REDWOOD BURL TABLE
Wild with roots, a Gorgon head:
my young eyes cogwheeled at
the tangled waist-high mass riverbar trucked
and my squat mallet sent thick flakes like
flack off my checkerboarded chest,
hints of burl beneath the busted rock
stuck in the dirty redwood,
till the giant's clubbed wart clean of stone
gave a milled slab set rickety
on two paint-thick sawhorses,
wobbling in the pull of the screaming grinder's
wire bristles spitting back the loose punk wood.
Renegade spiders ran, nooks invaded by the violent metal wand
and brushed sawdust left the surface clear
for belt sanding before subjection to the stages of the orbital.
When the meaty red cross-section doused gleamed
and the scrubbed rings' fluctuating bands rippled,
torched edges blackened shone silver
where the blue acetylene tip had spread,
and set on the knotted legs of a less charred base
the finished tabletop
took center stage in the showroom
for your more and less impressed tourists,
whilst in the sideyard my grimed thumb
spun a bowl.
VISHNU
Slumbering delighted
the world-dreamer drifts alone
partially submerged
partially afloat
upon a lake of lotus without limit
above and below a pillared heaven
The sun grows
the whole world withers
wind spins into cyclone
and cyclone into fire
The spider respools its web
IF LIFE EAT DEATH
Hieing to the wombed hill
Mid yip and yirr of Baalists beery
We woozy skirmishers
Wambled past the whippoorwill
And gave a girn to gimcrack,
Bedaubed in wizardry and woodcraft,
Riled rimers, with pyretic vim,
Barmy each pant and peck,
We salivating songsters,
Scragging victuals along the junket,
Raw wood thrush and songsparrow
Our stark beefsteak.
Rooty wolfberry
Sopped the Bacchic balladry,
Blackish the scape,
Our mockery beneath Varuna,
Till to indigenous ziggurats
We did sorn the shadow lords,
A measly chiliad of bubbling keeves
Ripe for us to batten.
WEIR EXAM
Floating in the wetsuit nets of light cross my mask:
refracted through the choppy surface they waver on the rock
as the hollow rhythmic hiss of my mouth’s breath
pushes through the tube–strange stone shapes
pass steady in a narrow view–arms forward
I fly streamlined toward the sandbagged pickets
where the scouring current tears away the riverbed.
Over a developing hole wedged rock taps the lonely aluminum,
raised dust glints fool’s gold, dead grass collects
twigs between the bars and undulates decaying in the cage.
I work my way along the trap. No salmon are inside.
Bloated faces pushed forth by my imagination
watch me slice my way upstream like a gill man in the Amazon.
INTERVIEW WITH A TRIBAL LEADER
Saved from a blue clay mudslide by a Horse Mountain potstop
we rescheduled, and when later came, there he was, looking just like on TV
where I’d seen him talking on Bigfoot and so looked him up in the phone book.
My buddy Eric couldn’t make the drive a second time
but my other buddy Tom could and he was there with a Camcorder catching
Jimmy in his chair and the back of my already balding head.
It’s weird to see yourself in a tight Humboldt T-shirt interviewing Jimmy
after all that hassle when in the first five minutes you realize
the show sort of lied and Bigfoot is a subject where maybe
you know more than he does. Great tribal leader, full of all kinds of stories,
only he hadn’t seen anything and wasn’t really sure. Probably TV
just wanted an Indian. If he pulled off his head and showed a
Bigfoot inside I would not have been surprised, but on the outside
he was eighty-four years old and told us of the time when he was a kid
talking Hupa in a cherry tree eating cherries and some George Washington
of a teacher jabbed him with a nail on the end of a stick to make him talk American.
He told us how to leech acorns and showed us pictures of the Deer Dance.
I told him the interview was only for me, and Tom, it was just something we wanted to do.
Back on his deck before we left, looking at the river, he said his mother told him
one time she saw four of them come out of the forest to swim,
a male, a female and two young ones, and they swam till they saw her and left.
COMMUNITY
Upon our holy day of rest
Strolling arm-in-arm abreast--
Our linked, glinting smiles warm the way--
Along our path this Sabbath day
Our neighbors step in time with us.
Proceeding uniformly thus
We each wish each a merry morn,
Till in green grass spotted forlorn,
Innocent as new-fallen snow
The youngest child asks where we go.
"Jacob, tell her where we're treading."
"We're going to the beheading!"
THE HEROISM OF HEDONISM
conjures wolfish doggerels
in sacred games and festivals of atonement.
The plow of evil pushed
tills exhausted land
and the tallow taken underground
lights cities beneath Vesuvius.
A hero shall emerge:
as a blade baptized in a bed of fire,
in ceremony shaped and sharpened,
a severer of shackles,
he is the bane of formulaic observance.
Pity the conqueror or praise
but stand not in his way
lest panthers' claws
and chariot wheels' grind
pin mockful notes on dying ears
frozen in the ash of agony.
MILKING THE BACK
Thick vat glass added fresh back size
bobbing in brine like swollen legions of buffalo tongue
and the clerk would hook the one Grandpa let me pick.
At home we’d unwrap the massy package,
I with my fork, ready to poke.
Grandpa’s deft prong freed embedded gravel bits
whose frugal removal fueled our maracas.
Then he’d heft the back to sheets of wax paper
where for half a day it dried before it was applied.
I’d watch the pungent juices ooze as if alive,
seeping the way a beached whale weeps.
When it was time, Grandpa lifted the back
like a butcher with a side of beef,
squeezing loose the yellow milk
into a foil pan at his feet.
Now I am an old man.
You can’t find fresh back anymore.
I have no idea why we did all
that.
SAIL AN ALIAS
When I feel Doom mooD
That is when I Word roW
There I go in Deep speeD
Rabid in my Wolf floW
I shed the Animal laminA
I shed the GoddammaddoG
To release the Droll lorD
I turn the Revel leveR
I like to Moor a rooM
I like to Fool alooF
There I drink my Regal lageR
Then how Me leer 'n reel 'eM
I see No evil live oN
Though I Lived a deviL
Where the Pools looP
Without the Flesh selF
In Sleep peelS
Reviled I deliveR
Resume, museR
IN THE ULTIMATE POEM FIRST AND FINAL
letters combine to align in arrangement which reads
not just across left to right or right to left but forth and up and down and back
all making sense
no space omitted
it all interacts
inside-out
diagonal
form and content match
and the letters take shapes which in turn comment
missing nothing
texture
color
senses over senses
and the poem is thought
and the thought is matter
and we walk in the poem
and we breathe in the poem
and our hearts beat the poem
and beyond all language
the poem ex p l O o
l O O
O o O O
O o o o o
o o o o o o o
o . o . d o . . o . .
. . . e .
. . . . . s.
IF YOU LIKE THE POEMS,
CHECK OUT THE BOOKS:
http://www.amazon.com/Stewart-Kirby/e/B00572M8JC/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
Chapter One
“Got hardtack?”
Danyul Bune in skin of coon and buck had in his mighty hand a big bent blade
worn from overuse shaving his great bald head. A shave-pate man was he, and
bare-chested he strode on the soft rust duff of the redwood forest turf. Upon
this dreamy terrain a squat and sturdy figure stood.
“What the fuck’s hardtack?” Tracker, Danyul Bune’s trusty, crusty sidekick,
said.
“It’s like a biscuit, ain’t it?”
Tracker ran a sandpaper hand across his chin, squinting, and grinned. “I
plumb fergot. It’s a biscuit, all right. I might just have one or two,” Tracker
wryly added, opening up his pack and producing a fist-sized chunk which he
tossed across the wide clean carpet of fallen redwood bits collected across
untold millennia and clear on up to the Wild and Wooly Western World Year of
1775--when the redwoods really rocked--which Danyul caught on the fly,
proceeding then to smash and to smash said hardtack on the blade, striking
sparks as he smote and saying, “Just need somethin’ to pound this here
pig-sticker back into place.”
