I am a salesman. I sell flower services. I sell flowers, but in my heart I like to believe I sell dreams. Sweet little lies that fall like raindrops, and shatter like a crystal vase after you've thrown it against the wall in anger.

Have you ever heard the story of Atlas? Yeah, that guy with the world on his shoulders. Well you've probably heard it as a Greek myth, but it's older than that. Anyway, he didn't start out with the world. No the guy started out with a plate of beans. He was a waiter in one of the first restaurants. Nobody knows the name of the place anymore, but we do know that they had the first tablecloths, and they were red. The napkins were red, the candles were red, the plates were made out of red clay, in fact at that time even people's skin was red, because of all the red clay dust, it didn't matter what color you were underneath the dirt, you were red anyway. Everyone was red, from the mayor to the little kid begging for apple cores on the streets, everybody was red. And Atlas? He was really red, because he sweat so much. The dust just stuck to him. Anyway. There he was in the restaurant, carrying plates of red beans and rice to people, when all of the sudden a snake dropped from the ceiling right on top of table seven, the one where the city council man and his mistress were eating. Everyone starts screaming and hollering red bloody murder. Atlas didn't miss a beat, he ran over to the table, looked at the snake, looked at the city councilman and his young mistress, and lifted the whole table right off the floor, and held it up to the ceiling. Oh, man, the room exploded in applause, here was this guy, sure he was kind of big, and kind of tall, but not too big, and not too tall, but man could he ever lift tables. He had saved the city councilman, who later ran for and became the mayor in the city official's annual fight to the death. So that's how it started and then people kept asking Atlas to lift more things, here lift this bed, beds at the time were only a little bit bigger than tables, people weren't really into sleeping all that much back then. So Atlas lifted the bed, and then a long bench with people on it, and then a small tree, and then a whole house and on and on, until he was lifting the known world, which really wasn't that big, but still pretty impressive for a local boy, but then again everyone was a local boy back then. The point is by the time the story of Atlas lifting the whole of the known world got to the Greeks size of the known world had gotten a lot bigger.

Get Yourself Bigger

"I'm here because I want to be. That's the only reason. James, I'm going to call you James, that's ok right? Anyway, I'm here because I want to be here. You have to get that right. When I'm ready to leave I'm going to go find my wife and tell her I'm ready to get things right. But right now I'm too small." That was the first thing Henry said to me. We were sitting in my office, you probably know the drill. You've seen enough movies about the marginalized and depressed. You've seen Edward Norton stare intently at the camera and turn away quickly. Turning into himself, as if there was something deeper there.

I am not a doctor. I don't have the qualifications for this job. I'm not even sure how I ended up doing this. The patients, we call them clients now, talk to me like I am there therapist, because that's what they are used to doing. I guess it is a kind of therapy. Its not part of their weekly hour with their actual therapist. I am supposed to make notes, and I do, because they, the clients, say really interesting things. 

Henry for instance is obsessed with his size. He has been diagnosed with Body Dismorphia, along with the usual list of disorders and maladies that pull people out of the general population, by which I don't mean prison, I mean the actual general population. Henry beat up a man at a bar downtown. He wasn't even involved in the initial fight. Which was started because a man thought a girl was trying to take his coat, when she was in fact making sure it didn't fall. Anyway, Henry beat that man into permanent brain damage. The victim now rides around town on a tricycle because he can't balance on a bicycle anymore. 

Henry turned himself in, two weeks later. He said he was afraid of doing it again. He said he didn't have his head right. I've been talking to him twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays for about six months now. 

The fucking thing is this: Henry is right. Here's what I wrote down from our last session. 

"James, the whole thing with the bodybuilding, I realize now that it wasn't about muscle. I was just being dumb. I was getting bigger in the wrong place. I should have been getting bigger on the inside. You know? Like, oh man, I should have paid more attention in school, what do they call it?" Philosophy is what I chimed in with. "No that's not it, I don't know what it is but that ain't it." Then the meds kicked in a little bit and he lost focus and started staring at the wall. They do that sometimes, the clients. Everyone does it, but the drugs the state gives people here, the drugs exaggerate certain things.

"I'm like a child staring up at the clock at school." He said, this is the sort of disconnected thing that you have to follow with these patients because when you do, oftentimes they end things up in a beautiful way, this is what I have learned. "I'm like a child staring up at a clock on the wall at school, and I don't even see the map of the world next to it, and that's the thing that is ticking away and not the clock. Everyone is ticking away, all of us, and we don't see it because we're focused on the thing that's moving." This is a sentiment that is repeated a lot in here. The world is moving on, and we the witnesses and the victims and the perpetrators are not, because we are beholden to some sort of different time scale than that which rules the outside walls.

I go home to my apartment and think about these things. Then I go to work, I do not work full time at the hospital. They should call it an asylum like they did in the old days, because nobody is getting better, they are only accepting that the staff along with everyone else will become indifferent to them, just like everyone else in their lives. Eventually everyone will stop visiting, parents, siblings, wives, children, everyone stops visiting in the end. Life covers up profundity with reality, and so it goes.

Here sits Henry, a boat against the current, and I can't help but agree with him. He is too small on the inside, and so are all of us. The thing is though that the space that we try to fill is becoming increasingly infinite. We are all trying to bridge an ocean, and Henry is the only person I know who acknowledges that his lifeboat may not breach that ocean, and that is why he beat a man into infirmity. God bless Henry., 

A Relationship

She walked into the room. It was a very cold room, the kind of cold that sticks to your skin and not your clothes, wet and chilly.
"I know what you did" Was the first thing George said. It was a really awkward way to start up a confrontation. In hindsight George would later rethink this tactic, and swear to himself that a build-up would be better than barreling directly into the matter, but now he carried on conspicuously. "You fucked him didn't you? You fucked that bartender."

