slick n' dirty | story blog from dr. menlo

Secular blues. Curried tofu scramble. Hash browns. Home fries. Ketchup. Coffee. Biscuits and gravy. Large portrait of Richard Dawkins on the wall. Post-breakfast they went through scripts.

Enter the Reality Network. Enter the Reality Network. For fuck’s sake, please enter the goddamn Reality Network. You have an island with 6 survivors. All 6 are needed to build a raft to get to the next island, but 2 survivors went off to worship toads and 2 others went off to worship dead skin. 4 out of 6 humans there have diverted their human resources to nonsense, diverting precious time and energies away from real human problems and real human solutions. The raft is not built and all 6 are eaten by ginormous giza lizards who swam in from a radiated part of Japan. You see what happens when humans get diverted from the Reality Network?

What if a planet-crushing meteor was en route to earth and we needed all of humanity to pull together and work on technology to kill that meteor or duck! But you had millions of people who belonged to cults – their brains have been colonized by bullshit. They aren’t going to help. They are paying taxes to their bullshit propagators. Their mind is decorated with details that would make most fiction writers blush in embarrassment – and they deny the tools that indicate this meteor, and they deny the trajectory of the meteor . . . they refuse to help. All of those who refuse science are largely fucking useless in humanity’s greatest hour of need.

And then there is pollution and global warming. Still the corporations are in charge. Still, their main focus is this year’s profits. Still, they fund media campaigns to stall, subvert, deny all global warming science or proposed solving tactics. For their own pockets, they actively work against the health of our planet and our very human race.

The Atheist Interlocuter Brigade assemble. Their bellies are full and their minds are charged. They have been doing the back and forth. They are shuffled into vans and shuttled to locations predetermined by HQ maps. Public corners they take up. Some go on foot and travel to heckle any proselytizers of cults they come upon. When a Scientology hive is discovered, i.e., the word will go out and interlocuters will converge, shout and point ‘cult, cult!’ Different tactics of various degrees of aggression and pacifism, obviousness and subtlety, art and non-art are attempted, documented, tried. But the A.I.B will engage. What they want is converts. To the worldwide reality network. You give your email and you will get updates. In the struggle for science against the current cancers of the human race: corporatism over humans, fictional worlds masquerading as religions and demanding taxes, etc. Truth will out. Fanatically, this.

It is OK to be fanatical about some things. When these things are good. And fair. And benefit your fellow man. The Atheist Interlocuter Brigade has been dispatched to your block and to your internets. They will not talk to you if you don’t talk to them. They will just stand there with a sign that says, ‘Pro-Science.’ Throw a nod or thumbs up if you can muster.

We are working on anti-cult and anti-corporate juju which you can take in pill form. This would be easiest, obviously. Until then – ahoy with the reality network netizens!

Black Box Revolution

He was just walking down the street head immersed in effluvia when a man bumped into him. “Oh, I’m sorry about that!” the man said, smiling broadly. He had such a wide smile you tended to take him for his word, so Joel did, but thinking so, he heard a clatter to his right. He turned to look and there his umbrella had gone down the steps in the scuffle.

Joel turned back to the man who had interceded him: “Oh, that’s quite all right, no harm done.”

The man with the wide smile tipped his hat and walked on. Joel looked after him for a minute before walking down the steps to retrieve his rain shield. As he bent over to pick it up the door there opened and a hand reached out, grabbed him by his lapels and pulled him in, slamming the door shut behind him.

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1. Me and Toehead

I was 12 years old when I first found out what a snake zombie was. I was still cultivating a pretty heavy goth stage when my Dad and his new bitch wife drove me and my brother and my little sister down to Florida for some creeperville known as ‘Disneyworld.’

I had a lot of attitude for 12. The world could fuck off, who needed it?

I was playing Murder Isle on the DS when the adults stopped off 95 at an exit in Georgia to refuel. My Dad’s bitch wife – whom we will call Toehead – asked me if I wanted to go into the Starbucks with her while my Pa worked the tank.

“Yea, sure.” I said. They let me have coffee at 12. How could I resist?

We were waiting in line feeling awkward together when I saw the stack of newspapers. It was the front page of the Tampa Tribune that caught my eye: GIANT SNAKE CAUGHT WITH BOY INSIDE.
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“So.”

“So.”

It was two of them awkward sos. They were making each other nervous and each felt like the geek.

She licked her lips and looked up at him again, her oversized eyes pooling with warmth.

He fought to keep from hyperventilating. “Am I sweating profusely?” he rapidly wondered.

She smiled–her last resort when feeling socially helpless. And also her first. In between she snorted and odd parts of her body got sticky.

He, on the other hand, when pressed, exerted a unique aroma which smelled like the result of an unholy congress between old Cheetos, young snails and yam. Also, he chortled.

“You, uh, got an extra box of staples?” he asked. He wiped his hands against his khakis. They left sweat marks you could take fingerprints from.

Her coming nite passed before her eyes: bus, Jane Eyre, boorishly-talkative roommates and ice cream and masturbation alone in her room. She looked him over hotly.

“Um, yea. Right here.” She fished them out of her top drawer, and while leaning over she faced his sloppily-laced sneakers. She wanted desperately to relace them for him.

