He was blonde, tan and muscled in his sleeveless shirt. My friend referred to him as “The Golden Boy.” He was frat, yuppie, upscale – polished and clean, the iPad of his day. His name was Cliff. I didn’t become obsessed with him until my friend told me that a few days earlier they’d all gotten drunk together and Cliff had admitted to her that he might be bisexual.

This information sent me into a tailspin. What was really just a glimmer of availability became, to my mind, a feeling of entitlement. He was like me. I deserved to have sex with him.

I got way too drunk at this picnic. The party moved to a house – the house Cliff shared with a female roommate. By this time my friend had left, it was mainly Cliff and his friends, but somehow I’d tagged along. I have this ability.

One time I went to a concert alone. Afterwards I met a girl in the crowd as we were leaving, and somehow I ended up accompanying her and her friends to a house a few blocks away, where they grilled food and drank beer on a patio. When the group decided to leave to go to a bar I got into the car with them, carrying a beer in my hand. We drove a couple miles and parked in a lot. As we were getting out, the driver noticed I had an open beer and got upset about it. She told me it wasn’t cool. They got out and walked toward the bar. “Who is that guy anyway?” I heard the driver say as they walked away. “How did he end up with us?” I let them go, headed home on foot.

I could barely say how I’d ended up with them. It was like a game, to see if I could ingratiate myself with a group of strangers. I wouldn’t talk much, wouldn’t be myself. I’d subsume myself to the flow of life, unnoticed, uninvited.

Cliff and his friends were playing drinking games around a dining room table and I was with them. When you lost you had to do a shot. I remember losing a lot. Cliff was making me do shots. He was getting into my face, yelling “Drink it!” It was the most interaction we’d had all day and it felt like progress to me.

I got piss drunk. I may have thrown up in their bathroom. I passed out in an upstairs bedroom. When I woke up I looked down the hall to Cliff’s open bedroom door. His dog was there. I called to the dog softly and he padded out to me down the hall. Nobody else was awake. I waited for something to happen but nothing did, so I left quietly, unnoticed.

Some months later a group of my friends moved into a house just a few streets down from Cliff’s, to where I had to ride my bike past his house to get to theirs.

One night Cliff’s front door was open and all his lights were on. I remember feeing frustrated, horny, lonely. I rode past his place then turned around and rode past it again. Finally I stopped and crept up on to his porch. I knocked lightly on the screen door. I didn’t know what I’d do if he answered. I left, rode around some more, then came back. I knocked again. I called into the house, “Hello? Anybody home?”

Cliff’s dog came to the door. She looked at me. She didn’t bark, just watched me until I left and rode away and never came back.

West Virginia summers were always green, but it had been two years now since we’d been on our own, and Deep Hollow was positively choked with it.  Green was overtaking all the houses, and ours was no exception. Vines had started to creep under the back door.

We’d found a whole stack of clean blankets and sheets when we first found the house on Spring Street, and a good stock of canned food and water. But all of it was gone now, and the towels were just as filthy as the rest of the place. So I suggested to Haley that it was time to move to the west side of town.

“That’s where everybody else is, anyway,” I said. Haley got an anxious look on her face. She put down her magazine – Vogue, with a water-crinkled cover.

“What about all my clothes? I can’t even imagine moving all of this stuff.”

“Just leave it here! It’s only like a fifteen minute walk over to where Donovan and those guys are. I mean, this whole house can be our personal closet, if we want. We can take our time moving it.” Because, I didn’t add, we had all the time in the world. Nothing but time, really.

I walked down the street to the rancid market (as Haley had dubbed it, due to the stench from rotting vegetables that were melting on the shelves during the first year) and found a pallet on wheels that we could use to transport the generator.

I took the long way back home, past the old junior high school. A dark, stone building, it loomed imposingly above the road.

I heard a voice call “Hey!” It was Timmy, waving at me from a window.

“Come up, man! Come check out my place!”

“Okay,” I said, but I hesitated. The junior high school building had always kind of creeped me out. All those shiny dark hallways; the huge, echoing auditorium. Just the thought of the dusty basement gymnasium and the locker rooms where I’d once changed for gym class made me shiver. I took a deep breath, and ascended the steps.

It was quiet when I entered, but the wind whooshing down the hall had a voice of its own. I felt dizzy, like I was entering a past life.

“Timmy?” I called out. For a minute my voice just hung there, racing down the halls like a ghost.

“Up here!”

