Bud Smith's Blog: Bud Smith , page 5

This Might Not Be The Place

 

last night took a screwdriver and opened up the crack in the wall

found a dial to an iron safe, spun it for an hour, trying all ya’all’s birthdays 

this new home is teal and pink 

this new home has hardwood floors that came from the same forest as the arc of the covenant 

this new house has two microwaves, one for bacon 

the other just to look pretty 

my wife stands naked in the living room trying to figure out where the beeping is coming from 

she points at a different crack in a different ceiling, “I think they plastered over the bomb detector”

I drag the ladder out from under the velvet couch 

the other day we picked up the phone and called the Chinese food place farther down the street and told them we currently have an alliance with the Chinese food place closer to us on the street but in our last order we found sorrow in their egg rolls and the fortune cookies were insults, here’s what her three said:

Your Mother is Fat and Soon You Will Be Too 

Fate is Not Just a Town In Texas 

The Cherry Blossom Outside Your Window is Waiting For The Perfect Window

knock three times on the iron safe, say your prayers, drink your joy for breakfast 

I try your social security number but the iron safe doesn’t love you like I love you 

this new house has junk drawers, empty and sobbing, hoping you’ll fall apart and fill them up 

we open all the cabinets searching out this beeping 

nine volt batteries in both our mouths 

all my dreams are of unearthing secret caverns filled to capacity with dying batteries and plastic hate 

later, I shower twice, once to get the dirt off and once more to think about magic numbers 

the safe probably has the mortgage payment 

the safe probably has the city tax and the state tax and even more

the safe probably has the combination to the safe written on an ancient scroll, a thousand years older than the safe, the house, the street, the cherry blossom tree, both rival Chinese food restaurants

your mother wants to come and visit but she wants us to have a priest kiss each wall first 

I take off your pants and kiss you instead and no she can’t ever come here this house is a den for lucifer 

at the farthest counter I drop a gold coin into the “Help A Sick Pet Jar” and the clerk wants to know where did I get that?

I tell him, “The combination was the number of blossoms on the limb divided by the beeps per hour, multiplied by my father’s father’s birthday.”

he gives us three cans of ginger ale, house mustard, a free calendar and a 30 gallon garbage bag filled with wonton noodle

final fortune: Do Not Piss In the Shower If You Own the Shower

Life happens downhill.

Pink Shark

My first girlfriend was eaten by a pink shark. Usually people are attacked and the shark realizes its mistake after the first bite, but this shark didn’t realize my girlfriend was not a seal or a porpoise and it kept biting and dragging her down into the darkness. 

I’m a vegetarian now because of this.

I don’t want to consume anyone else’s future.

Here’s the thing, my village is weird. Our customs are backwards. 

My girlfriend was parasailing around the island for two reasons. 

The first reason was because she had committed six sins that the small council did not like: she’d gotten a boy’s haircut; did not weave or sew or hem, had no interest in wet nursing; was seen wearing pants in the werewolf moonlight; had applied for a driver’s license online even though we have no roads or motorized vehicles; was suspected of being a witch because she liked to go for long walks in the gentle jungle rain, alone, without a suitor (me). 

For these sins, she would atone, and believe me, not by any ill feelings I had about her actions. It was none of my business what she did. She would complete three loops around the island, or be fed into the volcano.

The second reason she was parasailing, was because she believed that she could escape off the island, and maybe some way I could also get off the island and come visit her somewhere that was more understanding about how she wanted to live her one and only life on this hostile planet. (Was it all hostile?) 

The argument was: You’re a man, you can just buy a plane ticket. 

She couldn’t vote. She couldn’t touch money. One week out of the month she was forced to live, like all the other women, in the goat pit.

No one likes the goat pit.

Some of the elders are fond of the goat pit.

But none of us more progressives like the goat pit, men or women under fifty years old. We understand the world is changing.

The goats don’t even like having the women there.

We had spent many secret hours studying tidal charts and weather maps. And because she was brilliant and brave and ripped like you wouldn’t believe, I thought she could beat the breaker waves and sail away if the current and wind was just right.

I was in my roost atop the tallest palm tree, watching with my binoculars though when the pink shark breeched the surface and bit into her skull, thrashing as it did.

I was so shocked, I fell out of the palm tree and knocked myself unconscious on a coconut lying in the sand. 

I woke up surrounded by elders.

They had also seen the pink shark. They had also been watching. 

The bloody coconut was waved in my face as a way of shaming me.

What kind of man let’s himself be defeated by a coconut?

