three a.m.

There’s something nice about an empty town.  It put me in a good mood, made me clean my apartment.  Went for a walk and the streets were cold and empty.  Came home and took a bath and began reading Coetzee’s Boyhood, which is better than I always thought it would be, or maybe I’m just in the mood.  When I got out of the bath, I noticed that a clean sheet of snow had covered the roof of the building across the street.  If you were here right now, you’d see a purple sky, and snow swirling under the streetlights.  It’s a great night to be here alone.

Also, I tried to buy an apple pie tonight, but the town is empty and the grocery store closed early.  I know, it’s the season for pumpkin, and pumpkin is my favorite, but lately I’ve been craving apple.  Maybe because I’ve been on an x-box binge, playing this rpg where you get energy by eating apple pie and red meat.  It’s called fable, and it’s pretty fun.  My character looks kind of like this except his hair is longer and whiter, and I don’t have those nasty blue veins.     ( It’s one of those games where you choose your haircut and tattoos and
all that.  I had mutton chops for a while, but the other characters
kept making fun of me.) Got the tattoos and the sheriff mustache, though, which make me more attractive, or so say the guys who made the rules for this game.  You can almost imagine them all staying up late eating doritoes and drinking 3-liters of soda, having passionate arguments about whether or not an obsidian axe with flame augmentation would inflict more damage than a steel greathammer.

Thanks for all who sent responses to the Zombie stripper call-out.  I got messages from people I didn’t even know.  Maybe we unwittingly have touched on a new literary moment?  I’ll post the stuff you sent soon.

I’m in favor of everyone making up a pen name for themselves, even people who don’t write.  I’m about to start reading a book that Morris loaned me by a guy named Breece D’J Pancake.  (Yeah, it’s D’J.  I don’t know how that’s pronounced either.)  The backstory is that he’s from West Virginia, and he shot himself in the head when he was 26 and in an MFA program.  Just like me!, except I’m from Arkansas, and my stories aren’t good enough for me to commit suicide yet, mostly because I don’t have a pen name.  How about Clive J’R Omelette?  LeRoy DePonze?  Jimmy Biscuit?  Juice McCullough?  B.K. One?

So in celebration of Halloween, I spent the morning writing zombie stripper poems.  This seems like the kind of thing I probably shouldn’t admit in a public forum, but I’m on a mission.  You poets have a writing assignment.  I’m trying to get zombie-stripper poems from other writers, to fill out the series of zombie stripper poems, which go from 1-?  So far, I’ve got #1, #17, and #67.  The format for the title is like: Zombie Stripper Poem #1: Midnight Picnic.  Zombie Stripper Poem #17: Dance of the Undead.  And so forth.  If you send me one, I’ll remove your name and post it in a place where it will get seen.  (Not a billboard; more like a cinderblock wall somewhere in my office).  Of course, there are no stylistic restrictions.  It doesn’t even have to be good.  It just has to be vaguely topical.  If you like, you can even post it as a comment in this blog, along with your pen name.

If you’re wondering what Zack thinks you should be reading, it’s Aimee Bender’s latest collection of short stories: Willful Creatures.  There’s a story about a man born with keys for nine of his fingers, so he spends his life looking for the right doors.  There’s another story about a man who buys a little man at the pet store, takes him home, and torments him.  My personal favorite so far is called Debbieland, which is written in the collective voice (as in, "WE don’t like Debbie…" is there a name for that?)