it.

I will say this, it’s all been going up from there.

soff-soff: hell yeah on We Heart It -...

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 10:34:28 -0600

soff-soff:

hell yeah on We Heart It - http://weheartit.com/entry/34855175/via/Soffy