What kind of man let’s his girlfriend be killed and does not seek vengeance?

They brought out the ceremonial vengeance spear and laid it at my feet.

“I’m not going to seek revenge,” I said. 

They said I was to be fed to the volcano then. 

They stripped me naked to check and make sure I had a penis. 

Then they checked to make sure I wasn’t a warlock by lighting my left foot on fire while I screamed.

I proved I am human by not losing consciousness and also by not making any of the elders develop indigestion or runny noses. 

For thirty days I was kept down in the snake chamber, which used to be filled with vipers but now is more or less just a quiet place where people go who don’t deserve jail but also should be watched, an eye kept on them.

I don’t think there was ever vipers. I have never seen a viper. I asked my father who said he asked his father. None of us have ever seen a viper.

On the 31st day, I was led out into the surf, covered in goats blood. Goat chunks tied to me with fishing string. The ceremonial vengeance spear was in my hands.

I would kill the pink shark or I would be killed by the pink shark. Or I would drown. Or on the off-chance I made it back to the beach without doing any of those things, I would be finally fed to the volcano.

I’m not even sure that there was a volcano. 

In my thirty two years I had never seen even the hint of a hill or a high outcropping of rock looming over the jungle trees. A volcano couldn’t be flat, could it?

I waded out into the surf.

It was almost impossible to swim with the spear in one hand and the chunks of goat weighing me down. 

I let go of the spear, it sank into the water below. 

For hours I swam, mostly doing the dead man’s float, back stroking and looking up at the moon.

My life was spared by a miracle. The tide changed and a quarter mile of plastic trash surrounded me in a swirling, bobbing, buoyant good turn of events. I threw myself on top of a hundreds of empty milk jugs and soda bottles wrapped luckily by seaweed and dental floss and all the other stuff you throw out the window, and I wept with joy mixed with sorrow until I passed out from exhaustion.

Just before dawn, there was a noise like a great beast coming and I looked up to see an unnatural light shining in my face.

A cruise ship. 

The crew hoisted me up. 

They cut the chunks of goat off me. 

They asked me my story. 

I told them my story. 

Everyone was sad about my girlfriend. 

Everyone wanted to know what happened with the pink shark. 

I told them, of course, “I killed the pink shark.”

The following day, dressed in clothes the tourists on board had bequeathed as a gift of good will (panama jack hat, khaki shorts, purple flip flops, vertical striped t-shirt), I took a tour of the ship.

In the deepest guts of the ship, there was a zoo filled with animals I had never seen before, red and green birds that spoke, furry little mice, monkeys with fast fingers and shrill screeches, a perfectly normal house cat with a collar and a bell, a tank of water with frogs at the top gulping air, and fish at the bottom making bubbles. 

But here was a curious sight …

I leaned in and put my nose to a different glass aquarium. 

I looked at the vipers inside, black with orange bellies, slithering around their prison. Tongues darting out to taste the world brought to the ship.

I breathed hot air until the condensation fogged up the glass. 

And then with my thumb, I wrote her name:

CASSANDRA

Work Safe or Die Trying

I’ve been writing essays on creativity and working for the site Real Pants.

Here are some of the posts …

Work Safe Or Die Trying (pilot post)
Drug Test
Welding & Writing
Time Isn’t After Us 
Sunrise
Where You’re From 
Brooklyn and Alaska
Recording An Audio Book 
Lunch Truck
Discount Office Furniture 

Soon We’ll Be Swimming

It was the dead of summer and I was working at a house on the ocean. Things with cement in NJ. The beach behind the house was private. There weren’t any signs letting you know it was private, but there was no way to get on the beach unless you passed through the serious gates at the front of the property and snuck though yard, or if you walked along the beach from another part of the world. Or if you swam across the ocean from Portugal, Spain, Morocco …

There were carpenters working on the house. They brought their lunch boxes every day and they did not listen to a radio. They were quiet and respectful of the homeowners even though the homeowners were not there and would not be there ever, probably because this was just one of a bucketful of houses they owned.  

I took my shoes off and my shirt and one of the carpenter’s said, “What are you doing?” 

“Going swimming in the ocean.” 

“That’s not a good idea.” 

There were eight carpenters sitting on the deck eating their sandwiches. They were sweating like crazy. They looked like beaten dogs. 

“The ocean is good,” I said.

I went through the back gate and down onto the sand and there was no one around. I mean I could look a mile to the right and see no neon the sand. I could look a mile to the left and see no one on the sand. It was a perfect summer day once you got down there by the surf and the breeze. And once you got into the water, where you weren’t supposed to be. 