“I can see that, stupid! Why don’t yew use yer fuckin’ head?”
“Sounds to me,” Danyul said, audibly testing the flattened blade on his
already bald skull skin, “like you don’t think she’ll show.” Here he referred
to Sacajariton. And in fact wondered himself if Sacajariton would appear with
news of a fight set up with a twelve year-old Bigfoot. One of Yawg the
Stick-Man’s boys. He of the Mountain Folk. The Yupa knew Danyul was the Goods
in the Woods. That was specifically how they billed him. But this twelve
year-old young buck was showing some serious promise, and Danyul needed the
money.
“Gotcherself all dainty agin?”
Astonishingly scantily-clad, Sacajariton appeared. “Now now, Tracker,” she
said, “we all know that’s where Danyul gets his legendary strength.”
“Have we got a fight?”
“Well, yes and no, Danyul,” said Sacajariton. “Grok”—that was the twelve
year-old Bigfoot—“got shot by some fops and fed to some pigs.” Those were wild
boars let loose by Lord Buttle, he being the top resident fop. “But they do
have a sick bear for you,” she said.
Sacajariton filled in details as the three hightailed across the ridge to
the pit where the Yupa waited and took bets. The salmon were thick in the
river, and large calling birds were on the wing.
And they grooved through the grove heartbeat in hand, as one with the wind
as were their kind, and they came to a place where Yupa warrior guards spun
round from behind trees with great big knives and slapped high fives as the
three passed by, swiveling like that periodically right on up to the
twenty-four foot square pit wherein a one-eyed black bear with mange sat on its
vaguely gray and pinkish mottled haunches looking up at the moneyed mitts of
the ravenous spittle-spewing crowd which consisted of screaming pink-skinned
white men, many of whom wore bright white powdered wigs and said things like,
“You filthy sons of whores!” and, “Kill! Kill! Die! Die!” with such furious
exertion--doubly resounding on the appearance of the astonishingly scantily
clad Sacajariton--that it was a matter of some several moments before every man
there felt fully the presence of Danyul Bune among them, and subsequently shut
the fuck up.
It was a foregone conclusion to all who knew Danyul that he would win, or at
least should have been, not simply because the bear was small and sick and
lacked an eye, but because Danyul had, far and away, the best resume of anybody
around for physically besting other beings. Pick a contest, any contest, Danyul
always won. Some folks said it bothered him that far to the east there was
another guy in coonskin whose name sounded the same. Playing the fame game.
When in fact if you actually compared them, Danyul was way better.
For one thing, Danyul was only four years old when he first killed a man.
Danyul was a robust man who looked very strong, but Danyul was much stronger
than he looked. Sturdily constructed in the extreme, he could at the same time
imbibe to much further an extent than one would ever think of even dreaming
humanly possible. Some contended Danyul Bune wasn’t even human.
He was already stripped down to the waist. Danyul’s super-manly torso,
sporting just that right amount of sag, rigorously jiggled when he dropped down
in the pit. Very authentic. Still, he had the balls.
Tracker yelled encouragement at the lip of the pit. “Yeee-haww, Danyul! Show
that mangy ol’ bar what’s what! Wooo-weee!”
What was left of the bear’s hair flew off in clumps as it flared up in
defense of its tortured life. At this point, it only wanted out, really. But
Danyul wasn’t having any of it. He didn’t like the way this goddam bear was
looking at him. The bear had, Danyul strongly felt, shown him grave insult. It
had initiated asininity. Danyul had taken a personal dislike to it. The code of
honor had been breached, and Danyul demanded justice.
“Don’t fuck with me, bitch!” Danyul barked an inarticulate oath, lunging in
with a left hook that connected at the base of the bear’s jaw and sent it
sprawling to the length of its chain with an audible snap of the spine that
nearly killed it.
The cheers of the men resounded through the redwoods as Danyul Bune bashed
the bear's brains clear out of its screaming skull with a loud and sudden
burst! Later on, after getting paid, with Sacajariton on one arm, a stein of
beer in hand, tokin' a fattie, he'd hear Tracker recount the way the bear's
neck stretched waaaay out when Danyul struck it, and how the blow lifted the
bear clean off of the dirt, so that it hung in the air for one golden moment
for everyone forever. But this, this moment was his.
A detachment of fops from Lord Buttle's stockade accosted Danyul and Tracker
after they'd dropped Sacajariton off at her place. Tracker quickly inferred
that the fops had stupidly bet on the bear, and now as revenge for their loss
they claimed the right to detain and search Danyul Bune's person.
Not being a man to suffer others treading on his liberty, Danyul Bune
whipped out the war hatchet he kept at his side with a bloodcurdling whoop and
shocked the assemblage of freedom-hating functionaries by severing their
leader's skull clear from his body with one quick swipe. Dark arcs of blood
fountained from the fresh stump. The white wig, spattered with red, flew aside
and the shocked, distorted face winced on contact with the surface of the
trail.
Tracker, having suffered who knows what in his youth, smiled and smiled and
giggled with his peculiar high-pitched mirth as Danyul struck and smote and
slashed until all of the butchering was done, at which point Danyul collected a
number of body parts to take back to Black Raven to aid in powerful magic.
Black Raven once brewed Danyul Bune an elixir that revealed the secret
speech of the beasts of the wood. When Danyul was fresh with this knowledge, a
group of three Bigfeet attacked him one night in his sleep, and would have torn
Danyul apart then and there to punish him for discovering the cave in the
forest leading down to their hidden world, but Danyul was able to speak to the
hairy giants in their own language, and thereby managed to save his skin
because of the magic of the Yupa shaman.
Chapter Two
That night in the redwoods, partyin' with the Yupa peoples, gettin' all
fucked up, Tracker assured Danyul Bune that yes, he could in fact build a time
machine. "Yew want a time machine, Danyul, yew jest say the word! Ain't no
trick to buildin' a damn time machine! Hell, gimme some crystals, li'l bit of
yer basic minin' essentials and whatnot . . . "
Tracker rattled off a buncha other stuff too technical for Danyul in his
current state or at any other time to adequately process. His current state was
higher than the giant redwoods which stabbed at the stars. Coonskin cap askew,
Danyul passed the pipe to Black Raven.
Black Raven took a long hit. One of those hits where the insides of the
cheeks meet. He took a long hit like a man with something to prove, but that
was just Black Raven.
Black Raven stared at Tracker for awhile. Tracker didn't notice. He was
sitting on an overturned bucket recently acquired from a regiment of
freedom-haters, examining Black Raven's collection of crystals and expanding to
the ether on the subject of his first love, to which no one was listening,
which was just as well anyway, because for the life of him he couldn't
remember.
"Tracker's such a trip," Black Raven said.
"Tell you one thing," Danyul said kickin' back on a bear skin rug,
chompin' down on salmon jerky, "the man's damn sure mechanically-inclined.
I seen him make all kinds of shit. It's the way you gotta be out here, yeah I
know, I get that. Crap sake. But I ain't never seen nothin' like Tracker for
constructin' a contraption."
Black Raven went around his place, coughing and trying not to, putting on
various feather headdresses, trying hard to look normal and not look stoned.
Then Black Raven saw that Danyul was not only a warrior in the can-do spirit of
self-reliance, the embodied epitome of independent excellence, he was also a
born storyteller and true friend to the end, for he told of the time Tracker
constructed an air balloon device which carried him higher than the tallest
redwood. The ominous gloomy figure that was Black Raven got along really well
with that battler of Bigfeet and his trusty, crusty sidekick, and knew them as
a couple of bullshitters from way back. They were the guys that went the
furthest the soonest, livin' the dream on the buckskin fringe, so far ahead of
the rest, it would take the rest of their lives to wait around for everybody
else to catch up.