The accusation caught Harriet off-guard. Not, because it wasn't true. It was certainly true. She had engaged in sexual congress with the bartender who introduced himself as Red. A man long in limb and crooked and yellow in the teeth, but still there was something she found in him.

"Yes. I did George." She said unapologetically. This was the end then. Before this very moment the relationship may have continued. This was the branching moment, where the spiral arm careened off the path that both of them had imagined laying in each others arms.

The coldness, the factual nature in which she said "Yes. I did George." cut him. It was to him as if she couldn't imagine another outcome. As if she couldn't imagine a world where his trust in her wasn't betrayed. As if she could not imagine a world where her emotional engagement in him outweighed her carnal needs. Of course that's not why it happened.

Now for Harriet the conversation took her back to that night. The drink, the drink after drink. The fear. Things with George were moving to fast, they were going too well. When this happened with Brian he had left her, just before she graduated. She and Brian had a whole life planned together, and that was less than nothing, and now she was beginning to imagine that with someone else, and lighting cannot strike twice, especially if you make sure it doesn't.

So that's how it ended between them.

"Yes. I did George"

"Jane, you are not going to believe this." I'm practicing what I'm going to say. I've been pacing up and down in front of her apartment building for a full twenty minutes. "Listen, Jane I've been offered a..." No, that's not going to work. "Jane, I'm sorry, but I can't let this go on anymore."

Yes that's it, I've got to make a change. It is still cold out. Even though we've had three days of sunshine and all the snow has melted and birds are singing in the trees they keep planting by the sidewalks. The trees that are never going to get older or bigger, but are going to die choked by cigarette butts and empty plastic water bottles, and chewing gum scraped onto their trunks.

I'm suddenly glad I'm not a tree. But maybe it wouldn't be so bad. If I were a tree I wouldn't have to see her with him. I know what they're up to. I know how she looks at him, when I'm in the room. Dance lessons, you bet your fucking ass, dance lessons. I'll eat my hat. What kind of dance do you do on the mattress when I'm not around?

No. Poison. That's a poison pill, that thought will grow vines and choke your mind. Stop it.

Just another nip from the flask. Wasn't it supposed to be warm today? We've had three days of sunshine, and the last time I read the newspaper my horoscope said I'd feel the sunshine coming through.

The homeless man on the corner, didn't ask me for change. He just let me walk on by. Do I look that bad? I know this coat is ripped, I keep meaning to sew it shut, but I've only got a little bit of time left to tell Jane that I'm leaving.


"Jane!" I shout up at her window. There aren't any lights on but I know she's there, hips tipped up to heaven and him pointing south at hell.

"Do you hear me Jane?" Lights go on and off in the other windows. Another sip, another smoke. Is she coming down? Should I run? Hearts beating faster. Why? I practiced this. There's a cop on the corner down the street.

"Jane I'm leaving now." I shout. I shouldn't shout so much. It is ripping up my throat.
I've got to go and sew my coat.

Tommy Andrews Lost His Tooth On March Twenty-Third

Last week Tommy Andrews came down the street holding his arm that was bleeding. He looked really pale and his shirt was all red. He was shouting at me to get inside and to have my mother call an ambulance. That's when the car drove by again and this time they slowed down and shot Tommy Andrews in the face. This morning I found one of his teeth.

All week long I've been staring in the mirror. At school I excuse myself from the classroom and go stand in front of the mirror in the boy's room. I look at my eyes for so long that they start tearing up. I think the teachers are just glad that I'm not talking to Jeremy Gunderson anymore.

I haven't been outside in a while. I'm not afraid that the methheads will get me. I know Tommy Andrews did something to them, and you can't mess with methheads, its like kicking a sack of badgers, you leave that to the police.

I just don't feel safe. I mean if a great guy like Tommy Andrews can get his head blown off in What Cheer Iowa, where are you safe? Tomorrow the sun could explode and we'd know about it eight minutes too late. I suppose there's nowhere safe and that I should just be ready to have my head blown off by methheads any minute, wherever I am.

I suppose I should take Tommy Andrews' tooth to somebody. I'm sure his family will want it. But how do you give them a part of their son? Here Mrs. Andrews, here's this tooth, I'm pretty sure that it's Tommy's. He took the football team to state, and here is his tooth. Do you think Mrs. Andrews will think about when she was pregnant with Tommy? Will she hold his tooth and think about the head that that tooth used to be in, and how that head was once in her belly? I bet that would be weird. I know my mom has some of my baby teeth in an old pill bottle somewhere, and whenever I ask her why, she says I won't understand until I have kids of my own.

Tomorrow is April 1st, and we're all going to the funeral. I hope Mrs. Andrews doesn't think I'm telling a joke when I hand her the tooth. I hope I don't laugh on accident because of how nervous I am.

Hot News

Hey Friends!

Due to a hatred of everything in it I am putting a full stop on that novel I was so jazzed about a couple of months ago.

We'll see how I feel about it in the future, but right now it just reads as a bunch of pretentious drivel, really it drips with angst.

So until I can cool down and come back to the work I am going to return to my first love, stories set in the Midwest in small dying towns!

Get ready for some guilt and nostalgia mixed up together with some prime self-hatred and regrets, we're heading back to the Midwest where everything started.