Smile Deli

Last night we walked up to the bodega on 181st street and got some Cafe Bustelo cheap expression ground tin can coffee, some bacon, a package of multi-grain English muffins (all they had to choose from)(stacks of multigrain but no reg., baby), a random mixed six pack of beer because people just buy beer all mismatched at that place, so like sure it started out as Sam Adams, but wound up with no Sam Adams in it, couple Sierra Nevadas, an oddball beligium beer not made by a monk, a pilsner from Mars. 

All through the bodega, we were followed by a gray bodega cat who rubbed his body against us and loved us. This bodega cat followed us passed the toilet paper and the cheese section, passed the Pringles cans, passed the soups and soap and newspapers and when we paid at the register, and started to walk out through the door with its steel net welded over the window, I thought the bodega cat might come with us and live out the rest of his days with us. Just follow us up Broadway, follow us passed the empty park, follow us up the cracked marble stairs in our bomb-shelter-having pre war building.

But, bodega cat stayed at the doorway, staring out at us on the street and the guy who owns the bodega smiled like “Nice try!”

The other day I was down in NJ in the town where I grew up, driving a filmmaker around so he could get some still shots. Landscapes, mostly. We went to places I knew well, and so I was kinda giving him a tour in a way of my most nostalgia soaked spots, “here’s where my first girlfriend lived”, “oh look at that, they finally tore that down” (points at nothing), “here’s where I almost got my first DWI, almost” … we needed some shots of the marina, and the bay and the pine barrens and the sand pits,with their graffiti concrete end of the world walls and of course if we could find them, renegade dirt bikers. 

On the way out of the sandpits, I passed by the campground where I grew up. We didn’t need any shots from inside the campground, but I pulled in there anyway and as we drove up the dirt road, I was happy to see that the house I grew up in was no longer a house that was rented out, but was more or less exactly the same as it was when I lived there in 1990 (with 70s decor)(dark wood paneling, everything tile and shag rug) and the house was now a ‘Deluxe Cabin’ and get this, the door was unlocked. 

So, in the filmmaker and I walked. I walked through the room where I grew up, shared with my brother with bunk beds. Through the kitchen where I had been electrocuted by the toaster with wet hands and thought it was a ghost. Into the living room where my mom and dad had payed Legend of Zelda (separate, he was day shift, she was night shift), feverishly trying to be the first person in the house to beat it. Wound up being my mom. Walked down the hallway to the room where my mom and dad lived and I used to sneak in and steal money from her purse while she was sleeping off a night shift at the factory, so I could go and play arcade games down in the basement of the campground general store. 

I bring all this up, because there used to be a gray cat that we had. His name was Lucky. He used to follow me all around the campground, no leash. He’d just follow along wherever I walked. Up and down the dirt roads that looped around the campground. Out into the sand pits, walking through the dirt bike trails, just wherever. He was the weirdest cat. More a cat-dog than anything. Just so friendly and so chill. When I met that bodega cat last night, he reminded of Lucky.

Leaving the campground house, the owner of the campground caught me and the filmmaker driving out and he pulled up next to us like he was going to bring the apocalypse down on us. “Can I ask what you’re doing here?”

I told him I used to live the house over on the hill and he looked over in the direction of the house over on the hill and I didn’t mention how we’d just broken in there and taken a bunch of pictures and I had thought about the ghost of my ‘suburban coulda-been bodega cat’ and the owner just said, “Okay, well be careful driving around here, the guys in the machines are really whipping through this place”

He meant the workers in their front end loaders, cleaning up the mess from the winter. Because the campground was just about to open again for the season, the first of the RV owners coming back to the Jersey Shore. 

I’m siting at my desk right now, third floor up, in apartment 12 on the intersection of Haven Ave. and 173rd Street in NYC. I’ve got a cup of Cafe Bustelo coffee, I’m listening to the birds outside the window, which is open, because spring is here now. I’ve settled on that. Winter is over and the fire escape window will be open wide as long as I am at my desk, record player going, my hands crunched up like little claws as I type about the good things in my life.

  

Short Film/ Essays

Hey hey. Here is a short film to go along with my novel I’m From Electric Peak, coming this spring. 

  

The film was made by Kristen Felicetti, who is a really great writer herself, and makes the magazine Bushwick Review. 

The book will be out from Artistically Declined rrrrrrrrrreal soon. 