"Tracker can make a machine if he wants," Black Raven said,
"but it would be easier to use what already is. In a land far from here, long
ago, three brothers stepped through a doorway to our world and taught the
people how to live."
"Sounds like a bossy buncha buttholes," Danyul said, chucking a
chunk of oak on the fire.
"What kinda doorway?" Tracker asked, roused now from his reverie.
"One that goes to other worlds. And yes, very bossy."
"Yeah, well, what the hell kinda doorway goes to other worlds?"
The shaman grew silent, and seemed as though he would speak no more.
"Somethin' I said?" Tracker appealed, perplexed. "What the
hell?"
Danyul shrugged.
Again, silence. The oak chunk on the fire snapped and sparked.
Then staring into space Black Raven said, "Tracker, you are my brother,
but too often you let your tone get shitty with me." He turned and looked
at Tracker. "It pisses me off."
Snap, spark.
There was an uncomfortable pause before Tracker broke the silence. Clearing
his throat, he said, "There any of them doorways around here?"
Another pause. Then the shaman replied, "Yes."
"Hey Black Raven," Danyul said, loading a fresh bowl, "what
do you say we pass this here around, then go check out your doorway to other
worlds?"
Tracker plunked himself down in arm's reach, leaving the overturned bucket
seat free.
"It's not mine," Black Raven said, "but okay."
AT THE Chevron the artist saw a guy who pumps gas mopping the floor and sporting a new haircut. "Sieg heil, dude," bemused by the beer cooler the artist addressed. "You gonna grow the little mustache or what?"
Dude was sporting the all-time Hitler. As though Hitler's weird side-swept hair was a plastic shell that snapped right onto his head. He was about 25. Quiet guy. Wore thick glasses that distorted his eyes, had a goofy grin, and usually talked about his favorite TV show, the one with the murdering android on the loose. "Oh, I thought about it," he sheepishly admitted, "but I'd probably only wind up getting my ass kicked."
Chuckling, the artist agreed.
In pyoint of fyact, in this very establishment the artist had a similar night some months ago, upon procuring his Sumerian ambrosia, issued unto the night crew stentorian manly challenge.
"Here's what's gonna happen," the artist pronounced, well aware in this as in all things that he was the only customer, "I'm gonna beat all three of you at arm wrestling, both arms, right now, and then I'm gonna walk out of here with these beers, for free. Let's go."
The night crew, all brothers, looked at each other. The biggest said he was too tired. The youngest was right out, no way willing. And the oldest faced the artist only on the condition that he get to use two arms. Right there over the Lottery tickets they did wage immortal battle. Till finally with his two arms straining at the artist's one--and with an expression on his face like Peter Lorre hanging onto the doorknob for dear life in M--he did fairly beat the artist, and the artist had to pay for his own beer after all.
He liked the kid with the Hitler hair. "He's not really Adolf Hitler," the artist thought. "He only has his hair. Which might have been kicked around flea markets for decades. If I ever see anybody try to give the kid any trouble, I'll protect him, for it is his right to snap on Hitler's hair, and he provides me with much amusement."
"I never understood how anybody could get behind fascism," the artist said aloud forking over beer dough. "Click-click, click-click. You do what one asshole says or else. Christmas, who the hell wants to get on board with that shit? Well, take ease."
"Later."
"Don't forget to watch Hunting RoboPoe!"
"Ain't got no TV. Take ease."
"Auf wiedersehen."
Standing near a pump outside, maybe asking a guy for change or whatever was a woman with a face pinched in deep at the cheeks as though she had no teeth. Because she didn't. She was thin, officially rangy, and moved constantly around on her feet and with her arms twisting in contortions like a spider on a warm stove while it slowly shrinks.
The artist passed by the dead lawn house with the old blind dog that still barked like a prophet upon my return hovelward, noting the likely senile canine's black limbs a-tremblin'. Another dog sat next to it, evidently used to the other's eccentric ways. Never did see any people there. Just the dogs. If they played poker inside with neighbor dogs, the artist doubted anyone would listening to the black one with the trembling legs. You'd have to be crazy.
Tire swings hanging from corner trees, occasional wind chimes and lawn mowers gracing the breeze, he passed sections of sidewalk where cats appeared by old iron gates with bent handrails and low stone walls under shaded places where ancient trees lined the streets with arching boughs interlaced, chalk on the sidewalk left from kids' games and lots of flags hanging, too. Old houses with interesting gables and fantastic landscaping hid the odd grow-op. Working people drove trucks they couldn't afford and when they got home it weren't to no Taj Mahal. No problem there. All you ever really have are your experiences, anyway.
Ascending the sagging steps to the front porch of the aged hovel, he stopped at the top and turned around to survey the serenity of the delightful little community. Ah, how nice. Then he turned back around to the swinging varicose vein-lined legs of sneering prozzies perched in open windows, kicked an empty bottle toward a couple of rats, and climbed up to his apartment stepping over, best he could, the corpses on the stairs.
Inner sanctum attained, he slid inside like a trapdoor spider and closed the door, not all the way, just enough to allow him to spy approaching prey and spring. And ordinarily he certainly would spend most of the day quietly positioned to attack and consume a human being, but this time was different. For inspiration had struck in the form of an eagle with a serpent in its talons.
The sublime vision appeared to him alone in the mountains. Over a river in fact. And it lifted his mind for once off his troubles.
It was time once again, he realized, to sluice himself in cascading Alpine cataracts. To become once again heavy with wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey, and needs hands outstretched to receive it. Images from the Franco-Prussian War took form and loomed in roiling skies to the growing opening notes of Das Rheingold.
Once again the hour of the Overman rang within his soul like the brazen conch shells of gold-robed votaries and giant gongs resounding.
Whereupon he realized his true name, Striking Eagle. Or, alternatively, The Eagle, or Eagle, or He Who Moves With the Spirit of the Striking Eagle.
The next day being an off day, he decided to pay the used book store a visit to see if he could find a copy of Friedrich Nietzsche's letters to aid him in the writing of his longest ongoing project, the definitive screenplay on the premiere philosopher's life.
As always, heads of loved ones spun around before him saying hurtful things. Graffiti art on the train cars played frame-by-frame as the train passed by, showing scenes of misery.
He entered the book store and headed straight to the back wall, fairly certain He'd seen a copy there, maybe his old one.
Edward Abbey...John Muir...
