junkdrawer

Problem with history, or anyways "history", is how most folks still buy this notion progress. Most history is sort of a cod history, a bluffer's guide, and like all ideologies, history's just a handle bolted onto the world so's life can be made intelligible enough to bear. There's this paradox--you look at each individual things as it passes through time, and sure looks like that thing gets worse. 9 things outta 10, 'nyway.

So how overall are people thinking things (in gen'ral, as a (w)hole) is getting better?

The particular thing at hand what degraded over time is this tune Collision's humming (pretty well) as he assembles for his agent the manuscript for Bloodied Fangs Shattered by Mine Iron Fist: A Esse Zholtok joint. The tune used to be a delightful shanty once sung by Billy Trelawney--now the only words Collision "knows" are the chorus, which he renders as:
"I like my testicles
hey hey hey
I like my testicles" (& so on...)

oooOOOooo

An Original POEM
by that noted blogger...


To my pupil, Otis,

I take leave of my life.
My footsteps carry me
like clouds upon wind,
drifting in the pale light of the dawning day...
I go in search of adventure.

A poet who don't know it.

oooOOOooo

Four (4) books published under pseudonyms, determined to have been written by members of the Thorn Triad by that noted blogger:
Be the Girl All Guys Want
Understanding Men
Pick up Hot Women Nightly
Dumped?

oooOOOooo

ANOTHER COMMUNIQUE FROM Flynn "Potatoes" O-Brien:

ESCAPE ARTISTS:
The escape artist is anti-christian; maybe supra-xian. Xns posit enduring this world and recieving (maybe) a greater reward in a different world, later. Transcendance with time. Escape artists posit transcending right now--poof! No more chains! Here I am--here. It's me. (Not a soul, not an angel.) And I'm existing my ass off in this world of yours with its locks and its chains, but totally on my own mother-jumping terms.

You want to understand the trick?

Okay.

Chains and locks can be escaped. That's the trick.

(The real trick is from their side: the claim that the locks, fences, clubs, chains and whatever are what has the power in this world.)

oooOOOooo

Dressing For Adventure:
Now, then, always &c

Men of a certain cast form relationships of various kinds with mere objects, you'd be surprised. Chris Collision spends a great deal of pleasant time wearing Ben Davis work pants--despite disliking their look*--in large measure because:
With zero effort You Can put the following things in the pockets without really bulging or sagging or looking like a jack-ass:

Front Left:

Cellular Telephone

Steel Ring for Pantleg (to keep unsnagg'd from Bike Chain)

Front Right:

Zippo**

.mp3 Player; earbud headphones

Marks-A-Lot marker

Benchmade knife

Back Left:

Handkerchief

Can of Chewing Tobacco

Keys (multifarious)

Back Right:

Wallet

And scattered around, according to whim, maybe a bike's front light, a pair of riding gloves, some cash, etc.

Nor is it uncommon for Collision to mount carrying pouches upon his leather belt, with a multitool, maybe a flashlight. And naturally he'd disdain leaving the house without his large bike bag--known to the ancient Enthusiasts of the Inscrutable as a Bag of Tricks.

Beat Sayonara girds his loins with a similar amount, though modulo the better part of a century's difference in the nature of the tools. No multitool nor clip knife for Charles, but a fixed-blade knife at his belt and a buck-knife in his pocket. Ansible key. The proverbial ass pocket of whiskey, married with a flask of straight gin. Couple stubs of pencil, sheafs of paper.

It would occur to neither man to carry any condom.

Don't infer that the obvious organizational challenge in/of change has much to do with why these men tend to strap on their trousers and keep them on, baby. Their own home oppositional subcultures positively value dirtiness, and a certain degree of simplicity: while both men retain vast quantities of information frozen into various media, otherwise their respective belongings'd fit comfortably in a hatchback.