  

Also …

I’ve been writing a column at Real Pants called Work Safe Or Die Trying. I should build a page here on this site to catalogue them all, but in the meantime I thought I’d link to them here if anyone wants to follow along. The column has been going live with a new essay on creativity/working a blue collar job and how to find time and inspiration within both … Here are some links. 

Work Safe Or Die Trying (pilot post)
Drug Test 
Welding & Writing 
Time Isn’t After Us 
Sunrise 

Thanks for reading/watching, all the all. 

Love, 

Bud 

Ch-Ch-Changes

 

1

 

The other night, the king came back from the dead and he was even dragging his throne with him up from the pit in the earth where he’d been killed by his enemies over three thousand years ago.

He put his crown back on what was left of his skull and looked out on his kingdom. Which was gone.

The kingdom had been replaced by a residential neighborhood. A quiet suburban street. The castle that’d once stood there, had long been ruined, demolished, all the stones carted away. Forgotten.

A blue light from a TV flickered in the window of a modest sleeping house. Maybe sorcery.

He gazed at driveways with cars in them. At Cats in the Windows. Dogs unseen, and unfazed by threat, slept at the foot of this bed and that bed.

Lawn sprinklers ticked in the moonlight.

The king gazed up at the humming street lights, and the power lines that swooped down. A water tower standing in the distance looked like a sleeping monster. The king was quiet not to wake it.

He dragged his throne down the center of the street, left it on someone’s front lawn, right beside a realty sign with a woman’s smiling face and fingers criss crossed under a chin, neck wrapped in pearls.

He went back down into his pit in the earth to find his ceremonial sword and his personal guard, who’d also been slaughtered.

 

2

The other morning I drove into town to hit the bank and the library to return a magazine. But when I got to Western Avenue, I had to slam on the brakes. The road ended abruptly, intersected by a wide channel of water.

This was new.

I got out of the car and looked across the water but could only see a block wall.

A voice from the top of the wall yelled, “Be gone!”

“What’s happened?”

“I have no idea what’s happened. I can only tell you what will happen if you don’t turn around.”

“And what’s that?”

An arrow sailed down and stuck in the windshield of my Hyundai Elantra.

I got in my car and drove the long way, taking a country road. The arrow had destroyed the rear view mirror and I was worried about getting a ticket from the cops, but I saw no cops.

Usually there’s at least one cruiser sitting under the train bridge by the new luxury condominiums, but there was no cop car there.

The woods looked terrible. Thinning out. The last time I’d driven through here, the woods had been thick with leaves and trunks and singing birds. Something else, strange, the water tower with its bright colorful eagle painted on it for our town’s high school football team was gone. I’d driven past that water tower most of my life, now there was just a void there. Only sky.

When I took Deer Run Road, hoping to get into town that way, I was annoyed to again hit a wide channel of water. The drawbridge was up. Thick planked and raised with chains so big they looked like plastic props someone would wear for Halloween.

At least this way had a drawbridge. Beyond the drawbridge was another block wall and beyond that, I thought I could make out the peaks of a castle.

A woman in a suit of armor stood across the water, some kind of guard at that side of the drawbridge.

“Hello!” I said, “What’s going on here?”

“Nothing is going on here,” she said. “Unless you have business for it to be more than nothing.”

“I’m trying to get to the bank before noon.”

“Bank? Forget the bank. Go back to your farm.”

“I don’t live on a farm.”

“You do now. Everyone is a farmer who lives outside the castle walls.”

“I’m an electrical engineer. That’s how I make my money.”

“Forget money!” She yelled, “You’ll give us 3/4 of what crops you raise or we’ll burn your farm down and kill your family.”

“I don’t have a family.”

“Well you better hurry up and make one quick to help you with a bountiful harvest.”

“I don’t plan on any kind of harvest.”

“We won’t protect you from the hordes if you don’t provide a bountiful harvest!”

“Hordes?”

“We’ll open the gates.”

“Oh, you know what! Fuck you! Lower the drawbridge, I’m coming across.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you correctly,” she said. “I want to make sure. What did you just say?”

“FUCK! YOU!”

A large hunk of stone sailed over the wall. It crashed down next to my Hyundai as I sped backwards.

I drove through town the way I’d come.

The thinning woods were completely gone now. The land was flat without even a tree stump.

I drove down the street where I lived and found my house gone too. My entire development was a flat field.

I could barely pass in my car, the road was too muddy.

My neighbor George was pushing a cart towards me, I stopped and rolled down the window.

“What are you doing?”