She handed him the box and tried to brush fingers. Instead she jammed the box straight into his index finger’s hangnail and he let out a howl; she convulsed and the box went flying.

“Ow!” Jeannie in the back said. Apparently it had struck her in the throat. Jeannie would then go home sick. She had that thing going around anyway.

“Oops!” the girl cried, aghast.

He was glancing over at Jeannie, red moons emerging on his cheeks.

He looked back down at her.

“Oh well, I’ll see if the mailroom has any. Thanks anyway . . . “

“Sorry about that,” she said, smiling. Her mind flashed to ice cream.

“See you around,” he said, offended digit already placed into hot wet mouth.

“You too.” she said.

She watched him go and then turned back to her monitor. In a minute, Jeannie would trundle over and ask her in that accusing voice if she knew where the first aid kit was. But for now, just for the moment, she could look at that beautiful beach wallpaper and dream.

[originally published @ Gimmicky June 16, 2004]

Jackie and the Cheese

She laid on her towel profusely.

She imagined the sun sending microscopic missiles into her pores exploding in 20 years into some awful noma. She often had dreams where she was chased down an alley by an extremely agitated posse of grey, billowing nomas. Today, she soaked.

An unusual amount of sand blew onto her arm and she opened her eye to see a steel-tipped boot. Shit.

“Where’s the fucking cheese, Jackie?”

She turned over quickly and stood up, nimbly clutching her towel to some of her nakedness as she did so.

“The fuck you doing here, Lenny?”

Lenny grinned his greaseball smile and re-manuevered the toothpick around in his mouth. “I came to play with the beach balls. I like playing with beach balls. What are beaches for, if not for playing with da balls?”

She attempted her evil eye, unfortunately weak in lieu of her clothinglessness.

“I don’t know nothing about no cheese, Lenny.”

Lenny smacked one fist into palm. “It was his best sonata, Jackie! You shouldn’t a just took it like that. He’s a wreck, now. A complete catastrophe. He needs that sonata back!”

“You damn fool!” she screamed. “He would have been a global laughingstock had he released that piece! It was called Cheese, for christ’s sake! It only consisted of one note!”

He put his hands on his hips.

“You bitch!” he sputtered. “Plus, you look like a lobster!”

He ran off into the high grass. She put the back of her hand to her forehead; she did feel unusually hot. Plus, she freckled; she was the type to burn easily.

She applied some oil and laid back down. She liked how the sun warmed all her parts.

[originally published @ Gimmicky June 16, 2004]

So it was early when I went to work. Left my brick building, turned right and started to walk. They grew on my sides like wings in matching suits.

“Ya got a minute?”

“I hope so,” I said. “Otherwise I’ve got less than 60 seconds to live.”

“We hope it don’t come to that,” the other said, with the toothpick hanging out of his mouth.

“I think I’ll call you Toothpick,” I say, to Toothpick.

He takes the toothpick out of his mouth and stabs it at me. “Now who you callin’ what, you little commie faggot?”

Chuck: “Now, Herb, there’s no need to get aggro this early in the morning, is there?”

Toothpick: “Maybe I like to get aggro, Chuck. Maybe it makes me feeeeel good. Oh hey but wait, a minute, I can’t just do anything that feels good, unless I’m a commie anarcho-faggot like our little friend over here.”

Me: “What is this, some kind of bureaucratic shake-down? You guys running the Mutt and Jeff routine because I didn’t pay my pet’s license? It was a fuckin’ chia-pet, ok? Last I checked you don’t need no fuckin’ pet license for no fuckin’ chia-pet, alright?”

They give me the look.

Toothpick: “So, where you going now, Mister Chia-pet?”

“Since when does the pet license dept. have the right to interrogate pet owners on their present destination if suddenly found on sidewalks? What the fuck do you guys want?”

“We want the commie pinko bastard who’s been running that commie pink website to stop.” says Chuck.

“Stop now.” sez Toothpick.

“Stop as if his health and overall future welfare depended on it.” says Chuck.

“Which, in fact, it does.” says Toothpick.

“You know what?” I offered. “I’d recommend old Humphrey Bogart movies to better your patter. As it is, you couldn’t threaten a blind mouse wearing a hearing aide with the volume turned all the way up.”

Toothpick to Chuck: “Maybe he wants a down payment on his earnings?”

“Maybe we oughta get the tellers,” Chuck nodded.

“This is broad daylight.” I said. Indeed, all around us people were walking to work. “If you’d wanted to hurt me you’d have jillions of ways not to do it in broad daylight during residential morning rush hour. This wasn’t your intent. So you stocked up on the scary words, which I have registered, duly. Operation complete. Now here is the latest word from headquarters: ‘Initiate Operation See-Ya-Later.’”

Toothpick to Chuck: “He talks to us like we’re spiders,”

“Like little flecks on the wall,” Chuck nods. “But this boy needs to change his underpants, whether he knows it or not.”

“And so we jet,” Toothpick says, turning back in unison with Chuck, who cannot help but add, “for now.”

I continued to work.

[reprinted from Dr. Menlo circa 2003]