So many memories of people being awful. He remembered a time in Grade 4 that certainly helped set the stage of his life in terms of his relationships with people. He hadn't made it to school on a Monday. Sick or something. So he showed up on Tuesday...and found that everyone had subtly changed. They all behaved coldly toward him. He could feel a difference in the energy around him. The teacher, who looked like a bobblehead because he had a spindly little neck and a small weak body under a round, retarded noggin, hated being unable to conduct an interesting life, and seemed to see kids the age of nine and ten as competitors in life. Ah, how this douche bag hated the young artist in particular. Him, and one other, a kid whose parents were just beginning their divorce. The boys perceived themselves as being a lot like Hawkeye and Trapper from M*A*S*H. And, aside from the fact that they weren't surgeons in Korea, but were instead in Grade 4, yeah, pretty good call on their part. Turns out, on the Monday the young artist missed, the girl with the bladder problem pissed her pants at school again. So fuckin' little half-ass Trapper laughed. As per usual. And of course anybody else who saw couldn't wait to start snickering, too. This made the pants-pisser bawl her pissy head off so much, that the bulk of the herd started moving away from his half-ass Trapper sidekick. Bobblehead got wind of the pissing and started figuring, hey, time to get back at some little kid to try to make up for all the times kids laughed at him for being such a douche. But right before the punishment could come down, half-ass Trapper turned like a rat and squealed, "No! No! It's not fair! Hawkeye's always doing way worse than me! Take him, take him!" This caused everything to stop. Only a tumbleweed rolled. Bobblehead pondered. "It's true," Bobblehead thought. "Hawkeye is my greatest enemy. The thing to do is wait. Yes, wait until Hawkeye returns." So, after lunch-time recess, the children, who had been instructed to in no way warn the young artist, filed into the classroom with a palpably conspiratorial air. They all knew to go directly to the reading area. The place with the books. There was a sofa in that corner, one no longer fit for a home, with a big fuckin' stain in the middle from all the times the bladder-problem kid had pissed herself on it. Now for the first time ever they started acting all nicey-nice to the pisser. "I wanna sit next to the pisser!" "No, me!" Oh God, they gave her such a gigantic crown. A truck rolled up with a lifetime supply of diapers. Anything to avoid getting in trouble for having laughed. Anything to get revenge on their leaders for being the stars of the show. Bobblehead's little plan was to just let everybody else in the class get to air their hate. So they did. "They think they're so cool!" That was the complaint. Individually, collectively, they were all encouraged to say that. And they did. After a while, half-ass Trapper started crying. But not the young artist. His reaction was to start telling off every single one of them. Didn't take long for him to start clearly winning. And right at that point Bobblehead looked at the clock and wrapped it up. They think they're so cool!
Nietzsche.
So completely misunderstood. Appropriated by a-holes who never fuckin' read him. So very maligned, so deeply wronged. All because he happened to be Dy-no-mite and missed one goddam Monday.
Book in hand, the artist made his way toward the counter in order to purchase it. Now, the aisles in this book store can get a little tight. There's always new crap stacked up all over the place. Why? Because the country's a fucked up lie from the start and nothing works right, so people have to piddle around with boxes of old shit to try to trade in for a couple bucks. The artist happened to notice a fuckwad standing in his aisle. And as he approached, he further happened to notice that the fuckwad wasn't accommodating the necessary physical adjustment for his passage. Everybody does it, you make a little room, maybe even say, "Excuse me." No big fuckin' deal. He'd encountered this kind of thing before, sometimes a beggar who doesn't want to have to budge, but usually on the sidewalk.
Certainly there was no way he'd be backtracking to take another route. He shoved his way right on through. He turned his face toward fuckwad so fuckwad would have to feel the artist breathing down on him.
There was somebody else at the counter. The artist could see that was gonna take a few minutes. So he moseyed back on over toward fuckwad. Got real close, like he wasn't there. Reached across his line of sight. Didn't say excuse me. Stood there real close.
He could tell he got to him. Because a couple minutes later after he moved away and perused elsewhere, fuckwad tried to do the same thing to the artist. The artist stymied the moment with ease, just with his aggressive body language. He never once said a word. Neither of them did. And this little game went on a couple more times until the artist ramped up the aggression and fuckwad left. The artist moved quickly, got right up in fuckwad's face, but acted like he wasn't, just all calm. Fuckwad's widened eyes amused the artist. Fuckwad left fast.
Good boy. Or was that maybe some kind of robot with bad wiring?
Bought his Nietzsche book, the artist did. Casually looked around for fuckwad or any serial killer androids on the leisurely stroll across town. But he didn't see anything all the way back to his apartment.
It wasn't for another couple weeks till the artist saw fuckwad again. Quite by accident, unless you count help from a benevolent God. The artist recognized him right away. From a distance. And he realized: Hey, whaddaya know? I just found out where that asshole lives.
COONSKIN (I)
Seemed like most of the houses you saw in town weren't really real anymore. Folks sold quietly out. Now the neighbors in the houses were machines for the park, while the people who used to live there were probably on their way to the moon. Either that or one of those floating cities, or maybe Mars. Most preferred the moon to Mars, was what Coonskin heard, the moon being closer for return visits to see how poor everybody was.
Coonskin took a walk down to the river and saw the trees and the rocks on the way somehow differently. How would these things look one last time before leaving? he wondered. What if some other place looked just about exactly like this? Wouldn't that be a letdown?
He wished they'd upgrade to more androids around town, what with it turning into some kind of magical land of bullshit. Animatronic neighbors were boring. Immobile cuckoo clocks doing the same thing over and over. Now, maybe if there was some kind of an interesting android woman around, that might change things. Hmmm. He could at least invite her over for dinner. Coonskin heard about how there were all these jobs available fixing animatronic people and animatronic pets, but none of the work ever panned out for him. Coonskin never saw no Gold Rush repairing puppet neighbors.
Some folks in town rented parts of their property to the park for the paying public to see, and got to watch improved animatronic versions of themselves go through the motions of life in fixed positions while they themselves rode out their less-viewed existences aging.
What must it be like on Mars, with all the radiation? he wondered. And the moon, too. Always being stuck inside, everything tenuous, dangerous. Plus all the less considered adverse effects. On the other hand, if you thought about it, it was probably kind of bizarre that visiting androids sometimes stood around watching the humans. Coonskin certainly included. He was far from immune to that. A lot of the androids with any sort of wherewithal you saw looked like dead celebrities brought back to life. Android versions of dead celebrities were always a big hit. Sometimes the celebrities weren't even dead yet. Everybody saw plenty of those. They had an android William Shakespeare open a play there not long ago. And then there was always the ongoing hunt for RoboPoe.
Hunting RoboPoe. Coonskin used to wonder why anybody would watch it. It's all such bull, he thought. First serial killer robot, yeah right. Isn't that strange that there's always security camera video of RoboPoe morosely skulking around some crime scene, taunting the public and the police with stories and poems he left behind, and yet no one could ever find him, he was always just barely slipping out of reach and into the next episode? The whole thing was totally staged, he thought. They excited everybody about catching RoboPoe and getting the gigantic bounty as a distraction while they dismantled the world. Sales of RoboPoe hunting kits galore.
Then Coonskin saw the show. And he had to admit, the more you got into it, the more you wanted to be the one who got him.
When Coonskin wasn't working, he was training. Supposedly RoboPoe moved around in hiding throughout the county trying to reach the park because there was something he wanted at park headquarters. Either that or the underground Dreamland base they had somewhere nearby. Some of that might have been true. He also might have liked taking advantage of the coverage in the forests. The trick to catching RoboPoe, Coonskin thought, was to get inside his head. It wasn't like they had a regular economy around there anymore. Best he could do was try to get as many hours as he could with the park. Paddling canoe in his coonskin cap down at the river afforded him lots of opportunities when working to train not only physically, but mentally, as well.
Coonskin got into an argument with his closest remaining flesh-neighbor over his training. She had the lot adjacent to the back yard and came over to the fence while he was shooting arrows at a target with RoboPoe's face. (You could get stacks of those cheap, by the way.) She wasn't attacking how he trained so much as why. For someone who had never even seen the show, she sure acted high and mighty. He used to think she was an all right neighbor, too. He used to be glad that she hadn't sold out.
"Whatever happened to Due Process?" she said, basically blaming him.
He told her, "Yeah, I know, I understand, I get it, but there's nothing I can do. I need money to live. That's not my idea. Personally, I think we can do better, way better. But until that happens, it's all just fantasy. In the real world, dumping the body of RoboPoe on the Slab of Justice will solve my problems. I'll finally be able to get out of this hell hole and afford to live offworld."
"Anti-gravity cities!" she scoffed. "They're all going to fall right out of the sky."
"No," he said, "they're not. You have no idea what you're talking about."