“You didn’t hear? Oh god, bunch of bullshit. This morning this big shot king came up from a cursed hole in the ground and reclaimed this whole area as his rightful realm.”

“I saw the moat and the drawbridge. They tried to crush me with a cannonball … Oh wait, a cannonball would be different. This was a catapult.”

“Catapult. Yeah that got those,” George said. “And crazy guys on horses, in spades. Least you still got your car. It’ll help you plow your field.”

“I’m not plowing a field!”

“They’ll kill ya, dude. They just put Carl and Kathy’s heads on pikes.” he pointed at where Kathy and Carl’s blue Cape Cod had stood.

“Come on, hop in the car, let’s get out of here.”

George declined the ride, said, “You don’t want to get beyond the safety of the walls. The hordes are worse than the king’s men.”

“Says who?”

“The King, whatever his name is.”

I put the peddle to the floor and burst up the muddy road.

Men on horseback stood in a line ahead. Arrows smacked against the front of my car. I slowed when I saw the way out of town didn’t exist any more. A tall stone wall was there instead. I stopped completely when I saw the battering ram coming towards me, and the horses I’d have to kill with my Hyundai for no reason.

My car was swarmed with suits of armor and clanking swords and hammers and an ax that went through the hood and became lodged in the engine itself.

 

3

Yesterday I started to hear screams from outside the walls of my prison cell. The guard who had been taunting me and talking about how vicious my execution would soon be was suddenly gone from the chamber outside of my cell.

The sun fell and the room became dark.

“Hello?”

My voice was only an echo that bounced down the stone hallway. But then there was a light. A torch, and a woman in a hooded robe carrying the torch.

When she got closer, and lowered the hood, I saw it was Louise, the manager from the food store across the street from the dry cleaner.

She had keys in her hand, but none of them fit the lock.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “I think we might be the only normal people left …”

“That’s beat.”

Still another key didn’t work. The lock rattled but didn’t pop.

“I know a place we’ll be safe,” she said. “I’ll take you there.” 

“What’s all the screaming?” I asked. 

“People being eaten …”

“Eaten by what?”

She tried another key. That one didn’t fit either. “Ughh, by—“

There was something running up behind her in the hallway. It didn’t take long. It bit in and dragged her down to the ground.

A dinosaur.

More of them came into the hallway. They ripped Louise apart and ate her. I was weeping and cowering in the corner of my cell as they pounded the bars trying to get in at me. But I was happy that the bars were there and that I was safe.

4

The screams have stopped. When I woke up this morning, I could see through the wall in a spot, it was eroding away. There was now a small window, created by chance.

Outside, I saw piles of feather-covered dinosaurs face down in the mud.

Or belly up, sizzling in the sun.

The bars to my cell were rusted out so thin, I was able to spread them with my hands. I walked out of the crumbling castle just as it collapsed into dust and absorbed back into the wet sloppy ground.

I walked to a fallen dinosaur and saw it was being consumed from the inside out. Bacteria.

In the distance, I could see a single tree.

I walked towards the tree.

I wondered what I could create. Gasoline is made from oil but how? Electricity is made by causing a turbine to spin. But how do you make a turbine? And what is alternate current or direct current other than magic right now? I have seen boy scouts make fire with a stick or a piece of flint in a Youtube video but there is no wifi any longer and I can’t access those Youtube videos.

Underneath the tree, I found the throne, I found the crown. 

I kept walking.

Ahead in the distance, trees are pushing up out of the slop, rising like a time lapse video of the moon coming up from seemingly nothing.

My Air Jordans are slick with primordial ooze. 

Drug Test / Dustbunny City / Snow

Hi everybody. Snowed like crazy over here. I’m at work now, we just dragged a few pickups out of mountains of snow at the oil refinery. Fun times. Shout out to all the kids on the east coast. Hope you made some badass art, watched all the Netflix you could and of course, set aside some time for parting in the blizzard with your favorite person, chemical or snow snow shovel. 

Some news: I have a flash fiction collection called Dust Bunny City that will be coming out from Disorder Press. Look for that sometime around the end of the year. A paperback book illustrated by Rae Buleri. The book will be a sister to my story cycle Calm Face and also my poetry collection, Everything Neon. 

  

I was on the podcast Other Stories put together by the fantastic writer and curator Ilana Masad. I read my story Reviews of the Corner Bodega (from Calm Face, part of Tables Without Chairs #1).  