He had made his home in one of the classrooms on the second floor. I had to admit, it didn’t look so bad. He’d hung all kinds of posters and cool stuff on the walls and had put a bed in the middle. He was making bongs out of chemistry equipment and there were some half-finished ones on the teacher’s desk.

“Doesn’t it creep you out to be here at night?” I asked.  I couldn’t imagine trying to sleep in a place that had a hundred empty rooms.  Timmy just smiled.

“Sometimes I’m sure I hear people,” he said. “You know the teacher’s lounge on the fourth floor?”

I did. It was the only thing on the fourth floor, the highest and deepest point of the building.  It wasn’t really a floor at all. A flight of steps from the third level just stopped at a tiny green room, where the teachers used to smoke.

“I don’t ever go in there, man,” Timmy said. “I try to avoid the third floor, too, actually. I only go up there if I absolutely have to.” He said he was growing pot on the roof, and his favorite thing to do was to smoke it in the principal’s office.

“We’re moving, if you want to come help us. We’re trying to get this one house near Donovan’s place,” I said. Timmy perked up. I always thought he might have had a thing for Haley, but he was too shy, and I supposed Haley just hadn’t noticed him yet.

Timmy threw a chemistry bong in his knapsack and I all but bolted for the door. I only felt better when the place was out of my sight.

I told Timmy my theory about how buildings retain the souls of the people who have lived in them, how they become their own entity.

“You know those storage spaces on Rt. 428?” Timmy asked.

“The ones with all the orange doors?”

“Yeah.  Has it been tapped yet?”

“I don’t think so. We could hit that up on our way, maybe get some stuff for the new place.”

“Yeah. There could be anything in those storage spaces. Little capsules of people’s entire lives.”

When we got home Haley had made some mac & cheese with tuna, so we all sat down and ate. Timmy said hi to her, but for the most part they pretended not to notice each other. I thought that was kind of sweet.

“I guess I’m all packed up,” she said. “I guess.”

When we left the sun was getting lower in the sky. The world sure looked beautiful that way. It always made me feel strange but comforted. We walked down the middle of the sun-dappled road in a procession, the green trees high above.

We got to the mini-storage place and set our stuff down in the parking lot. I looked down the row at all these spaces, all these lives that I would never lead. I got this feeling, sad and nostalgic. It had something to do with the dying afternoon sun. It was a heavy feeling and I stood with it.

***

It was twilight when we ran into Donovan and his friends skateboarding underneath the railroad overpass.  At first I just saw his friends, grinding against the concrete ledges that separated the sidewalk from the street.  Those boys always made me feel a little uncomfortable.  But they just nodded at us, and Haley and Tim went right up to them and started talking.

Donovan was sitting on one ledge, his close-cropped head silhouetted against the purple darkening sky, the orange cherry of his cigarette floating over the bottom half of his face.

“What brings you guys over here?” Donovan said, engaging my hand in a complex shake that I awkwardly tried to follow.  He took a drag off of his cigarette.  I could see his face better now that I was close, his soft eyes and handsome jawline.  He glanced at the pallet.  “Moving?”

“Yeah, Haley and I.  The Spring Street house was getting too run down.”

“You know there’s a place on Walnut – the old Palmer place.  Ron and I were just there the other day.  It’s pretty sweet – working fireplace, or good enough to where we could get it working.  Wine in the cellar.  We took a couple bottles but there’s a bunch left.”

“That sounds good…”

“Plus it’s right down the street from me.  It’ll be nice to have you guys around – it’s like we never see each other.”

I heard Haley laughing and I glanced back.  The boys were hovering around her.  Tim had borrowed somebody’s board and was trying to do an ollie.  The boys were smiling and so was Haley and I was hit with how long it had been since I’d seen her relaxed.  I knew we’d made the right decision.

That was the best summer of my life, or at least since we’d been on our own.  All through July things blossomed and grew.  Tim and Haley got closer; he all but moved in with us and left the school building to its own devices, moving his pot plants to the woods of the old playground behind our new house.

Because we were by the playground we’d sometimes see the younger kids, and the older girls who’d sort of adopted them.  I liked having kids around and so did Haley.  She’d invite them up to the house.

We organized huge block parties, people would come from all over town.  We’d stay out all night playing release, building campfires out in the woods, and setting off fireworks.

Donovan would often mention journeying to the city.  He said it would be good to find out what was out there.  Plus we were running out of gas for the generators, and we needed to act.