Coonskin sure wished RoboPoe would show up around there and stuff his neighbor up a chimney before Coonskin killed him. Obviously she had no idea how hard Coonskin had to paddle in order to keep a robot from getting his job. Obviously she didn't care in the slightest about those innocent people RoboPoe killed, supposedly. Coonskin read what RoboPoe did to that old man. How they tore the floorboards up and found him. Left another guy chained in a basement behind a wall he'd built. RoboPoe knew to do those things because of the stories. It was all part of his Poe-gramming.
The baseball bat cinched tight in the vise took a dozen staples from the gun when affixing five or six feet of razor wire. That much wire is right where you want it. Less is too little and more is too much on a baseball bat. The artist favored a prime maple Louisville Slugger. She's sturdy, well-balanced, and gleams like a million bucks all decked out in her steel finery. The fresh razor wire looked every inch like a tight sexy dress on his best gal, and it sure was nice thinking about making that dress red.
Upon completing the task of constructing the tool, the artist beheld the product of his craftsmanship with swelling pride. See the pretty girl in all her glory, held aloft like a newborn babe, razor wire so sharp and shining, he thought, or maybe said aloud.
He placed the sacred instrument in a specially constructed truck bed-liner case, and placed the case reverently in the back of his pickup. Letting the engine warm allowed him a moment to visualize the directions to his destination. On the passenger side of the seat he had his black close-fitting cold weather ninja hood with a slit for the nose and the eyes stretched out waiting.
At the end of the street rose a commanding series of stone steps toward the university. Gray and cracked and thick with moss, the old stairs and wrought iron-topped walls gave a good feeling every time. The maples were beginning to turn. He enjoyed the crisp brush of the leaves in the breeze with the window down. On a night such as this, he thought, a man might walk home his gal and sit on the front porch swing together sipping lemonade, or maybe take a baseball bat wrapped with razor wire on over to Oak Street.
Then at an intersection looking like a corner in a town straight out of any number of episodes of The Twilight Zone, there she was getting into an SUV: the Golden Woman, the shockingly beautiful brunette with the inhumanly perfect features and otherworldly golden sheen to her bright bronze skin. Beneath the streetlight clearly visible. And once again, ahh, the eye-contact. Yet he was unable to stop, unable to meet her, unable to talk with her at all. Merely another maddening glimpse. This was going to cost Oak Street extra dear. He really couldn't wait to get there now.
At a stoplight the artist checked his phone for the time. "Good good good," he said aloud. "The next time I see the Golden Woman, I will stop no matter what and speak with her somehow."
"Elm Street," he said, passing it. There was an episode of The Twilight Zone with Elm Street in the title. Wasn't there? Or was it Maple?
Maple Street, he decided. But couldn't remember the rest of it. Elm Street is the one with Freddy Krueger.
Boy was she a beaut of a bat. True, there was much to appreciate in a kukuri, but he liked being a bat-man. "I'm a bat-man," he liked to hoarsely announce when alone.
He took the turn, cruised on down a bit, found the right address, continued on a block before turning. Pulled a U-turn, parked facing Oak with a view of the address. Turned off the lights and the motor, sat and waited, appreciating old trees rising around, making fantastic silhouettes against the deep rich blue of the new night sky.
He checked his phone. "Should be any minute now." Thoughts of the Golden Woman crept at the edges of his mind.
Lights coming down the street made his hand move for his ninja hood. The problem with the kukuri was being too clean. One good swing severs a leg mid-thigh. For sheer brutality though, ah, a razor wire-wrapped bat.
Sure enough, the car contained the artist's quarry. It turned into the correct address. Whereupon swiftly flying into action, the artist became silence, became shadow. He donned his mask, grabbed his case. He opened the case just a crack, so that it stayed closed only by his holding the handle. Crossing the street quickly, he approached his prey from the blind-side of the vehicle. His prey had parked in a dark driveway shielded by twisted old trees. Appearing from behind he dropped the case and grabbed the bat.
"Hey, scumbag!" the artist hissed, aiming at the knees. "Next time fuckin' move, piece of shit!" And the artist whaled on him about ten or twenty times thrashing his prey's trashy worthless body and head and flailing limbs, razor wire bat chopping in hard and tearing back out. "The Eagle! has! landed!" he said, chopping emphatically with each punctuation.
Naturally, as predicted, the bested crybaby had to start screaming bloody murder.
Well, no point sticking around now, the artist figured. He tucked his best gal with her pretty red dress back into bed and got a move on as the screams started to really get loud.
He put the case in the back of the truck, hopped in, started up, and drove off, removing the ninja hood only when safely around the corner. Then, carefully as he came in, he calmly headed out of town to the bridge over the river. There he parked and cleaned his hands and the bat and the case in the current.
Only when he stopped washing did he really hear the river, and listening to it he thought of the Golden Woman. How every time they see each other, their eyes always locked.
Stashing the bat in a pre-scouted spot under a thick clump of brush in the boulders near the bridge, he hopped back in his truck and drove away.
He overheard some people talking in the Chevron. For once they weren't talking about Hunting RoboPoe. Evidently there was some discussion about an incident. A violent incident, and terribly so. But the thing was, no one knew who did it. They wanted to know, yet no one had any idea. And the artist thought about this after he bought his $3.09 beer with the 42 ounces and the 8% alcohol by volume. He thought, gosh, why would they want to know who did that? They never cared about the books the artist wrote. If you're not gonna care who authors the great books, why would you care about who authors the great social justice? It just didn't make any sense. More importantly, he found that in order to do Nietzsche justice, he would need to read his works again.
"It's not only about a screenplay," the artist reminded himself aloud atop many an icy peak, and whilst sluicing himself in raging Alpine cataracts, "it's about really, truly, actually being the Overman."
COONSKIN (II)
He'd been reading Poe's works as part of his training in order to get inside the killer's mind. And he had to say, Poe's stories were inspirational as hell. Tortures leaped out of his brain regularly now. Before he started watching the show, Coonskin probably would have thought that coming up with tortures was a sad indication of being dehumanized. But it wasn't true. Not this time. RoboPoe wasn't human. In reality, Coonskin only wanted to do a good job. He wanted to get as many points as he could from the scoring audience when the time came. When somebody spotted RoboPoe last week behind a mini-mart, she got a brand-new sofa for chucking a Molotov cocktail at him. Not only that, she got to meet Rutger Hauer in his new body, looking exactly like that android he played in Blade Runner. RoboHauer presented her with the Medal of Vigilance right in front of the Slab of Justice and everything.
Some guy up north made the news for shooting up a room thinking RoboPoe was inside.
Coonskin knew it the show was awful, but after you watched a few episodes, he noticed, you got sucked into it. Mostly, everybody on the show just kind of stood around looking poor and saying this was their greatest adventure ever, same as the producers done told 'em. "But that one guy's sister-in-law," Coonskin thought, "she's got a sweet rack and cusses funny."
"He's around here, my enemy," Coonskin further thought, "skulking in the woods nearby. That ol' skunk. Where's a dog? I need a dog to drink my beer with and talk a little trash 'bout RoboPoe. If I had a plastic rocking chair and a plastic shotgun on my lap, I could park it next to my trusty ol' animatronic dog and keep a real good lookout for that ol' skunk and arch-enemy. Maybe get a loop of cricket sounds piped in. I can feel it. I can feel the show getting closer. And I really do have to get that money. It's the only way I'll ever get out of here and be able to make a real life. I overheard some visitors while I was paddling canoe, trying to ignore the increasing feeling that I'm over-training again. Can't cut a single hour. It sounded like they were scouting locations for the show."
