PRACTICE YOUR CRAFT BY SMASHING YOUR FACE INTO THE CLEAN WALL

My mind desires to wander, to be set adrift on a steamer trunk turned raft. My mind is unable to focus. My mind will replace that song pounding from the speakers with another song. My mind will replace that movie projected on the side of your house with another movie. My mind will replace the words in that book you let me borrow with different words. A friend will ask, "So what did you think of Satanic Panic and the Very Special Episodes’ performance tonight?" And I will rant for ten minutes about a different performance by a different band that took place in my head. I will say, "They figured me out, man. A long time ago. One night in Ybor City, everything hit me at once and I for a brief moment I had total clarity. I ran down seventh, screaming the code of the meta-program, but as I screamed it it faded away." I’m not trying to be rude. And I don’t think what happens in my head is more important than what happens in reality. I don’t choose this state of being. I don’t choose this wiring and these circuits. I want to exist in your world. I want to fight for this world. I want to fight against that force of evil building a secession against reality, that force of evil that bombards us with so much absurdity, cruelty, and violence, those voices overflowing with declarative verve, those voices that echo down your street, those voices that keep telling you that every single thing you are witnessing is false.

Maybe they’re in on it too, those voices, and they pull the goopy strings. Maybe they’re the ones who keep leaving me voicemails in which they express their concerns over my emotional stability and my feelings, in which they tell me to do my best to make artificial adjustments to my emotional stability and my feelings.

Don’t tell me how to feel.

No one told Mr. Delemore and his organization, the Order of the Cacti, how to feel, and I believe this lack of outside influence and lack of subtle meddling fostered quite the confluence of happy accidents for this tycoon’s empire. Rapid organic growth was inevitable. Side note: If you want to watch someone blossom, never give them hell for their attitude. The attitude is a symptom of a series of traumas that you will never be able to understand. God bless you, you’re allowed to be scared and sad. You’re allowed to feel worthless. You’re allowed to sit and do nothing. You’re not lazy. You don’t need to be productive. Having a bad attitude while waiting tables is totally understandable. If your boss ever gives you shit for frowning dunk his fucking hands into the fryer.

While sitting in my favorite Pink Flamingos booth, sniffing the fried hand stench wafting past my nostrils, my mind wandering as my brain’s faulty wiring is wont to do, I pretended my hand was a roller coaster. The coaster sped on its track, the chrome siding of the diner table, and lost control. My hand was knocked from the track, it flew through the air – the air that reeked of grease trap, stale French fries, and that oddly distinctive smell of soft shell crab – and landed on the Pink Flamingos menu.  

My musings in the form of ink splotches that kind of resemble language, my nineteen year old self, and my dirty dick doodles – the surf board has a dick, the shark has a dick, and the collage next to the appetizers of the crab eating itself, the crab’s demented grin peeking out from the behind the splattering carnage of its self-devouring has a dick -- flew off the menu.

And when I say my younger self, I literally mean a younger version of myself – a nineteen year old me -- flew out of Pink Flamingos menu and landed on the table, and when his feet slapped onto the diner table top covered in the classic cracked ice design, goofball boy tap danced.

Stamp! Stomp! Click click click clack clack! Jazz hands!

He winked and wiggled a come-hither finger at me.

I shook my head no at him. No thank you. Never before breakfast.

Echo leaned backward, a smirk across his face, and with an elegant arch of his spine fell back into the paper.

“I don’t remember being that limber,” I said.

Christ, it must be the Mega Low Man night, I thought to myself. This happens every year. I wonder which poor bastards are going to be sacrificed.

I leaned into the table, peered into the menu, and watched my younger self fall – whooooooooooaaaaaaaa. He landed on his feet, again – what am I, a cat -- and planted the flag of his personal Patasphere into the center of The Island.

My flag was a birdsmouth flag – that’s the flag shape that looks like an open bird beak, * tweeting bird sounds * -- The flag was green with a vector rendering of a hypersphere I had printed off the internet sewn onto the center.

“You have an obsession with spheres,” Flynn used to say to me.

I used to respond, “The spheres evolve. When you’re five, they’re three dimensional. When you’re nineteen their four dimensional. By forty, you're jumping inside the hypersphere and going around and around.”

“Speak for yourself. Please don’t tell me how to feel. Don't eat yourself, okay. The world is not one image every once in a while with or without text attached eventually followed by another image. The world is much more complicated than this. The world is infinitely-maybe.”

Under the hypersphere, I wrote the lyrics of my favorite Satanic Panic and the Very Special Episodes song in blue ink, but they weren’t really the lyrics. No one knows the real lyrics of any of their songs. I insert my own lyrics and they always end up being a semi-autobiographical tale.

Sounds Like Purgatory

Sort of by SPATVSE but not really

Byron threw the plastic gate open and carried the unlabeled bin to the driveway while he muttered under his breath. He abruptly stopped muttering under his breath and shouted his desire to return to the family popcorn farm in Iowa.

