manual course correction

We're looking at you right now, and it seems pretty obv what the deal is. 

Good because i could tell something was wrong there was a sound i tried to describe when we first spoke, if you remember, like a

Yes i recall that

Ok right that high weeeeeeeeee sound. And am i supposed to veer directly into the path of adversity?

Haha, well it's just that your autopilot is pretty jacked. 

Whut? 

At this moment it is trying to take you places you don't wanna go.

Well what's that gonna cost me?

...

...

It's hard to estimate the costs to you. If you're committed to going forward in this vehicle, it'll mean waking up, looking up, coming up for air, whatever you're doing, and just check in on how things are going and probably including a lot of manual course correction even braking. It just depends on how consciously and responsibly you want to live your life even if it's only yourself you have to take care of. 

I mean what's the charge. What are you charging me for this in shiny coins. 

Oh, no charge ma'am. 

Whu-whut? 

Ya, like i said, it can't be fixed. Just keep an eye out and drive like it's yesterday. 

No, i mean why did you call me ma'am. 

by Reptily-ily

"It's a Take!"
Chukka Chank Screenwriting Festival
Table 12 Leader: Vinnette Cotidiene

everywhere is far

The Jansdaads are speaking with their minds only.

It won't take long, but you'll be risking your life to get there. 

I know, Jan. 

I hope you'll feel Mthyuh. 

You know i will. She'll be right there on the horizon. If i die in the hooptie, her birds will eat me. 

You know there's no guarantee you'll find what you're looking for. 

I'm looking for you Jan.

I know, Jan. I want you to come and find me. 

If i can feel Mthyuh, maybe i can break the Crack, somehow i'll understand. I'll come back and go directly to the air conditioning unit for the temporary classrooms at the Community College of Cement. I'll duck under it, hit my head, that's how some got through. 

My mind is getting tired. 

Mine too, Jan.

it's all about choices

I got an out call from a Jan who was on a house sitting hustle at a really nice Highchank palacio almost entirely obscured by the 3-hooptie garage door. In fact she had to crank it open just so i could get in, which put me a little sour since i had to walk there from the coils, which were very loose that day. 

She sits me in a parlor like where you'd blow the butler and says she was a little concerned because i looked like a thug in my picture. I look at her a little harsh at the same time she's saying not in person though, not at all. 

I was all ok, got a bathroom? I think the Jan felt obligated to wait for me in the salon de fellatio to demonstrate her mindful wakefulness towards diversity and inclusion. Or she was delirious on shiv or fasting. She let me wander from room to room demonstrating my low urgency towards getting to know her better. I did feel urgent, but it was more about the Jan's purse, which was gaping open on a plinth. 

Then there were five shiny coins in my pocket as i told her i could hear the horn calling all the way from Chukkachank, that i'd learned to distinguish it from the cry of a bird, so i'd better get going now. 

Bitch did not miss a beat. Oh, that's a shame, hope i didn't offend you, good to meet you tho, got everything? 

MPS got me? Not even a butch K's dick from the mouth of the coils. I say what, it's an emergency? They're like naw, we like coming up in this neighborhood. 

So you just ignoring the calls from fucked-up barrios? 

Naw, they got they own justice. 

Say i know a Jan who's DTF. What say you check her out to see she ok and let me catch my spring. 

The one MPS goes that's not us, craning out her neck. We take you instead and abuse you in our jail. 

Hahahahaha! I was cracking up and slapping my thigh until they jabbed me with a pharmsupply corrective and did exactly what they said they would. 

They have special restraints like the ones for Ks but tiny for hybrids. I was awake and screaming with my mind only. I was mostly angry not in pain. They figured out the location of my flap vents and dorsal expressors and drained as much funk as they could. 

I get back to the hangar acting normal. I curl up behind a bone mound breathing deeply. I can't blame anyone. My ancestry is recklessness, but they say it's all about choices. 

by Reptily-ily

Phyllis (trans.)

From DDT

[To Jan]

1. It's always interesting negotiating meaning with you. 

2. So you are saying that you have bpd?

3. I'd forgotten, maybe out of politeness, to ask you about it. Or a little out of not seeing a reason or a problem to solve. More information is better than less? 