The day prior, Coonskin had taken the bus an hour north by car. Took three times as long on the bus because they went a weird roundabout way, frequently stopping. He had all his gear packed up as carry-on sufficient for him to camp out a couple nights, there being an area he researched which held a lot of terrain suited to RoboPoe's sensibilities. Initially Coonskin planned on reading Poe's works aloud in however many Gothic locales it took until RoboPoe 's hearing "his" work respectfully presented drew him out for the killin'. That was the ideal plan, if Coonskin got lucky. However, after meeting a woman on the bus, Coonskin figured he'd get better hunting results if she was the one doing the reading.
Taking the bus was a tawdry experience. Seating so compact as to verge on inhumane. Half the people there all sharing hacking coughs, threat of disease on every surface. The people in back said there was a guy just off who sat talking on the bus for literally fourteen hours straight and never stopped talking for even one second the whole time. The woman next to Coonskin, who had a pretty face, a nice figure, and intense eyes, wore a hoodie that hid her hair. By the paint on her clothes Coonskin surmised she was an artist. She was dressed quite well. But there were a few tiny bits of paint splash--almost as though placed there for effect, like the torn spots in the form-fitting jeans which hugged her legs. Those she held straight in the air against the back of the tall vacant seat in front of her. Coonskin thought she seemed impressed when he responded, "I'm hunting RoboPoe." Some passengers around them listened in. One was a repo-man with a Ph.D. in something mathematical. Another guy knew everything Coonskin knew about off-world colonies and life in the anti-gravity cities drifting high above. There was also a woman on the bus who talked to herself. Most of what she had to say was lewd. A woman who got on and who stayed till the next stop asked Coonskin if he had heard about the earthquake. "What earthquake?" Coonskin said. She said it was all over the news, that an earthquake was going to happen. "What?" he said. "Since when do they predict earthquakes?" To which the woman replied, "No, it's for real. It's on all the news. There's going to be a gigantic earthquake. It's over. It's all over." Coonskin asked her a little more, and finally she said that she knew because God had told her.
Lizzie, the young woman with her legs up on the seat and the intense eyes, showed me some of her favorite videos on her laptop. Ads kept popping up with dead celebrity android endorsements looking exactly like the real thing and all saying the same thing: "I want you to know...I'm Hunting RoboPoe!"
We're all Hunting RoboPoe! Together, we can show him what for. We will never forget what this monster has done. Honor the heroes. To enter a book burning event near you, click here.
We want you to know...we're Hunting RoboPoe!
"Your ass is grass, boy!" Coonskin heartily pronounced after the ad, following up this statement with an uncontrollable whoop as he looked at Lizzie's legs bouncing around and thought about killing and winning money and prizes. Lizzie loved how much Coonskin wanted to kill RoboPoe.
"Why don't you join me?" Coonskin said. "Join me in my hunt. My hunt...to bring this android piece of shit to justice by shooting him. What, are you too busy?"
"No, I'm free. Freer than you. Are all androids pieces of shit to you?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean I'm not sure I like your attitude toward AI. Is everyone not like you a piece of shit. Because if that's what you think, fuck you, you're the piece of shit."
"Are you AI?"
Lizzie looked out the bus window next to her. Didn't reply.
STRIKING EAGLE (III)
The artist decided to breeze through The Birth of Tragedy and Untimely Meditations and devote more attention to Human, All Too Human and The Wanderer and His Shadow because he preferred the aphorisms. Nietzsche's early works he did find interesting, but Nietzsche simply hadn't yet put in his 10,000 hours of practice required for proficiency. By the latter two volumes he spoke loud and clear because he had conquered his addiction to Wagner. He was pissed off by then, and had nothing to lose.
Human, All Too Human (HATH) hath an aphorism to which the artist happened to randomly turn opening the book, number 178, titled The Effectiveness of the Incomplete which reminded the artist of a blog post he wrote about how leaving something to the imagination counts. He wondered, did his copy of the book open most readily to a page he used to visit years ago, and which may have influenced his thought without his even knowing it? "It's possible," he thought. "I've been addicted to Nietzsche for a lot of years."
NIETZSCHE DOC
DYNAMITE!
He's the German philosopher in the 1880s depicted with the giant mustache who says, "What does not kill me makes me stronger."
Misrepresented in death by his sister, who altered a book he had abandoned and gave it to Hitler as an all-purpose excuse for evil in a moral vacuum, for decades the misplaced idolatry of the Nazis for Nietzsche ruined his posthumous reputation, but in the 1950s scholarship revealed the error and his thought has been widely used ever since by disparate groups and individuals for varied ends.
In the excellent 2016 BBC documentary "Genius of the Modern World--Friedrich Nietzsche", engaging host historian Bettany Hughes cogently distills Nietzsche's often notoriously elusive ideas. And she visits scholars with their own observations.
For example, one scholar responds to the question of who is a Nietzschean Ubermensch or Overman, "An Overman is one who is no longer reliant on external goals." It is someone "who is able to commit to goals that you set yourself."
The documentary travels to the areas in Europe where he lived, showcasing the panoramic views of Sils Maria, Switzerland, the forests, rivers, and snow-capped mountains that inspired a philosophy of celebrating this life here and now and finding joy in overcoming obstacles and thereby reaching new heights.
Born in Rocken, Germany, in 1844, the philosopher who said, "I'm not a man, I'm dynamite!" began life as the son of a Lutheran minister in a household that, according to Hughes, "lived and breathed Christianity." It has been said of Nietzsche that he did not speak until he was four. It was at that age that his father died, an early event which shook young Nietzsche's faith.
In his early twenties he decided not to follow in his father's footsteps, but instead became a professor of Philology (Linguistics today) at Basel, Switzerland, the youngest professor in the university's history.
At this time he met Richard Wagner. Wagner was thrilled to have the young philosopher as a fan whose academic stature lent the composer additional weight. But after the opening of the new theater in Wagner's honor at Bayreuth and the production of his opera, The Ring, Nietzsche was deeply disappointed.
Itching to spread his wings, Nietzsche cited ill health (accurately enough) and resigned from the university, crisscrossing Europe and spending "the rest of his adult life in a state of nomadic solitude."
But he had, as Hughes observes, "his mind for company."
COONSKIN (III)
On the bus, Coonskin found, pretty much everybody knew what was up on any given subject. He made this observation to Lizzie casually. The woman who talked all the time to herself, more or less hoping somebody would join in, Coonskin thought, happened to mention that she'd been on the streets off and on since childhood. Since childhood, imagine that. Coonskin wondered how the people on the bus knew that one guy had been on for fourteen hours. "Some people," Lizzie said, still looking out the window, "stay on the bus as long as they can because they have nowhere else to go."
To Coonskin it felt weird to sit without paddling. The foliage was incredible. Muted mustard and brilliant explosions of deepest orange dotted the tall green forest rising all around. The day was gray, and heavy gray clumps of fog drifted over the river and held fast throughout the mountains. At one point the bus driver pulled over, got up from the seat, stood facing everyone on the bus, and in an authoritative manner declared, "All right! I smell weed!" To which everyone on board correctly yelled back as one, "IT'S A DEAD SKUNK!" Apologizing, the driver sat back down and pulled off. When Coonskin called out, "Not that we wouldn't smoke a dead skunk," everybody got a kick out of it. Lizzie couldn't believe Coonskin was single. She said she bet his girlfriends all loved coming to the park for canoe rides.
"All of them, right. You're so nice to me," he said. "I can't believe you're single, either."
"Oh good," she said, "because I'm not. Although I might be soon," she quickly added, followed up by a subject-changing question: "Which of Poe's works will you read first?"
"Well, you know, I was kind of hoping you would do the reading." They had been spending so much of their time looking at each other as they talked, neither of them noticed the stop until they were suddenly on it. For a long moment Coonskin had to wonder if Lizzie was going to get off the bus with him. He couldn't ask her though, not in the rush of having to grab up his carry-on and swiftly vacate. Moving as fast as he could meant no time to even turn around to see if she was following him, like in a Greek myth. Was it really too good to be true?
