Strawberry Hotcake

 Don acknowledged that the drugs were peaking when, at the top of the Ferris Wheel, he looked over and realized that Strawberry Shortcake was trying to give him a blowjob.  It was the 1980’s toy in real woman form, and his jimmy just wasn’t having it, so laden with whatever the dwarf had dosed him with that he probably wouldn’t get a hard on for several more hours.  

“Hawk! Thwap!” She spit on his dick and sucked it again but to no avail.  

“What is WRONG with you?  God normally guys are so hot by now! Ugh!!” Strawberry groaned.  She gave up and he felt himself mumbling a slurred apology and putting his jimmy back in his Y fronts.  

“Where’s Rumple?” He croaked, gazing down from the ride in horror.  He’d always despised Ferris wheels, ever since the first time his Pa had taken him on one as a wee lad, telling him all about how our great grand uncle such and such had invented the great wheel for the 1893 Colombian Exposition, and how proud he ought to feel at the top when the wheel stopped, and they could look out, son and father, over the fairgrounds.  

    “Who the hell is Rumple?  God, you’re odd!” Said Strawberry Shortcake.  Don suddenly sobered up just enough to realize that it was a normal young lady in a costume.  He felt only slightly less flipped out.

    “The dwarf I was with…how did I get on this ride?!”

    “Sweeney?  Where’d you get ‘Rumple’?  Sweeney sent you with me to keep you safe while he goes and talks to the man!  We have to see what to do with you…or to you.”

    Don shuddered, looking around for escape routes.  His legs felt like wet noodles as he tried to stand, only realizing he was still in the car of the Ferris Wheel when his sudden movement began to flip it over.  The gal grabbed his belt from the back, pulling him back down in the seat.

    “Relax, Donnie!” said Strawberry, stroking his crotch impatiently.  We’ll be stuck up here for another ten minutes, Sweeney had the carny fix it so I could get my rocks off! You gonna fuck me, mister?”

“Drugged…” was all Don could muster and then he, once again, passed out.

Story I.

Nausea - as much like carsickness as anything - washed over Don as his reality stabilized. As it faded away, the gnome's mutterings faded into audibility, then comprehensibility. "…Mufthalp leaving me to fill the gas tank again… no-good, low-life, inconsiderate!… And I'll catch the heat for this substitute fuel…"
Don wondered why the fellow's speech suddenly sounded so much tamer, until he realized he'd absent-mindedly pulled off some of the taffy and started chewing on it a minute ago. "Makes as much sense as anything, I guess," he sighed.

He was too distracted to stop Rumple (as he'd named the gnome) from popping something into his mouth, followed by a swig of a drink he found even more cloying than Mountain Dew to wash it down - bizarrely, it didn't set him coughing, so down the pill went.

"Don't think you're going anywhere far, thief. That'll blink you back once I'm tanked up."
Rumple removed Don's blindfold to reveal strawberry fields stretching nearly out of sight in all directions but one, where the sign above a gate read "FULTON'S FARMS".

"You've got about two hours," Rumple continued. "Well, we've got… Seems there's a festival going on. I'd like to watch a little. You can come with if you hold on to me. Or just sit here."
Just sitting there did not sound attractive at all, so Don grabbed Rumple's shoulder. His senses immediately capriciously leapt from his body to float, then fly towards the river, then into a nearby city, sailing down the levy past banners celebrating the American bicentennial, then slowing down as the crowds thickened and started rudely passing right through him on their ways to the face-painting and cotton-candy stands. Another sign - "TROY STRAWBERRY FESTIVAL" this time. The muggy air left him happy to have left his armpits miles away, while the sharp sun had no such bright side.

Dimone Z-68B Multi-Dimensional Super Tractor

 The next thing Don knew, a cane was rushing toward his face, and then he saw no more.  

     He awoke several minutes later strapped to a chair with a gag in his mouth.  The chair was stuck onto the tractor by pieces of taffy, facing the rear, and the tractor was chuffing along at a merry gait.  He was blindfolded but he could hear the dwarf muttering as he drove the contraption.

“Frenchin’ uplanders messin’ wit me rig, wot biz they gone’ get from bossman how I hope he ain’t sore wit me man, da guy saw too much what was I supposed to do just let him walk away!?  He saw my rig! Couldn’t have him blabbing all about how he’s seen a dimension hopping time traveling tractor!  Got to protect my Dimone Z-68B!! Gaddamn uplanders…”

Just then something happened which actually horrified Don. (Up to this point, he had only been alarmed)

The Dimone Z-68B Supertractor either time or dimension hopped.  Imagine your stereotypical quantum tunnel, then dip it in acid and put it under your tongue.

& 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.