his skin is just crawling up the drapes like a house cat writhing in the folds and systematically tearing it to shreds, because something's wrong here, they are all filling up the jars with blood or wine and he's not sure which he should be more afraid of since he is a recovering alcoholic after all and shouldn't someone tell them that? Well, I will, "excuse me, excuse me" he mutters, then more loudly "Hello!" but they make no response, they just circle in and out of the house as if on conveyor belts carrying their skins full of wine or blood or some other dark and pungent liquid which drips and smears onto the wood paneling within their foot prints like a Rorschach blot and surely they should know better than to barge in here... but here he finally looks up from their humanish feet and realizes that their very humanish torsos and even more humanesque heads are quite unsettlingly inhuman. Everything's in its proper place, the nose, eyes, hair, mouth, tusks, arms, legs etc. but all a little too much, like they're trying too hard, somehow, the sum is less than their parts. They move perfectly naturally, but when you look closely they seem hollow, as if there is no weight to their bodies, as if they were not ghosts, but thinly disguised chunks of air, not water like the rest of us, they look as if the silent drafts within the house might topple them like so many bowling pins, but they remain solid and unwavering and the worst part of all is their eyes which are a little too big or a little too small... fuck, they are ghosts.

I am so very passionately serious about all this, I think.

Blobs of intense nothing furiously fidgeting and poking at each other, the pus of universes overflowing into each other matches the depth of curdling oceans of spoiled milk within which floats rafts of unused books splayed out grasping into each other's pages, into each other's authors, long since deceased, the transcriptions of endlessly boring universes committed to the page, luckily not for too much longer, as the rotten milk sponges easily into the bobbing celluloid mass. And you look at the pages, the ones still exposed to the face of the sun and worse still, your gaze, and see what's written, so carefully scribed away and edited and it's all about guy who sells used cars and has emotional problems (autobiographical no doubt) and some sort of political intrigue spy story committing the sort of suspense to its pulp pages no man has ever justifiably experienced.

These are the sorts of documents likely to be perused by meandering alien civilizations and/or future technological societies, and where is the outcry? Who will speak out against the exploding helicopters of our post-millennial cinemas and the contrived responses of the repetitively famous faces interviewed on late night talk shows to the laughter of contrived studio audience audiences?

And where is my personal apology from a sullen Tiger Woods for his apology to his "millions of fans" concerning his undoubtedly magnificent sexual exploits? Where is the spirit of capitalism now, and where are the pulp romance novelists' agents who should absolutely be scraping together some kind of "official tie-in" underwriter sort of deal with the golfing mega-star, the man who better than anyone else can swing a shaft of expensive metal in that special way of his that makes us all gape at the sidelines and which, through a series of incredible historical mistakes originating in Scotland and before that out of the brute strokes of some incredibly bored and dim-witted European cro-magnon, makes him irresistible to women, the mere whistling sound of the swiftly arcing rod producing inestimable erotic potentials to play on the page, the party after the game, the cell-phone call from the wife, "I have to take this." while he stands up and steps into the hall politely nervous while whispering the sustaining lies and misdirection, this drama right alongside the intricate hardcore descriptions of baffling sexual positions involving, you guessed it, golf balls. And those millions of ex-fans that would buy it anyway in disgust, turning the pages with livid and grotesque attraction to all the fabricated, but not necessarily untrue details, which when you think about it may well be the case even if it is just clever speculation, has this guy written anything else? YES, the sequels, YES, the screenplay.

Shame on you, Mr. Woods, think the people waiting in line at the grocery store, when they are at their most judgmental, because for the fourth time in a month of grocery buying they have unwittingly selected the slightly slower cashier and how they wistfully watch the longer lines right beside disappear happily into the parking lot as their attendant hurriedly tries to determine the code for an unlabeled and out-of-season pear, and, giving up, calls for assistance over the intercom like a bereaved captain fervently sending out a last ditch S.O.S. on a radio receiver belching static with the inevitability of death on his lips, this, this is the time when one checks out the slutty colored magazines neatly proffered by the checkout stand with resurrected interest, above the gum for your stinking breath, and sees that glum visage of a tired and poorly photographed Tiger Woods holding his hands over his face and his incredible golf club is nowhere in sight and the wide yellow letters decry his fate as unapologetically as a gravestone,

and has anyone thought how difficult this must be for millionaire Mrs. Woods? I have, on and on. It has become an obsession of mine, just trying to think of how Mrs. Woods has been affected by Tiger's callous acts committed to directly deface our common sense of morality, call me old-fashioned or not. I try to forget it, but when I least expect it, walking out on some errand on a calm day suddenly my pace slackens and I stand in the middle of the street, I know not why, and I clutch at where they told me my heart was and scream silently while I hope that a car will swing by me a little too closely and smash away this syndicated pain into a puddle of blood, misquoted tabloid headlines and not much else.

So Much Depends Upon a Penguin

That lusty, almost trademarked natural form so commonly metaphored as a tuxedo, birds in tuxedos goddammit, it's like they're wearing fucking tuxedos! I see! So many cute tuxedoed birds chirping together all huddled up crooning stupidly to each other. I think I'll make a "major motion picture" about it. Wow, it's just like a tuxedo I think, so point it out for all to see and depend on. "Oh yeah, penguins, I heard of those..." slow internal silence/panic... light bulb! "...them's those tuxedoed birds! They wear them like darned ballroom danssers. Mighty elegant foul if ya ask me, yessireee."

