Confessions of a Fuck-Up Artist!

Hey kids... what time is it?

That's right, it's the Super-Astro Jesus Learning Hour with noted genius Senator Ted Cruz - chairman of the Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness.

Yayyyyy!

That's right, you'll be stupefied as the honorable Senator filibusters out some down-home know how to them NASA eggheads with a little help from the one book they ain't read yet - the Good Book. Watch in awe as he simultaneously debunks the myths of climate change and the democratic process as a stopgap against an inevitable environmental apocalypse. Behold as he explains the delicate chaos mathematics behind the butterfly wing flutter of two dudes kissing in San Francisco that escalates into severe draught over the heartland. Witness, as he explains the complex formula that demonstrates that our nation's space program is little more than Obamacare for rocket-scientists and astronauts.

Yes, boys and girls we have some fun times ahead of us and if nothing else, Ted Cruz's Space and Science Subcommittee promises to teach even an atheist to pray for some common sense.

"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” ~ Voltaire

Terminus: Cold wave on the silver dusk. It's thirty degrees and the wind chill drops it to a steady Fuck This. Here at the Y fighting the fat, poison, and the quick years' toll on the vanity. The arctic gusts outside have scattered the New Year's resolve from the crowds that have packed the weight rooms, yoga classes, and stair-climbers. Only a skeleton crew of the wind-whipped and bone-chilled hardcore have mustered for Better Me Duty tonight.

You got me, still high from the bowl I smoked after work with the Little Baller before the Mad Max commute down 85. I'm not here to look better, no matter how much I might wish I did, I'm here to burn rage somewhere where I won't get arrested or get my ass kicked.

You got the Meat Squad regulars. A cadre of brothers with the physiques of old He-Man action figures. They huddle around the free weights, bench 300 to warm up and take glugs from plastic milk bottles filled with brown-green protein cocktails. They talk grid-iron ballet, vitamin supplement immortality and the latest innovations in the delicate art of repetitively lifting heavy objects while grunting.

Then you got the Amazon MILFs of Decatur and they're a different story. Whereas the Meat Squad workout with a recreational camaraderie these ladies of savage tattoos and punk riot dyed hair, hit the machines with the single minded-focus of martial arts film protagonists training during montage sequences. They do not grunt. They do not laugh. They do not allow a single crack in their stone facade glowing with sweat. They clearly did not come here to make friends or fuck around. They did not come here to simply workout but rather they came here to work.
And looking at the men and then looking at the women who outnumber us four to one I begin to see why.

Men workout normally so they can look better... but the women workout so they do not become invisible. They are fighting to be seen in a world that grows blind to them a little more with each passing year and while I live in a world that tells me to be confident, they live in one where they are told to be eternally as beautiful as they were when they were young. When they were thin. When they didn't have kids or bills or an accumulation of experiences that register as history for a guy but gets labeled baggage once the ownership of a vagina is involved.

Such are my musings when I pop off the elliptical after three miles and the entirety of the GZA's Liquid Swords only to collide into one of the Amazon MILFs of Decatur. She's got some mass on her, enough to make our impact mosh worthy and send me sprawling back. I try to regain my balance, stomp on a loose shoelace with the other foot and almost go sprawling ass first to the floor.

But I don't.

I'm hovering off the back of my heels at a 45 degree angle and I look down to see she's got a fist clenched around the collar of my t-shirt keeping me from plummeting.

With a heave on her end and some dance floor muscle memory activated off the lizard brain, we both manage to get me back on my feet.

I go to apologize and then realize I can't say a word.

Her eyes. Pale gray. Gray as the winter clouds. Pale enough to shine full moon luminescent, two glowing pearls clutched in black mascaraed crow feet. Pull back. Southern face, rounded but sharp chinned, full of cheek, wise-ass smile that the belles here wear no matter how the fashions or the times may change around them. She's a plucky juggernaut, long black stringy hair, thick curved and a candy colored winged scarab sits tattooed beneath the v-neck peek with mandibles ready to bite stares that wander to deep down its lair.

Her fist remains clenched around my collar.

Blink.

She pulls me into her. We kiss. Hard. As if it's been years since we've kissed anyone outside of a ghost or a memory. As if it was the end of the world outside. As if the cold was dropping, faster and faster, icing over our inhibitions until the possibilities glitter off their surface . Outside the world has frozen over. We're trapped inside the gym with no source for heat but each other. The Amazon MILFs of Decatur take over the Y. They exert their dominion over the few men within their ranks. They divvy us up between their attentions. Most of them go for the bigger and younger guys in the Meat Squad. But a few, not many, choose me.

They are the mother of two who still remembers knocking a molar out of a skinheads jaw at a Corrosion of Conformity show back in '88, the frustrated sales rep who at night opens up a bottle of cheap red and wages war with a diminished but not defeated talent across the empty canvas, the rockabilly demonette who buried a good man too soon and left her with a bed that's been empty too long since.

And her, my pale eyed savior, my champion.

Who tells me after another feral night of slaying frost giants and lovemaking...

