Note to Lynch.

This isn’t the fluff piece your paper commissioned me for. This isn’t my glowing editorial on the fruits of living on that hell, Ortega. This isn’t my re-dubbing of ‘Long Sleep Cruise’s as ‘Dreamscapes’, because the former invoked something too akin to death, and was too damned accurate..

No, old friend. Of all the true stories I never wrote, this won’t be one of them. Feel free not to print it. We both know you won’t. But read it at least. Read it and think about what we’ve done. What men like us did to make this story possible…and what hell awaits us for cultivating so much of it in the verse.

And May you sleep as well as I have when all that thought wears you out. There’s your fluff piece for you Lynchy. I ain’t slept in 3 days.

PS….this story has pictures. Pass em out at your cocktail parties. The aristocrats love a good ghost story.

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To the Edge and Looking Off

What do you do when the campfire tales you delight in scaring each other with, turn out to be more than fancy?

You stop going camping.

Jigsaw faces.

Missing cheeks, lopped off lobes, lidless eyes and lipless ‘oh’s’.

The way they look at me. The way they gape. They seem to ask me ‘who’s skin are you wearing?’ That’s the thought that makes me purge. Who’s skin am I wearing? What skin is sewn into the inner lining of this fine Cotton Suit?

Someone else’s. I’m not myself. Today I’m that person. That lonely pioneer who set out to make his life on the edge of the abyss, and found something other. Today I’m the man who’s senses defy his own reason in a violent uprising of bodily spasms, until finally, reason packs up and goes back to the core. But I can’t go back with it. I’m looking into the other now, no matter which way I turn.

I came here to turn. To spin. That was my assignment. I’ve been out here on an alliance cruiser touring this stretch of nothing, waiting for a colony ship to derelict, fo