"I need to get back there," he shouted.

Flynn and I followed closely behind with our own unlabeled bins, the three of us mentally maxed out from not sleeping for seven days straight.

I made the mistake of asking a stupid question. This is a mistake I make often. I chuckled and asked Byron if his family farm dried the kernels after harvest or if a separate company did that. He laughed and explained that the breed of corn used for popcorn is naturally hard.

Although it was cold that day without a bit of humidity, the air felt tremendously thick and I feigned laughter through the frigid soup.

Flynn blew his warm breath into his hands and when we made eye contact, I could tell that he was having the same daydream as me. We were dreaming that we were little fishies chugging along upstream.

While we stood there on his driveway and I lightly kicked the surface of the pavers beneath my feet and Flynn fidgeted with his pockets, surrounded by towers of stacked bins, Byron told an anecdote about growing up on the popcorn farm. About how he and his brother would shoot open husks of corn with their bb guns while the stalks swayed in the Iowa breeze. They would giggle and high-five each time their aim was true and one of the kernels popped and instantaneously morphed into a white, fluffy mass. He went on to explain that he never had to deal with unlabeled bins in Iowa. He never had to live in fear that one day he would open an unlabeled bin only to find a family of massive spiders that jump out of the box all at once and eat his face. In Iowa, he never had to live in fear that one day he would open an unlabeled bin only to find a portal to purgatory.

He finished his tale with a long, deep sigh and he popped open the back of the rented moving truck. Over the course of the next three hours, the three of us opened the bins, deduced the bin’s holiday of origin by the contents, labeled the bins with a thick black permanent marker, and loaded the bins into the truck. Luckily, all of the bins were well organized. Halloween stuff was not mixed with Christmas. Saint Paddy’s Day was not mixed with Valentine’s Day. We didn’t have to do any kind of shifting or reorganizing. Thank god.

We got to the last bin and paused. Byron pulled out his cigarettes, gazed at the pack, but then decided against smoking one and put the box back into his pocket. Flynn knelt by the bin and ran his hands along its top and sides like he was searching for a secret latch. I cleared my throat and asked about the popcorn again. This time, asking if what he said about the kernels being naturally hard was true. Byron said nothing, only smiled to himself. Flynn sat on the bin and told us that he refused to open it. Byron told him that he shouldn’t be so bleak, that he should trust the flow of the universe, that he was bracing himself for no good reason. I told Byron that I was afraid to open the box too. I didn’t want to end up with a face full of spiders or wind up in purgatory. Being surrounded by unbaptized babies didn’t sound fun. I'm not sure why. I'm not Christian or anything. It just doesn't sound fun.

Byron yelled at us, “You’re already in purgatory. You're fucking stuck here with me. The two of you little shits came into contact with me, not by chance.”

“What the cluck are saying?” I asked him.

“I’m saying what I’m supposed to say,” he said, “to plant some worms in your little brains that way when a certain band comes into your life you’ll understand, eventually, probably twenty years from now that this was all supposed to happen. It was no accident that you met me. I work for these men and they hired me to hire you and they hired me to plant this information into your head.”

“What’s the information?” Flynn asked.

“This is it,” Byron said.

“That’s it?” I said. “Just that there is information and that we will come into contact with this band.”

Flynn laughed. “And what? We find a copy of one of their CDs in Vinyl Fever and what? We listen to it and we love it. The lyrics are maybe esoteric or damn near indistinguishable and we what? We don’t know why we connect to these lyrics so much but we do and we what? Slowly realize over the course of a couple years that maybe this is the band you were talking about and that these lyrics are a cipher message to us and that this band is made up of CIA operatives, maybe disgruntled CIA operatives who were boy-geniuses and were recruited by the CIA at age fifteen. At eighteen, they defected or went undercover or something and started a band that is highly influential to an underground subgenre and that band broke up and the breakup launched dozens of other highly influential bands. The goal of the original five, the boy-genius operatives, is to plant ciphers into the ether. The coded messages are about the truth. The truth about everything. Everything. And they’re recruiting and creating, like, half-sleeper agents. This is the only way to save the world. They have to do it this way, because of how controlled everything is.”

“What’s a half-sleeper agent?” I asked.

 “Like, an agent that remembers they’re a sleeper agent sometimes,” Byron said.

“No,” Flynn said. “You just described a sleeper agent. I’m talking about a half-sleeper agent.”

Byron nodded. “I’m not allowed to say yes or no to any of this speculation. After I let you say all of that, I was hired to say that I was hired to do this.”

Byron opened his mouth, wheezed for a moment, and then screeched one sustained high-pitched screech that went on for at least five minutes. 