"I'm sorry I didn't see you there." She lets go of my t-shirt sending me to plummet vertical back into reality. "You okay?"

I nod. I smile weakly at the wall behind her. I apologize and hit the lockers.

I don't stop trembling until I'm in the car lighting up one of the cigarettes I was going to quit smoking this year. It's twenty degrees and I'm still sweating.

Deep breath. Start up the car. Blow it off, let the cold grow until it freezes dry these visions of a MILF uprising at the Y.

It's just a god damn job, it's just a god damn job...

After getting to dance in Vampire Country with my favorite sexy satanist, after getting chased out of the Star Bar for smoking a joint with no apology, after the Cafe Perilous kicked us to the curb for drinking after hours, after a surprise NYE kiss from a tres horny red-head, after pulling my boy out of a fight at the Yacht, your humble correspondent - at long last - gets to crash with comic book gifts from the Magpie.

So now, the weakest link in a chain of super-freaks, packs his bowl, fires up the Wu-Tang (miss you Bud 24-7-365), and crashes into a world of four color action and Never-Never Land fantasies.

2014,know that I did my best and count myself amongst a whole shit load of better angels who did the same.

10-4, over and out.

There's a hole in my Christmas the size of my father and every year it gets a little easier to fill. The first Christmas was the hardest. His absence was an implosion, a black-hole where he should have been and it was truly strong enough to suck all the light out of those closest to him. The second Christmas was like a boxer entering the ring with a phantom limb firing left hooks off the stump at the end of their shoulder. It's a match you know you can't win but fuck if there aren't so many people who cheer with blind love for you to give it your all.

This year was different. This year for me the hole in my Christmas the size of my father resembled a silver-age comic book version of himself. Think Curt Swan drawing Invisible Kid or Phantom Girl, a silhouette version of him blank as an uncolored page and outlined with dots that look as if to aid a pair of unseen scissors ready to slice him back out of reality. He loved those old whacky Legion comics from his childhood. Used to tell me how he and his school boy chums would run around in the empty lots of early 60s Brooklyn playing out the latest epic out of Adventure Comics. He was always Cosmic Boy, he insisted, but as a child I suspected he would be Brainiac Five with his still lingering English accent and already formidable book smarts.

So it was easier this year to see at the edges of my sober imagination - (for mom I promised not to get high today... at least until we watched the new Doctor Who) - my father's ghost in silver-age glory. Briefly, when I opened up one of the gifts mom got me. The first two volumes of the collected Grimjack by Ostrander and Truman. This was the one gift I didn't see coming. This was what comics where like when I was my father's age when he was pretending to be Cosmic Boy or Brainiac 5. Grimjack was the game I played in my head, alone in the woods of Van Cortland park, swinging a sword branch and a pine needle in my mouth that heralded a future cigarette. In Yo-Town, Yonkers, New York I was just a creepy kid. But for brief afternoons alone I could be the hardest mercenary in Cynosure, the magical city where parallel dimensions meet.

It stuck with me so much so that I basically wrote my first novel as if Timothy Truman was drawing it in front of me as I typed.
Ah, but that's not what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say is that at some point the hole the size of your father, or your mother, or that person you will never love as much as anyone else before or after, it eventually gives you something back. A memory unlocked the way a cut scene might be unlocked from a video game. Or it won't even it be that, it may be as simple as even as seeing something you just know that missing person would love. You'll have this moment as if getting a bittersweet joke that now it is yours alone to laugh at.
Eventually, you even start to realize deeper than surface logic, that there are still people you love who need you now and it will suck because you will worry about them in ways you never worried before.

The hole in our Christmas the size of our love is not just a traveling grave that cannot be buried, it is also an escape hatch, one leading from the world we live to the one we once lived in. There, briefly amongst the growing shades, what is lost waits briefly for you again.

Sometimes, though, it just takes a few tries to get it open.

What I learned in 2014
1. You can use the camera on your phone to see which people on the bus are really there and which ones are actually the restless dead that travel hidden amongst us in plain sight.
2. That Nostradamus didn't say shit about no Ebola or ISIS going down in '14.
3. At the intersection of US 23 and Memorial you'll find two signs. The one east of 23 marks the city of Decatur, the one west, Terminus. However the space between these two signs is technically within neither city's domain and as such rests beyond its laws. Which means that yes, it is legal to sell mandrills from the back of a van while in this legal no-man's land.
4. Those tawdry pleasures that can only be bought in a alley with a fistful of bloodied gold teeth.
5. When playing AD&D always remember to check your human privilege, or at least do so until you're past 5th level. Also good advice for when you're not playing AD&D come to think of it.
6. No good comes to those who attempt to make a Molotov Cocktail out of their bong.
7. There isn't much that doesn't make Baby Jesus cry.
8. It takes months to get the taste of a man's severed ear out of your mouth. At least, that is, the first ear. After that the flavor lingers merely days before you hunger for another.
9. If the only thing you hate more than being given orders is when folks don't obey your own, then you're not a rebel but just another broke-ass aristocrat posing as one.
10. Don't carry a grudge further than you can walk.