We put it off until September, when the weather started to cool and we couldn’t avoid it any longer.  We woke up early one morning and just decided to go.  We wrote a note in chalk on the street and left by way of our backyard, which led to the path beside the river.

The path ambled between the river and the railroad tracks, through the unknown and barely-seen backyards of other towns like Deep Hollow, all rough and weedy and hiding rusty swing sets and dead cars on blocks.  We saw a few faces poking out of windows and backdoors but nobody greeted us.

Late that evening after we’d been walking all day we found a string of abandoned rail cars sitting on the tracks.  There were a few coal cars but the last car was white, made of fiberglass.  I’d never seen anything like it.  It looked like a refrigerator car or something.

There was a ladder and Donovan climbed up the side.  He lifted a hatch in the top and looked it.  Then he turned to me, giving me the strangest look.

“You’re not gonna believe this,” he said.  He dropped into the car and I climbed up to see.  Inside was a room, a bedroom.  The walls were painted a warm off-white.  There was soft carpeting on the floor, a bed on one side complete with pink bedspread and a pillow; a dresser next to the corner with a lamp on top of it.  There was another ladder leading down in.  Donovan tried the lamp.  It turned on.

“Battery operated?”  I said.  I took one last look at the darkening night sky, the trees rustling in the breeze, then I dropped in.  The place felt instantly comfortable; it smelled like sheets hung out in the sun.

“Magic-operated,” Donovan said with a grin.  He opened the top dresser drawer.  “Money,” he said.  The drawer was filled with twenties, rolled and crushed up and stuffed inside.  He opened the next one.  It was filled with nightgowns and underwear, all clean and folded.  The last drawer had nothing but a little round stuffed thing, a pillow the size of a coin.  It was a dark and brilliant red, a smooth rounded disc with a divot in the center.

“A red blood cell,” I said, and knew Donovan had been thinking the same thing.

“Wonders never cease,” he said, laughing as I put it in my pocket.

We slept there, the night air flowing down from the hatch and swirling through the sheet.  I slept amazingly – no dreams.

But when I woke up we were moving.  Donovan was on the ladder with his head sticking outside.  He waved to somebody.

“What is it?”

“It’s another train; they’re hooking on to us.  Hey!” he called out.  I heard a response but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

“They’re from the city,” Donovan said when he went back inside.  We were rumbling along at a clip.  “They were picking up these cars anyway.  They said we could ride along.  They seemed cool.”

“What did they look like?”

“Strange.  Kinda grungy.  But friendly.”  I climbed the ladder to see for myself.  There was an even longer line of cars ahead of us now, and kids were hanging off the sides of them, wearing dark clothes and bandanas and sporting dirty hair and piercings and stuff.

As we neared the city the sky got darker and the river got wider.  We started passing factories and old smoke-stained buildings.  Along the river were huge heaps of slag and leftover metal parts.  The city kids were everywhere, picking through it, hauling some of it with construction vehicles.

We rounded a bend and I saw the city skyline.  But what I saw straight ahead shook me to the core.  There was a huge metal beast rising into the air, at least fifty feet from the ground.  I must have gasped because Donovan squeezed past me and stuck his head out next to mine.

“They must have built it,” he said.  It had thick pipe arms that draped down to the ground, holes where its eyes should have been and a lifeless face.

“Why would they want to build something like that?” I said.  Donovan didn’t respond.  I guess I knew the answer.

The train slowed and we got out.  The kids were friendly enough, but also distant in a way.  You could tell they were caught up in their pursuits, and it was pretty amazing and overwhelming.  They were working as one, creating a vast menagerie of these metal beasts.  Most were smaller but no less fierce, all of them battling in the wasteland of the industrial riverside.

We asked a dread-headed kid where we could get some food and he pointed to a large house clinging to the hillside.  We climbed up a steep rambling row of concrete steps to get to the top.  The house was full of kids eating cafeteria style.  The food was good, grains and vegetables.  I gave the red blood cell pillow to one of the girls serving the food.  She had dark hair and a sweet face but there was a toughness and solidity to her.  She softened as she looked at it, held it to her heart.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.  I considered what it would be like to live here, what mysteries lay in its abandoned office buildings and skyscrapers.

We stood on the porch overlooking the riverside, the huge beast poised above it all.  It leaned forward with its arms, empty head cast to the horizon, ready to continue.

Two construction cranes hovered over it, screaming tall into the sky.  And as we stood there, one of the cranes began to tip over.  Screams came up from the river valley and multiplied as it came crashing down.

One day this would happen.  A speaker would appear in the clear blue sky.

