| [from the desk of Stickboy]
You gotta have eyeballs! Bienvenue, mes amis! Our new strip, Cancer Puppy, editat per la comisaria de la Generalitat de Pretty Sure, is now available – in paper (PDF) or plastic (html) Once again, thanks to the fine and fair-minded gentlemen of Olios, particularly his eminence, Steve Wiley, for taking such tender care of us and for giving Pretty Sure as fine a home on the Web as there is. Don’t forget to peruse the site – Steven Mayers interviews saxophonist Bishop Norman Williams, Mike Skott McCullough reviews the new Modest Mouse album, and we’ve got the usual trenchant political commentary that only the Kensington Review can provide. Ay, there is mincing mallecho afoot, gentle reader – we are smack against an atheist wall. If you want to skip the usual liberal invective, feel free to take yourself straight to the strip – I won’t even know. I believe love is our gravity, our sanity, it’s all we have that binds us to this battered, beaten world. When I’m sure I’m going to unpeel, collapse (and I am so close, now, a whisper might tear me asunder), it’s all that props me up, tapes me together, takes my fingers from their fists, puts my hands back in my pockets. How will we prevail? Love and love only, and not thatwhich we render unto God – he does not wait for you, but to each other. Looking back over the candle flicker of my life, the flashlight packed with moribund batteries, smacking the side of it to make it shine, it was love that drove me onward, and desire. That and enough booze and dope to have stopped the Persians at Thermopylae. Of course, this was never the path to riches, and while most of my fellow Millburn High School graduates bought good shoes and worried about the fiscal year, I loaded up a used Nissan van and drove west, to Boulder, San Francisco. (Millburn High School, where blacks and Hispanics dream to tread). The first time I saw the Rockies, we had just come over a rise, Rickie Lee Jones’s “The Horses” on the stereo…at first I thought they were clouds. Five drunken weeks in Europe, a few trips to Mexico, the concrete and steel splendor of Manhattan…I had never seen anything like it. I want it all, but I’m sure there won’t be time. Not for every book and song. Try to plow through the box sets, but you’ll only remember the singles. And I wanted every note, every word. When will this Bohemian dream arrive at its sputtering end? Happiness is an accident, a hope, the shallowest of goals at best. To consider and contribute, this is all you get, if luck will have you. I seek no hereafter – this world is more than enough. I am loath to leave it, but I doubt I’ll ever find myself above it, seated at God’s feet, flights of angels singing me to sleep, though if Heaven is a library, I’ll take it. A café better yet, with bossa nova on the CD player, a view of earth beneath the clouds, and free refills. If it doesn’t kill you, it will make you weaker. Human life is an arc, it must conclude, and we are not meant to die with perfect hair, unblemished skin and perky breasts. I am so afraid of the end, the darkness and the drowning, that last gulp of air, the memory of every compromise and sin. How will it end? Cancer? Alzheimer’s? A ten-car Turnpike pileup? To die on America’s most hideous, malodorous road, when I’d had such grand ideas. To writhe in pain just south of Newark Airport, near Jersey Gardens, and measure all I left unfinished. I would be a craven suicide, but I’m ready to tussle, to take that smack full on, so sick of waiting. To be buried in my wedding suit, my organs parted out. Is it fatigue or dread of waiting? I can outsmart myself no longer, I want to know I have a soul, even if it dies with me, scuffed and chipped and dimming neon blue. Atheism is an absolute with which I can’t contend, I am a failure at living in the moment, as spontaneous as evening mass. I have stepped all the way to finale, am watching it hurtle toward me. Some afternoons I am a wreck the city has made, besmirched by my consumer debt, beleaguered by my household. My voice is air blown through a conch shell, an abandoned beach, desolation and a congestion of grey clouds. The evening dissolved into cell phone calls and text messages, from the balcony it was boats and stars. Time is a distance; I can hear the church bells ring above the rain. We must be stalwart for something, or we are standard bearers for nothing. Don’t worry, Dilbert’ll be here soon. With that dog, that poor dog. He has to wear a tie. I think he runs the company, or something. New strip July 1st or so, an unearthed Paris Review interview from 1999 with legendary journalist Menzi Pusch available this summer, merchandise in the hopper, a song in my heart… j’suis, |