Then, ah, he saw that she had gotten off with him, just the two of them in front of the run-down gas station where the bus had stopped. The excitement he felt watching the bus roar away in a cloud all its own was a million times better than anything he had ever felt before, and as they adjusted their packs pretending to care about old notices on the cork board outside the tiny market adjacent, looking at Lizzie's wild eyes and heart-shaped face he wondered what it would be like to hold her in his arms.
STRIKING EAGLE (IV)
Moderation in all things is immoderate.
Affirmation of life is in experience.
The vitality substitutes of external validation run the world into the ground.
These thoughts and a thousand others turned over and over again in the artist's mind as he pedaled his bike out to the mountains early in the morning. He wore a black knit cap and a dark hoodie with the hood pulled up and loosely cinched sufficient to resist falling back in the misty morning wind while he rode, seeing only a few drivers pass. One was a rig with the tailgater's lights illuminating political bumper stickers.
"HATH 465," he chuckled. And later on when he started to think about the whole thing with the razor wire and the bat and all, he thought, "The Wanderer and His Shadow number 38, by golly," and chuckled again.
In the dark gray backpack which the artist wore were several items valuable to him, chiefly the notebooks he had going on and the hatchet he brought.
He thought about times he'd had to discipline his fellow man. Times he'd had to deliver fuckin' piledrivers to the face in the goddam street. He thought about the bizarre fact that people detested hearing him relay his sundry asskickings. The hypocrites. They loved violence in the movies because of imagining themselves doing the punching. But they hated to hear about the real thing from him.
COONSKIN (IV)
Inside they left their packs behind the counter with a greasy-haired young blonde woman wearing a t-shirt that said Now In Decadent Candy Bar Flavor. The TV bolted securely into a corner at the ceiling trained everyone's eyes on the hunt for RoboPoe. Coonskin didn't want to advertise the fact he was in on it himself, and was glad that Lizzie didn't mention it. He grabbed a couple orange juices, a few bags of peanuts, some chocolate, a package of four baked tofu squares, and a mini-size mouthwash.
"They're making a RoboPoe movie now," the cashier said. Coonskin and Lizzie were the only ones in the sliver of a store. "Gonna use actual androids in some roles, they say."
"It's enough to make your mind shift in your skull," he said as he paid, "like a frog re-positioning itself in mud." Recalling the Doors line he laughed aloud without explanation and they left. Not long thereafter while they were walking down the old dirt road, enjoying the silence, or so Coonskin thought, Lizzie remarked on his inexplicable bark of laughter in front of the cashier.
This reminded Coonskin that those who jump quickly into favor with each other tend to jump just as quickly out, and put him in the slightly awkward position of having to defend himself successfully without making her feel foolish or beaten. He managed, barely. Mostly because it started raining.
"You aren't going to record me reading anything aloud are you?"
"No way," he said, anxious to avoid any further kinks in the carpet. "I will not record you reading anything at all."
"Don't you think RoboPoe suspect a trap?"
"Absolutely," he affirmed. "But I intend to shoot him before he spots me. He thinks he's so smart. His ego is his weakness. If you look at the history of Poe, he can't turn down a challenge. Thinking of Napoleon's bravery facing his own troops, and hearing Beethoven, he accepts any challenge assured of his extremely satisfying victory and his conquered adversary's ignominious defeat. If I read this egotistical android right, he'll show up, sooner than later, thinking he'll be able to best me and win you."
"What makes you think he won't?"
"Because I'm better. Way better."
He was glad he brought protection. Didn't want to rush anything too fast though, so he started pitching the tent. Lizzie had her own, but Coonskin's was bigger and he noticed that she left hers packed. He felt good about that while he checked his weapons. Bow assembled, .44 pistol loaded, kukuri machete sheathed at his side, he grabbed some throwing stars and a couple of swords and found a spot between two trees concealed in a stand. They were in a sandy, rolling high river bar spot with little groups of trees here and there. In the distance they could see a house on a hillside flat, looking to Coonskin as though it were ready to sink into a dismal tarn. Ragged mountains rose all around. Nearby, the rain-brown river carried occasional limbs which, slowly spinning, got caught against the verdure hanging at the bank. In the shadows of the towering mountains, the night would come soon. He got everything all set up, figuring exactly where she should stand and read aloud based on the terrain and Coonskin's position.
"Now remember," he said, "I'm a really good shot, but even I'm not perfect, so as soon as he shows up, you make sure to squat down inside this stump. I'll hold my fire for as long as I can."
"Ae you serious? You're really going to shoot him?"
"Honey, I'm in it to win it."
"Well, be sure you don't shoot when I'm in between!"
"Don't worry, I'll be careful. You just be sure to duck. Go down deep inside that stump when I tell you and stay down till I say you can come up. Got it?"
"I like the danger. Danger makes me feel alive."
"Which story are you going to read first?"
"I will read 'The Premature Burial' unless you prefer another choice."
"No, that sounds fine. You have my flashlight?" Lizzie clicked it on. "Remember to read slowly," Coonskin said. "Enunciate and project. You can do this. Don't worry, I'll see him long before he reaches you. You'll be safe in the stump. Once he shows up, just crouch down."
"What makes you so sure he'll be here?"
"This is Gothic country, ma'am, highly Gothic terrain. Reckon the show's been steadily movin' this direction, and I've seen signs, Poe-tents. Hold on...what's this?" Not far off he spotted it. The shadow of a skulking figure. "Get down," Coonskin whispered and pulled out his pistol.
STRIKING EAGLE (V)
"Well well well," said the artist, having found a nice scenic Alpine-looking spot to catch his breath, adding, "what have we hear?" with increasing interest indeed as he saw a vehicle appear on a switchback of the winding road below. It was a truck. He recognized it immediately. A truck from where he used to work.
Whereupon the artist went down the mountain alone, for even at a distance through the windshield from above he recognized the old man in the truck.
He reached the rig remaining careful to stay out of the old man's line of sight until he was nearly upon him. The old man said the artist surprised him and that he looked different.
"I have something for you," the artist said, slipping off his backpack and withdrawing the hatchet. The old man cried out, "God!"
"Haven't you heard?" the artist replied, chopping away voraciously, "God is dead!" thereby butchering both Nietzsche and the old man in one fell swoop. "Fuck you, liar!" the artist spat, chopping harder and harder. "I never did you any wrong! You talked shit about me! Fuck you! Fuck you! Worthless piece of fucking shit! Hypocrite! Look at me! Look at me! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!"
PART TWO
STRONGBOT (I)
THE BOSTON STRONGBOT'S naugahyde-like skin, durable as a truck bed liner, reflected the midday gleam of the chemtrail sky with a dull vinyl glow. Robokilrain pounded away, but nothing could stop the Strongbot's onslaught.
A clubbing left crushed Kilrain's nose, smearing wiring everywhere.
"Goddam you John L., rot in robohell."
"Eat roboshit, Jake," the Strongbot replied, delivering a blow to his opponent's midsection--the solar plexus, they called it--with the force of a horse's kick as the crowd roared.
The majestic serenity of the towering redwoods remained intact. Especially in the groves where every square inch sparkled in protective spray-on plastic like a vast department store Pompeii.
After the fight, when they had gotten paid, John L. and Jake stopped off at the cafe. Used to be the place didn't have anything to offer. Then a local contractor hired a bunch of androids. After that, the cafe started offering android-friendly energy items. But that wasn't what brought the Strongbot.
"Hey Robeo," Jake jeered, smashed parts of his face still shooting occasional sparks, "you gonna show some nuts this time?"