4. Here's a sample of my ignorance on the topic: I really don't see how pd's in general are much different than symbols of the zodiak, numerological principles, or multiple-choice industrial-psych tests for HR departments. 

5. I once took a test that said I had all the disorders. What is my treatment? Maybe I should be locked up.

6. Some multipurpose drug. Of my choosing after months of chemical torture trying out different brands. Or none. What had brought all this on? 

7. Other drugs. Life. People go to shrinks when we have discomfort of mind and/or behavior. Or cops, but that's not us let's face it, not yet. Some of us come home stigmatized and traumatized by the pharmacological drug-testing spree and resulting stresses on normal life which was already fragile which is why we came in to talk about our problems. 

8. That's why I began the Institute for Talk-Therapy Apologists right down here in Chukka-Chank. Our Journal of the Institute for Talk Therapy Apologistics circulates into hundreds of libraries worldwide. We have a BS program that was first in the Lower Chanks to be approved for Common Mirror delivery while operating a motor hooptie. 

9. Another thing I like about us, even though as you say no one can ever know you, I have to grab at some likeness, like a toddler trying to distinguish myself from the wall even? --what I like about us is our tendency to make unsolicited comments. No? 

10. And for parsing out ideas/ sentences, sorting speech as one would if they were being critical in the everyday sense. 

11. The results of all that are, indeed I guess those of a personality. If you see yourself and seek to know yourself better using the template of X set of symptoms in order to better predict and watch out for unwanted tendencies, how might that process apply to my thinking about you going forward or our correspondence? I am ok knowing or not knowing the answer to that question.

12. This is all my grasping, and it's for you darling. 

To the volcano, 

Donna

PS: Oh please just indulge me: fun game. Find at least five signs of personality disorder in the text above. I can do it: 1) #1 could be taken as sarcasm/ irony though it was not meant to be so. 2) #5 Takes a stance like all politicians are corrupt, so I won't vote, you know? An abdication of responsibility disorder. Doesn't have to be all or nothing. But I've read that's a bpd thing. 3) #6 Was it really "torture"? Is that like it was devastating that their grandmother died? Self-pity disorder. Or it was really torture. 4) Same with #7: traumatized-- really? Experiences are relative to other experiences in an average schmuck's life. That's how being yelled at on a patio at a cocktail party or a pig roast can be "traumatizing." Folks show up to Shiv Days fully armed and ready to do damage for.. less? More? No reason-- that's the point. Some signs of the zodiac might be more driven toward heinous crimes. One would always hope it's passion somehow but no, much creepier. Like ignorance. Should they widen the scope of topics children encounter in public schools from an early age? Let's talk. 5) #9 & 10 cross a line into aggression-- there's little doubt now that some suppressed interpersonal issue is percolating. Life is short. Let's not let it boil. And these are not to mention the potential pathology of any number of the other statements made here, including the non-statements and especially this very exercise of picking through it all. What is that about. Ok and have to say, #7: Hopeless Circle disorder. DDT

I Got a College Degree on My Phone-- While Driving

No-Go on the Mo-Ho

I never thought I'd want a pre-1977 house with axles and deflated wheels instead of posts and beams
so desperately
And then be so relieved when the plan stalled as if I'd never really wanted no mo-ho at all.

My engine of change switched on just long enough to open up a crack in the down chute
of my soul
And then, when I knew I'd never turn it over, backfire energy torqued me on after other dreams



by Hoolie

memories from everywhere in on at my body

Cloud Dam

Driving toward the coast, the great mountain shoulders that let between them a wind pass to the Outer Chanks, we've been seeing a barrier, white-washed stable door, crimson smudge curtain at sunset, between northern and southern High Gate, where bouts of weather can build up and ponder a spill into our open gravel bowl. One you could see from the Community College of Cement, there's been of late a brooding cloud dam at Crack Gap.

We've got two car shirts, one getting its tail beat to fringe hung sticking out top the driver's side as an ultraviolet ray cushion, for a hooptie these days wants you to sit n' roast in yr own cancer juice as it crab rolls face-up along in its morning-loving glaze. The other's for short-sleeve work days to wear like a smock if yr painting short crescent lines with yr knuckles, sad faces rocking left and right in a studio that could churn the whole globe with a gesture light as a mouse's joint.