"Make a CGI penguin for the masses ASAP, Harold, give it an attitude and so forth, one of those punky, sarcastic personalities off the assembly line, get some drying out celebrity with children to please to do the voice, parade them out on the synthetic red carpet for all to see, plastic surgery already starting the mummification process, remove the organs, throw the brain away, if possible get them a life sized cardboard cut out, take that with them everywhere, stand those the disposable cultural tombstones outside the theaters then let 'em gather up in landfills on the flows of garbage they'll spread out evenly just like the south pole complete with winking penguin cutouts huddled close together, tipping their hats to you, I guarantee $10 million box office first day, if you keep the penguin."

"OK, boss."

"Cute, cute cute, cute cute cute penguins... everywhere!" says the daughter of an unprincipled explorer, so daft he has brought his three-and-one-half-year-old along on this soon-to-be-bloody trudge through the antarctic, without much hope of survival and with only a couple days worth of provisions left since he thought the money better spent on one magnificent harpoon elaborated with iridescent points without perfect symmetry, contorted madly about the center in spirals and sharp, cursive hooks which hypnotically carved into his brutal ape mind before ever grasping it and firing to roughly slough off layers of diaphanous flesh. The point so beautifully etched within eye sockets, trigger fingers tensing already, and the spring behind the catch causes two seasoned sailors to strain and tear their forearm muscles when they cock it, and for three or four infinitely precarious seconds the coiled metal strains back with mathematically even pressure as the shaft shivers in tension before it catches... their hearts rain beats of uneven syncopated rhythms in response to the pluming waves of loose adrenaline meandering through their knots of gnarled tree root arteries, and if a finger slips the harpoon will have already punched through the ship's hull, or, if it swings a different angle, up into the base of the jaw to brandish out through his head in a jagged intersection and always the chance of his daughter watching on with her very first pair of bloodshot eyes (awww) so tense and frighted her choked sobs tear her throat as a garrote from inside out.

Oh, how he wrote out the check for that heroic weapon! Swiftly, with a quill, in ornamental longhand, his signature sitting on a mat of baroque underlining loops, all courtesy of The Crown. "A necessary expense, necessary expense? Absolutely!" he says to himself in a gruff voice through wayward strands of mustache. As he holds it against his moistening palms for the first time, it presses down forcefully with twenty pounds of unexpected weight tucked away invisibly in its thick metal, his fingers automatically pivoting it in slow revolutions to display its wicked projections sculpted like long locks of a petrified maiden's hair swaying as if on their own before his widening eyes which salivate wondering tears that don't drip and build on his lower lid, the surface tension winning out, his vision undulates with that millimeter of liquid lens shaking with a blurry vibrato in time with the delicate quiverings of eyelid muscles, of blood cells' metered pumping in single file through capillaries between translucent films of skin.

But we're back on deck now and it's not nearly so useful when there's no food at all anywhere, the last biscuits nothing but crumbly fragments of dusty stale grain mixed with roach feces (Yes, even here! The cockroach is by far the greater explorer!) purchased at quarter price from some wily half-breed merchant who still made off with more than he should. The ship goes on, breaking through ice which closes up behind it just as the puzzle pieces scattered across the folds of his daughter's flowered dress sitting on the floor of his cabin smiling that eternal grin of youthful enthusiasm, a grin which matches the curvature of the gibbous moon overhead and curls vibrantly with the same zeal as the child's, but when viewed from the portholes of the ship issues a Cheshire malevolence. So the heavens peer down on the limp sails as the first stars emerge from the purple sky and become the grin's eyes which shimmer more like the captain's, who now strides across the frost encrusted deck to finally mount his harpoon on the bow, take his aim and instantly skewer thirty-odd dirty waddling tuxedoed penguins through necks and chests and beaks and wings and ovaries in an exact chord through their huddled discoid mass of feathers just before they scatter, flailing bodies left behind in a line ripe with freshly steaming, savorless meat made delectable by starvation. They feast on the fat especially, letting it drip steaming down their mouths and into the miserable beards pasted to their gaunt cheeks, tasting life returning to their bodies. And when they are filled they themselves waddle out onto the deck and take turns firing the harpoon into the tuxedoed colony, feathers and blood coat the glaciers like a paper mache of static, white and black, on and off, red-stained snow sopping with it, they made elaborate sculptures with it that the orca later nibbled on like hors d'oeuvres after the ship turned away and broke back through the thin ice refrozen on the surface like lost plate glass.

But some of the boys are getting impatient and they bound off onto the ice, as the ship makes its slow way back carrying the makeshift clubs of stool legs brandishing rusted bent nails and sizable splinters. They're off smashing the tiny penguin heads like kids at a tee-ball game and just laughing at the sport of it, seeing who can get the most, gently ribbing each other, "You can do better than that!" and the harpoon stays locked in place on the bow observing the events approvingly, behind it the little girl looks on mesmerized by that horribly brilliant point, eating she knows not what strange and delicious dish provided for her, by her father, which he prepared to resemble a smiling face. She eats it and giggles and asks for more with penguin smeared all over her face, a loose feather rests burnt on the plate.

"Cute, cute penguins!"

This begins to characterize the current state of human/penguin relations.