 When the screech ended and Byron caught Flynn and I frowning hard at each other, silently asking each other why had devoted these seven days to him – these days of unbroken attention, nail painting, nail polish huffing, pillow fighting, midnight swimming with accompanying R.E.M. references, porn watching with accompanying monkey shines and light fondling, pastry baking, antique television repairing, antique roadshowing of said televisions, league bowling, and crocheting at the Britton Plaza Michael’s with dozens of old ladies who we invited back to Byron’s for porn watching with accompanying light fondling. Byron pulled out the pack of cigarettes, stared hard at them, shook his head at the pack, and shoved them back into his pocket.

Byron, Flynn, and I stood in silence. The quiet was pathetically meaningless, like the three of us had forgotten how to effortlessly put anything into context, forgotten how to naturally be, forgotten how to even breathe like humans, like we’d suddenly developed gills and the notion of a morph into fishdom was way too much for us to process right then and there. We couldn’t. We simply couldn’t.

I picked my nose, making no effort to hide my shame. What was the use?

My gaze took me away from the bin for a moment to the many pavers that made up Byron’s semi-circle driveway. My mind wandered and took me to an animal attraction at a zoo, only the zoo wasn’t really a zoo. It was Byron’s driveway. The zoo attendees rolled up to his house in a camouflage jeep and slowly made the drive around the semi-circle, the attendees’ faces mashed against the protective lucite glass windows and the tour guide in safari hunter attire complete with pith helmet and wide-nosed elephant gun.

“To your left are three people preparing to haul all of these storage bins to a self-storage unit and they are tired as hell. Over the course of the last seven days, the three of them watched every Godzilla film, illegally notarized documents for sixteen strangers, purchased Jacques Cousteau’s yellow submarine and filmed an underwater documentary along the seawall of D.P. Delemore’s Island, gave each other makeovers, took turns licking the electrodes of Byron’s golf cart while Flynn and Echo incessantly asked Byron why he owned a golf cart, ate six pounds of expensive peanut butter, let a stranger take provocative pictures of their fingers and then let the stranger pay them for a three person rim job, drove to Orlando and back just for the hell of it, crushed three bags of cat food into a fine powder and then snorted it like cocaine, snorted actual cocaine, huffed more nail polish, crashed through the facade of the Dale Mabry Best Buy with Byron’s poor wife’s minivan and then stole two Doctor Who blu-rays, had a ham-fisted conversation on the walk home about the blu-ray versus hd-dvd format war and after that Byron went on a thirty-two minute rant about Betamax tapes, and cooked a chocolate chip pecan pie to crispy burnt hell. And they appear to be turning into fish. See the newly formed gills on their necks?”

The tour guide leaned out of the jeep, aimed his elephant gun at us, and fired.

I popped back out of the daydream and without further delay, Byron popped open the storage bin we’d been huddled around for the past ten minutes.

“Kentucky derby and Cinco De Mayo decorations,” he said without enthusiasm.

In a delayed reaction, Flynn and I jumped, expecting thousands of spiders to jump and latch onto us with their fuzzy legs and bloodthirsty fangs. I noted the plastic horses next to the pink plastic cocktail glasses that read HAPPY CINCO DE MAYO. I noted the black and red checkerboard dessert plates and the yellow inflatable fiesta sombrero cooler. I noted the horse silhouette table centerpieces and the taco garland. I stared and I stared.

Flynn studied, also baffled by the contents of the box.

Also studying, Byron sighed and lit a cigarette. The smoke smelled both delicious and like it was slowly killing him.

I snorted and burst into frenzied laughter, nearly falling over.

Byron took a deep drag and exhaled. Before taking another puff, he sighed again at the sight of the festive storage container.

“They happened on the same day one year.”

Flynn and I jumped into each other’s arms as heavy chortling with accompanying drool spilled from our mouths on our shoulders. Tears streamed down our faces and pitter-pattered onto the pavers beneath our feet, pavers that we were certain Byron would have us move one day. Move to an absurd location that only makes sense in Byron’s mind. Our crying and laughing clunked to a stop and we pivoted at the same time, the outer arms of our embrace releasing and the inner arms remaining around the shoulders, and we sighed in that high-pitched manner that normally follows long and heavy bouts of hysterics.

I said to Byron, “That sounds like purgatory.”

Byron replaced the lid of the Cinco De Kentucky Derby storage bin and took several short puffs like he was smoking a cigar, bent forward, a yearning to break free from the clutches of these operatives and to return to the family popcorn farm revealed in the degree of his back’s arch.

Staring at the top of the lid, his back frozen as an arch forgoddamnever and ever until nothing finally equals nothing and not nothing plus a tiny little bit of something, Byron lifted his fist and gave us a thumbs-up.

Shit, I love that song.

by Chase Grffin

Chase Griffin is not a CIA Operation Realityfuck asset. He has stories in Oyez Review, Maudlin House, Funny Looking Dog Quarterly, Sobotka Literary Magazine, Breadcrumbs Magazine, and more. His debut novel, What's On the Menu, was published by Long Day Press in 2020 the year of our Fnord. He and his wife write and produce a podcast called The Rocco Atleby Foundation.