The voices are back.
But not the ones from the elevator. They’re now coming from under the stairwell.
It’s a small crawl space. I used to put my shoes under there.
Not anymore.
The voices could get angry, and I don’t want that.
The voices.
They’re back.
I’m introduced at a party as Dr. Otto Rollo, even though I’m not a doctor nor am I German. I think I recognize someone from Brussels, but aren’t I in New York?
Is this jet lag?
There’s conversation about a lawsuit concerning contaminated drinking water, which I know nothing about, so I sit quietly watching a mountain of blue candle wax make its way across the table. I look for an opening, maybe something about water consumption or environmental law or even candle construction, but I have nothing.
I’m a post-Cold War poster child.
I can walk around Prague with my Walkman and listen to the new Fugazi tape.
I might even learn the language so that I can drink and screw and bum smokes like the locals.
We’re watching Bob Ross reruns on VHS and realize that at any given moment Bob could just slap a dusty old shack right there in the middle of his imagined Americana landscape with a few brush strokes and we’d all be totally amazed and completely satisfied.
We’d crash Brown parties ’cause there were more kegs and more girls and ’cause our dorms were just pasty kids listening to Cacteau Twins. We wanted broken glass and hash knives and nobody cared anyway who was coming or going and so this one time I ended up in this girl’s room who was a Psych major, or maybe it was Philosophy, and all she wanted to do was listen to In a Silent Way over and over so of course I stuck around for as many times as she wanted to play In a Silent Way.
There’s a problem with the bug zapper. Like, bugs aren’t actually dying when zapped. There’s the usual zapping sound and zapping light, but no bug execution, so to speak. So what I’ve got a moral quandary now: all these half-dead bugs at the bottom of the zapper cage just crawling to a slow death. What do I do about that?
Seagram’s 7 to start things off
Then some work around the house
To keep it respectable
Later, a visit from JP
Who brings whatever he could lay his hands on
That particular week
Inevitably, down to the beach
Which goes several days
And then this business
Will start
All over again
I never liked fishing
But the boys wanted to go
So I went along
There was waiting
A lot of waiting
And it was quiet
Maybe too quiet
Worst yet
The beer got warm
And I couldn’t thread
The hook
So let’s just say
It didn’t go well
“Oman will behave just like everybody else. Or else we’ll have to blow them up. They understand that. They’ll be fine.”
“If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.”
Editor’s Note: Individual “Shit Fascists Say” posts will be updated regularly as fascists continue to say more shit.
Ray spent Saturdays taking his 1979 Jeep Renegade apart, piece by piece, right down to the chassis. On Sunday, he’d put the whole thing back together. He did this every weekend, as far back as anyone could remember.
The Saturday morning setup went like this: lawn chair on the lawn, cooler of Hamm’s, transistor radio set to Oregon’s Golden Oldies, then laying out the tools, each sprayed with a spot of seafoam green to show ownership. After the setup, the first beer and a cigarette, then the job at hand.
As each piece came off the Jeep, Ray would carefully arrange the parts in the driveway and across the front lawn. Sometimes he’d line the parts up in the order they were taken off the Jeep, other times the arrangement would be more abstract; small groupings of similar parts, or piles that were all part of a certain area of the Jeep. There seemed to be some king of internal logic known only to Ray and nobody in the neighborhood could ever figure out what it was. By Saturday evening the Jeep was no longer a Jeep and the radio would be at a distorted volume. Nobody ever complained. Sometimes Ray passed out in the lawn chair, or in the grass, with the radio still blaring. Whatever time Ray got up on Sunday he’d start the process of putting the whole thing back together again. Come Sunday night the Jeep would be ready for another week and another dismantling.
So Dig This Big Crux 