*The cut is okay, baggy but stiff enough to avoid shapelessness; the fabric pills horribly after each laundering, unlike the similar Dickies brand, but the big problem is the line of the front pockets, which sports a curve Collision finds simultaneously fruity and vaguely labial.

**Another of Collision's staunchest brand loyalties. Stronger even than Adidas or Sega. Like unto Nintendo or Coca-Cola (Diet).

***Stolichnaya favors leather(n) pants, so pockets aren't really his thing. His Adventure Gear leans toward cunning little boxes stashed in the folds of his poety, piratic(al) shirts and bulky leather(n) belts with integrated pockets. The boxes thing he picked up in Japan, reining in ronin, freelancing for sundry constabularies; the belt thing is why he's known in certain circles as the Father of the Fanny Pack.

He also has little pockets in his hat and in some of his gaily-patterned scarves. Scarfs? Scarves.

oooOOOooo

A DEBATE
between Charles Stolichnaya and Rose [sic] Selavy

"Yrs is a bachelor's position."

"Come again?"

"You have any kids?"

"No."

"See? Invest in the future, only then roll back unto me with your valentines to risk & uncertainty. You claim to fight the o'erweeningly powerful? You yrselves have a lot of power...which you (would) oppose to ours, which seeks only to protect everybody. Including the absolutely powerless, those you neither know nor care about. Those you'd abandon to their own."

"Protect? Or control?"

"One needs must control those who know not what they do."

"Prett' much ever'body, by yr lahts..."

(Stolichnaya has a sharpish drawl--a tall corn twang, vowels curving and cutting like a scimitar--on occasion. Tired, or dead drunk, sometimes for effect.)

"I would take away yr car keys. I would lock you in the rumpus room to keep you from driving drunk. I will repress the irresponsible for the favor of the vulnerable..."

oooOOOooo

Stolichnaya uses an ancient incantation, taught him by O-Brien some years back--
"what makes a bullet fly in a straight line?
why are people so unkind?"

His mind thus opened to the living information of the universe, he's immedately buffeted by a couple inconsequential recent facts:
Isn't it a little early for the pipe?
Did you learn your lesson?

But he's on his way to What He Wants to Know.

oooOOOooo

Back in the Day, Charles Stolichnaya came up as a jack-ass. He never did get down with the safety--his allegiance lay with the ordinary until well after his death. (Bike riders are always on the bleeding edge of Dressing for Adventure.) His enthusiasm for the velocipede drew him, with a kind of lugubrious inexorability, into the Enthusiasts of the Inscrutable and their Big Doings. Never mind exactly how, cowboy.

Probably Collision won't get to traipse a similar path. Poor fucker.

oooOOOooo

A Scene: Collision attempts to Help Billy Trelawney Fix their Gainly Airship.

"Geet the fuuck away from my lug-nuts with those pliers, Sayonara."

oooOOOooo

[from an interview with Chris Collision in 2022, months before he shot himself]

"Here's the deal, sparklehorse--vampires are real. And these books are barely ficdtion. I gussy 'em up a little, foreground the pussy and the punching, but Esse is me, the vampires are that noted blogger."

"Who?"

"Nevermind. Lemme explain a different way. I carried this around in my wallet for 13 years."

SF Chronicle, 3jun2008, B2.

"One case that intrigued authorities involved a prostitution ring that specialized in underage girls and allegedly catered to influential civic leaders.

Garnier was one of the officers assigned to do surveillance of the brothel on the edge of the Mission District."

(Garnier was shot, off-duty, but an AMT .380-caliber semi-automatic pistol, once in the temple, once in the right side.)

"These underagers? Permanently underage, if you get my drift. They preyed on those 'civic leaders' to secure their own power and wealth. Garnier shot two of the vamps the night of the famous raid, and was killed for it by an Internal Affairs officer, herself a vampire. And everybody knows it!"

"How come you're not targeted for exposing this?"

"Who says I haven't been? Like I said, tho', Esse's me...and we're a couple robust hombres."