***

Also, my playlist for my novel F250 is up at the website Largehearted Boy. You can stream the playlist that goes along with the novel at Spotify

  

My new column at Real Pants, Work Safe or Die Trying has a new installment. Read Drug Test here. 

This week’s post is all about drugs in the work place. It’s illustrated by Michael Seymour Blake, a great artists and writer from Queens, NYC. 

Speaking of which, I am looking for artists and photographers who are interested in having their art featured in the Real Pants columns. Write to me in the comments or email budsmithwrites@gmail.com 

  

Okay now it’s time for some inspirational tweets because I got plastered during the blizzard. 

   

   

Shout out to me and let me know what you’re up to these day. What are you making? Working on a novel? Painting some crazy pictures? What’s new?

New Column at Real Pants / Stories in Wigleaf

Crazy day today. It’s really cold and I have to walk to the bank and get a notary public to witness me sign some documents. Also have to get some money out of the ATM machine to buy parts to fix my washing machine. Just a swamped day of coldness and ATM machines and bank notary bullshit. 

It’s Tuesday and I have off of work today. I just sent a new novel manuscript to an agency that wanted to read more of my work. I hope they don’t print out the whole document just to feed it to a goat, that would be wasteful. And printer ink is expensive. 

So here is some straight dope, my weekly column, Work Safe Or Die trying premiers today on the lit site Real Pants. I’ll be putting up an essay every Tuesday about working heavy construction and finding time for creative writing. It’ll be a mash up of things from my life and things I want to talk about in the pursuit of DIY-Make-It-Happen-Art-Adventures. You can follow along at Real Pants (the digital online community attached to the press Publishing Genius) by clicking here 

Thanks to Adam Robinson for helping the column along in this weird world. 

Also, Wigleaf, my favorite website for short fiction has two of my stories “Three Kids” and “Double Bird” on their site. They were posted on Saturday so here I am posting about them again on Tuesday. I’m insufferable.  

Check them out here, as well as a postcard from a nuclear power plant that I wrote you. 

 

 

 

I have a story called “Pentagram” recorded on the People Holding podcast. It’s a fun podcast with a lot of bizarre-ity. Check it out the new Podcast here Thanks to the editor, Morgan Beatty for kicking this into high hear. 

The site Largehearted Boy will feature a playlist for my novel F 250, as a Book Notes, look for that this week here. 

AND … This Thursday night will be the inaugural launch of a new event series in Brooklyn called COOL AS FUCK. I’ll be co-hosting it with Bill Lessard at Pete’s Candy Store and I hope you’ll come out and see the readings/performances and then later, check out our podcast that will launch shortly … here is the Facebook event 

Thanks for sticking with me and thank you for all the shouts and hangouts.

Love,

Bud 

CALM FACE Released

 

*image by Waylon Thornton

My novella CALM FACE has been released as an ebook from House of Vlad. It has a Goodreads Page here and can be picked dup at Amazon here
CALM FACE is available in paperback as part of Tables Without Chairs #1 also available from House of Vlad, but there is a limited run of signed CALM FACE paperbacks coming out, so if you are interested in getting one of those, email me at budsmithwrites@gmail.com and I’ll add you to the list … I’m told it’ll be a run of 50 books and that’s it.
Today I’m sending my final edits to the manuscript I’m From Electric Peak to Artistically Declined and the novella is scheduled to come out in April 2016. Keep a look out for that.
I am reading with Dead Rabbits here in NYC this Sunday, January 18th, Harlem. Check out more event details here 

 

I’ve also had a few short stories out lately. If you missed them, they are here:

Tiger Blood at Hobart

JANT at Monkeybicycle

When I Touch Your Face at Leopardskin and Limes

Sheetrock and Insulation at Literary Orphans

Pentagram at People Holding

 

Strange days here. David Bowie passed away I was at work at the refinery when I heard the news. Told my buddy I was working with about it and he said …

Coworker: Who the fuck cares about David Bowie?

So I opened up my Facebook and counted how many posts in a row were about the dude.

22 posts in a row. Random Facebook friends and then on the 23rd somebody posted a picture of an ass crack in a Walmart or something.

Later that day, I got an email that an interview I’d done with Spoken Word was up on their site. I talked in length about my writing, my work life, my home life and memories from my childhood. As well as my first attempt at writing a novel in a notebook when I was in middle school. You can check out the interview here 

So the cat is kind of out of the bag about the audio book, for F 250, which will be available some time near Valentine’s Day. Looking forward to sharing that with you soon. I’ve been very busy recording the audio book. It’s tough work.

Bud