& Artificially Flavored

Don had never seen a stranger tractor more strangely misplaced than the one parked right up there against Boiler #6 in the room - technically a spacious multi-boiler facility plant. The only way anyone could have gotten it down there was be disassembling it and then reassembling it after getting it through the door -- which is exactly how Don planned to move it out. And that wasn't even the weirdest part. It was covered in sour candy. Rings, pretzels, worms, you name it, apparently hand-stuffed into every crevice where it would fit. "Seems about a week old," thought Don. "Creepy. Not... dangerous. Gross though?"

He wasn't a farmer but he knew farmers. Either he could sell this or barter it. "Can't trust it to start, who knows if the engine's gummed up... Literally!" He'd just clambered back up the stairs and was mulling over the logistics when the dwarf (achondroplasiac type) approached in a huff.

"Don't you even think of stealing my tractor!"

Don Ferris finds Something

 Don Ferris was a janitor.  He had always thought he was going to be the next big rock singing sensation, but he spent a large amount of his life cleaning up garbage and moving heavy things for people.  Sacrifices are a normal part of being a parent.  And Don was a proud father to two sons, Jack and Harry. They had moved away to college but he still saw them on breaks and kept their rooms clean.  He told them both that if they ever got destitute or in trouble AT ALL to come home and stay with him. His own Dad had kicked him out and told him to ‘sink or swim’ when he’d been 19.  He had tried to be a better father to his sons.  

     It was the end of the school year at Kalamata College, and once again the entitled and mostly well off students were busy throwing away mounds and mounds of perfectly good food, clothing, and a variety of household items that had no defects other than simply being things kid didn’t feel like packing or worrying over any further.  Don had shamelessly harvested whatever useful things he could find.   He’d found all sorts of goodies including a portable record player, a bunch of Halloween decorations, and a full size foose ball table. 

One day Don found something very strange in the old boiler room of Drake Hall.  That day would change the course of his life, though he wouldn’t know that for a few days.

Introduction &

 Years spent without writing on here. Not sure what it was… not wanting to give energy to anything big enough to displace my addiction, distract me from my false goals? A damn shame, whenever I've been in the zone of writing a Joe story, no matter how cringeworthy, it's felt good.

I spent years with no tomorrows, or at best tomorrow as Lou Reed's "just another day." Never brushing my teeth, never stopping smoking until it happily did become just too much, never learning any new skills. All had to be sacrificed before the fire. And the fire had to burn because there was no tomorrow. Round and round it goes.

But there is another side. ADHD sucks, both acutely and chronically. So does depression. Helping with the acute helps with the chronic. Therapy helps. Good therapy is fucking expensive even in quote Eastern Europe unquote, but it helps. For years I couldn't get over the hump of contacting a neurologist to set up meds. Fear. Anxiety. Lack of faith. Amazingly she got me fired up and past that. Atomoxetine, slowly ramped up to 100mg. (Fuck amphetamines; coffee, sugar, booze, nicotine, games, masturbation, and dope and whatever else I'm forgetting have been quite enough addictions of various forms and degrees over the years for me.) It slows down the whirlwind. I'm not magically cured of it all but that's not the point.

Poverty helps. Having no choice helps. I mean, there's always a choice. You can fall out onto the street and die. Then I guess there's no choice. But while you're alive there's a choice. One marriage counselor we had liked to say, "The only thing you HAVE to do is die." (It sounds milder in Czech.) But realistically and with the assumed condition of "in order to not suffer the unbearable," yeah no, sometimes you have no choice.

Stumbling along all these decades I never really trained any skills except customer service, which nobody values, and translation, of which suddenly nobody now accepts the value. Sucks to be me. Editing is still valued, ish. Nothing is really valued in the freelance world unless you know how to sell yourself. Har dee har, yeah, no, fuck you. Anyway, I don't. Also I feel like I'm too old to pick up new salable skills in time. I'm scared. But it's not like not doing Joe is gonna help.

Three years without any Joe is pretty sad. Yeah, let's get back to it.

Kalamazoople

      It had been such a lovely autumn in Kalamazoople. Joseph "Bon" Riley was feeling sublime as he delivered for the tech giant PuberTreats.  He was almost in bliss listening to different radio stations or CDs as he drove fast food to students in apartment complexes, Italian food to families out in the country, and all sorts of food to perfectly normal folks of all stripes in all kinds of Kazoople neighborhoods.  Surprising to him was how beautiful the fall colors were this year, almost otherworldly in their surreal hues, in town and out of town. The trees of western Michigan are large and lovely, and after a decade in the more conifer heavy Pacific Northwest, it was striking to drive down boulevards through caves of branches resplendent  in the warm hues of fall, bright red-oranges, yellows, dark reds, purples, and half greens. 

     With a dreadful pandemic wiping out hundreds of thousands of people, and the economy sputtering after having shut down completely, Bon was very thankful that his formerly 'shit job' was now considered a very essential service, and he, formerly seen only peripherally as just some slob, now almost a hero to the public.  People were thanking him.  Children were waving out the window at him.  Millions upon millions of folks were unemployed, but he was making enough to keep the wolf away and then some. 

      He liked delivering, because he could do it when he needed to versus having to adhere to some corporate managers schedule.  The longer he delivered for a living, the more he appreciated the independent feeling of it, and even the somewhat dangerous aspect at times. Sure, he was putting a lot of miles on his car, but he had to make money, especially because of how uncertain things felt in the world.  He was trying very hard not to despair.  After all, things weren't so bad, he and his horribly estranged wife who was about to cheat on and leave him were going to be buying a nice home on a nice street and it was something that, though it was a hundred years old, would be theirs to do with as they pleased.  Renting a home is less worry, perhaps.  He'd have to see.

His sons would grow to know the place as the house that they grew up in. Until his wife bought a second house three blocks away and left him so she could be a liberated unmarried woman again but not actually divorce him.

  

Lipstick on the Joystick

Klaus blinked rapidly and then closed his eyes for a long time.  

When he opened them, Ralf was standing there with an Atari 2600 joystick. Just the joystick.  

     "It was better than drugs and beer before we knew drugs and beer, and it was better than the love of women before we knew the love of a woman, it is the addiction that doesn't kill but takes what we all run out of, as precious as our very breath.  Our time," Ralf said.  

Klaus looked perturbed.  

     "How did you get here? I thought the universe ended or reset or something.  Huh.  Where are we, anyway? I really need to get back..."   

Omezeno I

"I didn't know what I was doing. Which is a lie. Rise of Rock City isn't a game. It's a job. An unpaid job. It's harder than a real job, and less rewarding, in more ways than one. You're actively punished for working it. While saying your playing it, everydaying it, no other waying it, it's just the same, but you say it's different, you're playing different, but you're playing the same, because you're playing, but it's work, but it's unpaid. Sorry, did I repeat myself? I certainly rhymed. But I can't stop, because you can't top it. You can't stop it. Even if the universe ended. Because there's nothing better. There's nothing worse. But there's nothing better,"

Klaus said.


The universe had ended.

But Klaus, like a Jew who hadn't yet celebrated this year's Passover, wasn't ready to day.

Rydeen

EYES EYES EYES EYES EYES EYES EYES EYES EYES EYES EYES