Bunch of feathers

We plucked that folksy rich and poor line back and forth like a gi-tar chord, and the sound of all twelve strings
making a choice between high or low jangled the soul because we didn't know how we'd ring up the next meal.

It jangled the heart when we couldn't figure out how to get the BBQ grill in the trunk, and the real crystal pinot
glasses we gave away, the giant kind that miss october might be cradling somewhere bountiful, rocking hope.

It seemed like our sleek system for working the land and managing a certain chic was falling down around our
stetsons and turquoise as a bunch of feathers connected by rawhide to a roach clip tumbled onto the curbside.

Peg 



Chalk Chank

Deal Maker

sometimes yr wrinkles take on a heavy
dropping pressure against the skeleton.

you need to fling an eyebrow scrotum
backward just to see whuts up ahead.

or in a convertible, scarvs on yr chins,
some flaps of manz largest organ coul

-d fly off cracking loose as in shingles.
Giant tissue boxes and chili canz that

used to be marketed to the Y (MCA)
chromosome alone? Nau gone away.

den mthyuh

they call you a gas guzzlr,
they say yor out, an
awl thye syuddn
yr ina mthyaphukin orbit

yu caynt yet getchr mayl thayr,
all yr stuff is in boxes, and...
an yr hair looks mentally
ill from n-x-s of home cuts

all you can hold onto is a den
of freaked out animals and the
shame of prescription shampoo;
where is the world spinning to?

Bad Paper for Tires

whizzing past Stink Lake on the Bladder Dip
gas baby got restless and bucked at the wheel
you just wait devil pup your turn to burp, flail

mama's got a shimmy needs reducing for free
tho its counter-intuitive, go heavy on the petal
as if to say it's hip to coast in on silent fumes

handbrake of sticky vinyl, stripes that we paid
ahead based on our regional weather patterns
back then, not caring who'd snag us by radar.

bad driving tic (bad tic driving)

i can feel i didn't sleep last night
i can feel i was driving through
a toxic d'storm all day

i can feel my neck
ready for a brace
i've got a violent tic

now there are crickets
and a dog yap in porchlight
across the fence

erybody say
just relax is whut
you cn do nau

badrivingtic.mp3

Pecking worm cloud

click image

click image to view struggling hostage

click to follow grupe

I Sit and Drink before a Screen

Rock rolling, in packs, against effigies, has been preserved.
Some flakes even stream in hoopties to communal slurp holes,
risk getting picked off by the sensation grid or spoiling a life.
Gods of atroposis can bareback their amygdalas and view.

Once you buy the razor wires for yr pinfold, the bolts and screws
close automotively, as at sunset for grain bank doors.
Yr consciousness and shiny coins are disbursed in the heavens.
All the moisture you can carry is your hydroelectric insurance.

Donna
"For Illyn"

the human meat bazaars

Reptily loves telling stories of her childhood in the human meat bazaars. One endearing slave's Johnson was so large he would be ordered routinely to hold it still. It held metaphornical value as a coat rack, a radiator, a spritzer bottle. By way of salutation, you'd jive, "Just don't move, daddy!" in place of [his name] or ciao. For fear of insurrection or other friction, it was gathered to be the phrase Wayne wd encounter most often. Just as cruel were the simultaneous demands for hot verbalization. Two central desires, to act and be wordless, were denied him during moments of nature's most strenuous command. This was Wayne's work and Wayne's sacrifice. Bereft of options either for civil disobedience or employment, he wd oblige the temple-step tithe monitors to collect their coins by shameful finger from deep inside his snakeskin lucre sash.

Reptily was watching with blackened eye, from bed of filthy rag, beneath a corn hooptie when Wayne finally met his ticket to the middle chanks, a kidnapped preachers' kid from Fordamall. Jan's bare-shouldered, curly-shod traffickers were scraping her encumbrance along a pinched and moldring callejón, high on a mirrored pillow. Her veil branks was fine as wisps of smoke out the nostrils; wrought-iron finch seemed to dash for liberty from the fancy, cage-like dental installation; her head was razored to crushed velvet pile. He bought her where she sat. Without hesitation, for a five-teated cull nanny and a few ribald shouts, Wayne set Jan free. Jan took Wayne home. Jan's dad bought Wayne. Now Wayne just moans. Jan can now see. Wayne is on top. Jan says, "Don't stop..."

mob action

Donna reports:

One of my Spanish ex-husbands' families mobbed me once, so maybe that's the connect with the term mafia. *A* mob is loosely associated, maybe just by geography and emotion, an employer, or not even. *THE* mob is by definition an extended family.