The town was crawling with tourists. Used to be hover cars were the rare ones.
"Must've hit you harder than I thought," John L. said. "You just mind your own business. That means you know them wires floppin' out your face? Shove 'em."
It was true, though. The waitress. She was a woman. A real woman. How would she react? Would she see that he was for real? As these thoughts passed through his artificially intelligent mind, the Strongbot, so closely resembling the long ago flesh-and-blood John L. Sullivan, first heavyweight boxing champion of the world, called in his day the Boston Strongboy on account he was from Boston and he was a very strong boy, noted a genteel contingent of Civil War re-enacting androids on loan assembled upon the patio beneath the welcome shade of the table umbrellas. The Civil Warbots called out heartily to John L. and Jake--John L. in particular--and praised them for the entertainment they had recently provided.
Upon receiving this information, a little human boy who had been watching asked his little human parents if that man over there really was the Boston Strongbot.
"Why don't you go ask him?"
The boy went over.
"What the hell do you want?" the Strongbot said.
"You don't sound like you're from Boston."
"You don't look like you'd know."
"What makes you so great?"
"Everything about me," the Strongbot said. "You always like this?"
"Everything like what?"
"Sonny boy, you just happen to be looking at the world's greatest fighting machine."
Sparks flew out of Robokilrain's face as he laughed.
"And the reason for that," the Strongbot went on, not noticing, "the one main reason even more than my piston-powered punches and durable, easy-wipe skin, is simply knowing that, eventually, everybody hates me. It's in my programming. Makes me a better fighter that way. The best."
"It's in your programming?"
"It's in my programming. When they made me, in order to get my personality just right, they studied the psychology of the toughest dudes ever prior to me."
"You mean not just the Boston Strongboy only? What dudes?"
"Well, this one samurai. Mind your business. Dammit, where's my sword?"
"Can I have your autograph?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"If you were a real robofan you'd know I'm completely illiterate."
"You mean you can't even write your own name?"
"Did I stutter? Don't be stupid. Of course I can't write my own name. I just told you I'm completely illiterate. It's in my programming."
"Why does not being able to write help?"
Robokilrain spoke up. "Because if he was writin', then he wouldn't be bustin' folks in the ch-ch-ch-ch--"
The Strongbot slapped Robokilrain on the back.
"--chops."
The boy returned to his table. Swivel stools groaned as the bots sat down at the bar.
"Hey Robeo." Robokilrain nudged.
The Strongbot looked up. There she was.
"You boys ready to order?"
She had what they called a million dollar smile. And she didn't treat bots different from anybody else.
"You go on ahead," John L. told Jake. "I ain't decided yet."
"Yeah, you work on that decidin'."
"What'll it be, sweetie?"
The Strongbot's chair groaned.
"Did you hear that?" said Jake, turning his bashed face toward John L. "Never mind. Let's see, can I get a pint of Durasell?"
"Will that be all?"
"Yeah, that'll do. Didn't make as much today as I'd hoped."
"And what can I get you, sweetie?"
Sparks crackled as Robokilrain chortled. "You heard it. She called me sweetie first."
The Strongbot's fist slammed into Jake's face so hard, it knocked him off the stool and into the wall several feet behind. The imprint of John L.'s fist was left in Jake's demolished face. The sprawled body of Robokilrain lay lifeless on the floor.
The boy pleaded with his parents to watch while the Boston Strongbot bashed open Robokilrain's head to get the chip inside, but they wouldn't let him. They turned him away and shielded him so that all he got to hear were a couple of thunks and the loud crack when the head burst, followed by the robust cheers of the Civil Warbots.
"Make that just the one Durasell," the Strongbot told the waitress, pocketing Jake's chip.
"Are you gonna put that chip in a new robot?" said the boy.
"I won't be the one to do it. But yeah, that's what'll happen."
While the Strongbot watched the waitress work, he imagined driving her. Together they could head out to the beach. He could see his reflection in the sliding glass door of the beer fridge. In the right light his eyes glowed laser red. He imagined being tender with her. Of gentle places to touch her. The small of her back, behind her ear. He imagined touching her face. What must her skin feel like? Soft, probably. Tender. He would be so careful. But it wasn't just touching her he wanted. She was exciting, yes, but in the end he wanted to give her something real. He wanted to take care of her.
Lines between organic and artificial life were crossed all the time. Legal cases kept cropping up where it was hard to make the call. Sometimes people took on roboparts, and sometimes the other way around. Generally speaking, if you saw a celebrity, it was actually artificial. Then of course you saw people dressing up in costumes so that tourists would think they were androids. Fleshbums and robohobos alike equally eking existence, finding shelter in the woods wherever possible.
"Busy today," the Strongbot said as the waitress passed by. Packed to capacity, the cafe rang with a cacophony of multiple animated conversations and the clinking sounds of people eating. Music from out on the patio blended with the noises of the televisions inside.
She smiled and nodded. "They keep me hoppin'!"
Her voice was like music to him.
Wiping down a table, she glanced up at the clock. "Only ten more minutes and I'm free!"
Apparently studying the better part of the pint of Durasell in his mitts, John L. grew contemplative with this news. Was this the time to ask her if she'd like to maybe do something with him sometime? The Strongbot wondered this while a commotion at the window drew attention.
The boy had his face pressed to the glass."It's him," he said, "it's really him!"
One of the Civil Warbots standing at the window let loose a long, low whistle. Then looked over at John L.
The bell on the cafe door jingled.
"Well, well, well," a voice pronounced in the doorway. The cafe hushed as a dapper figure entered.
"You're Gentleman Jim Corbot!" the boy cried aloud.
The Corbot ignored the boy. "Well, well, well," he repeated. "Look what we have here."
The tortured seat squeaked relief as the Strongbot rose and stood nose-to-nose with the Corbot.
"This ain't 1892," said John L. "Ain't been no three damn years since my last fight, neither."
"No point arguing with progress, old boy. You're looking at the face of the future."
"You about ready to get that bank clerk face of yours bashed the hell in?"
"Ha! You think you want to try? You don't have the skills! We all know how this turns out."
From among the Civil Warbots, the Nathan Bedford Forrest android spoke. "Alrighty fellers, let's take this on outside now," RoboForrest said. "No sense bustin' up the cafe."
""Mom! Dad!" cried the wide-eyed boy. "Did you hear that? We're gonna get to see them fight!"
A palpable excitement arose, quelled quickly by the waitress stepping around from behind the counter and pulling at the Corbot's arm. "Come on," she said, "there's nothing to prove. Besides, you promised to let me watch you train."
The words struck the Strongbot harder than sledge-blows to his head. The Corbot...was her date?
Dapper and smirking, Gentleman Jim Corbot escorted the lovely young woman outside to his waiting hover limo. A small crowd followed the pair out, marveling at their beauty. The Strongot watched while the two got in the car. When they were in, a black window descended. The Corbot motioned to the boy, who stood nearby visibly disappointed in the absence of the fight. The Strongbot watched the boy receive an autographed glossy photo, and a message from the Corbot which the placated boy relayed as the hover limo swiftly slid out of town down the Avenue and into the serenity of the majestic redwoods.
"Hey, Strongbot!" cried the boy, holding up the signed glossy of the smiling Corbot's face for everyone to see. "Gentleman Jim Corbot himself told me to tell you that he already kicked your ass a long time ago, and he doesn't have time for lowlifes like you on account he's too busy hunting RoboPoe! That, and plus he says you're a chickenshit!"
From among the Civil Warbots came a couple more long, low whistles. Only longer than before. And a good bit lower, too.
STRIKING EAGLE AND ROBOPOE (I)
The artist was covered in blood. The blood of his former coworker completely ruined his clothes, and that bothered him very much because he didn't have any money for more clothes...