Conchi, Paco's sister explained by telephone: "Es que somos casi como una mafia."

But he lies to you, I pled. I bet he told you I was the one gave him Hep A.

"It doesn't matter. And don't surprise yourself if suddenly there is no water or power."

This isn't because I never brought children to the tribe, that your husband stated my arroz al horno was exquisite? That I mirror your sterility?

"1400 hours tomorrow. Under the M60 bridge, Parque Caprichon, near the statue of Satan. With the keys. We'll have your check."

Father Unamuno had secured some goat pen in the mountains to hide our hooptie, so I had nothing to get to work in.

The family estate on a low floor of a suburban apartment block was shuttered up with painted steel blinds.

Conchi's husband since the age of 9, Jose Maria was nearly a lawyer who could draw up the documents necessary to make it all seem above board.

Mrs. Unamuno only participated passively and hid as well as could be her disappointment at no longer having one less chico pijamado around the house to serve and mop up after.

Paco's brother, needle hanging from a vein, saw back to a time where the two boys'd lived in ecstatic flannel and hardons on thin mattresses over spring cots or at their homework desks or in the formaldehyde veneered pressboard dining salon sipping at fideos or steaming puree.

The jamon, in its holder atop the sinfonia in the anteroom, conspired to seethe with translucent mites.

Death row in space

Clouds of red dust occlude the sun;
between here and the light cracks
weightlessness is queen, and our
hooptie's gone before it even turns

around. A laser just makes the bad
pieces scatter and retake shape as
familiar clones of Christian prayer,
industrious, that this get done, that

he be changed, that I receive. These
trees are all weeds here. We haul an
burn them at the beach. I sucked on
the filter until the planet's exposure

seemed even lighter. As I stood, it
was my right arm that hurt so I knew
the supply of blood to everything but
the braino was safe. Here on a down

day, the security systems soak all the
power; all we have to do is wait until
the shingles stop sizzling off the grid
or an injury wipes the hard drift state.

Ted
"She was dead when I found her."

Interview with a Captain of Industry

"Looking for yr fren David?"

"Yes, I know it's last call, but..."

"Who's got a call butt?"

"Have you seen him?"

"Per my advice, he'll be arriving shortly in Gary, Indiana."

"Far."

"I'd say."

"Well, I've got five dollars. Can I buy you a White Russian?"

"I'll take that drink and offer you a job."

"What's yr name?"

"I hear yor a mediocre ho."

"It's what some say."

"But yr better than that."

"Don't you love Kaluhua?"

"Some glamour, but more regular."

"It's in Gary, yr operation?"

"It affected my amygdala, actually."

"Mom'll wanna know where I've gone."

"It'll hep you get a loan on a hooptie."

"With a visor mirror?"

"I told you you wr jus right."

Love

PHYLLIS:
How could it be love when
I can't say I'm falling in it,
and I only bump your sur-
face with a planet of time,
spinning with a momentum
that comes from wretched,
only low, wretched, sacred,
old impersonal wringing of
other people's writhing at-
tempts at pinning down lo-
ve? And how that only blo-
ssoms, like spores on a win
dborne molecule of filth, pr
opelling a tragic career of i-
nvoluntary grinding on air,
getting sucked in by forces
too massive to contemplate
?

REPTILY:
You are arrogant to suppos
-e that you can understand
my feelings or your terror,
especially in the context of
the known universe. Take f
-or example that smell on y
-our hand. The world leaves
you out of its mysteries and
conducts its thing regardles
-s of your silly outbursts of
lit crit. Your buddha thinks
he's driving when he's only
a hood ornament, dear. I a-
m made of essential solvent
-s which melt your quaint r
-esolutions n' hypothesizing.