Just like that, one moment it is there and one moment it isn’t.  Her eyes catch it and she takes in her breath sharp and fast, her eyes fixated in pure horror.

It is brown, cube shaped, and looks like a p.a. speaker, like one you may have had hanging in the corner of your junior high school.  It is huge and suspended there clear as day for all to see.  Everyone cries, because they are scared and confused and nobody knows how it got there.

It would look so menacing, the skewed angles of the speaker against the flat azure sky, looking like an instrument of God’s judgment.

But people would get used to it eventually.  It would become a fact of life.  You shut the door, step out onto the sidewalk, and there it is—that speaker, looming over you, looming over us all.

Then, just when everybody was getting used to it, it would start to make a sound.  Just a low sound would emerge at first, an ominous hum.  It would barely be noticeable.  It would gradually get louder and louder, and people would think it was the voice of God.  Then a horn would sound three times.

Soon, a pattern would emerge.  On cloudy days the sound would be reduced to a low buzz, so even if you can’t see the speaker, you know it’s still there.

Then the clouds would break, the sun would burst forth, and the speaker would release a sound so soaring and majestic, that it would stop us all in our tracks.

We would come out of tall buildings and under bridges to look at it, and again we would cry, but we would cry because it was so frightening and beautiful.

And in the countryside the sound would follow the sunshine, spilling down from the sky over rolling green hills and pastures, and everyone would take their pills and smile and everything would be so happy, radiantly happy.

“I’ve been having these weird dreams about my mother,” I say, reaching into my pocket and pulling out a green butterfly yo-yo.  ”I’m screaming at her, yelling into her face…I wake up in this horrendous blind rage…”

I let the yo-yo unwind on its string.  There’s nothing I can do with it because we’re speeding along in Tina’s car at ninety miles an hour. I let it roll down, flaccid on the floor.

“In the dream I’m telling her she’s smothering me, that she’s trying to protect me and it’s useless, there’s nothing she can do to help.”  Tina reaches over from the driver’s seat and massages the back of my head.

“Don’t worry, baby,” she says, “everything’ll be alright.”

“No it won’t,” James says from the backseat, but we ignore him.  I feel Tina stroking my head and I try to think happy thoughts.

***

When we get to the shore it is dusk, the world covered over in an orange syrupy glow.  Tina is the first one out of the car, she runs down the sand and James and I chase after her, laughing.  We tear off our clothes and dive into the ocean, swimming out until we’re floating above the ground.

Back on the sand, Tina throws her legs in the air and frames the world between them.  James stares out at the horizon, mesmerized by the ocean.

“There are whole other worlds under there,” he says, “thousands of ships and debris, miles and miles of places and things that we can’t understand…”  James is drifting, his mind is taking him places he can’t help but go.  ”More nuclear bombs than ever before,” he’d said earlier. “How can anyone be so naive as to think we won’t use them?”  I stand up and lead the way to the boardwalk.

Now it’s dark.  The boardwalk teems with life, ghost beach people who are here one week and gone the next.  We reach the entrance to the amusement park and Tina notices a girl sitting on the ground.  The girl looks weak and destitute, nearly on the verge of tears.  Tina goes over and talks to her.  She leans in, brushing stringy hair out of the girl’s face.  She reaches out and grabs hold of the girl’s dirty hand.

“She wants to come with us,” Tina says, ushering the girl in front of her.

***

We ride the Ferris wheel, Tina and the girl in one little car, James and I in another.  We’re on a giant neon wheel spinning in the night.  It rises up, comes back down, but doesn’t go anywhere.  James and I watch Tina and the girl getting closer, then making out.  The girl is young, but she seems to know what she’s doing.

James sighs and leans back into his seat.  I put my hand on his thigh and he doesn’t move it away.

***

We walk toward our hotel, the four of us.  The night seems darker and quieter than before, there seems to be an ominous hum in the air.  Hotels tower over us, concrete monoliths of little stacked rooms.  There’s no sign of life anywhere.  We enter our hotel, and the place looks deserted.

We’re all nervous.  James taps his foot in the elevator as Tina dotes on the girl, smoothing out her stringy hair and staring at her longingly.

“Isn’t she the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” she says.  She turns to the girl.  ”So perfect…”

There seems to be something wrong but Tina is trying not to acknowledge it.

“Let’s go up to the pool,” she says to me.  Then to the girl:  ”There’s a pool on the roof, isn’t that cool?  We can go swimming in the pool on the roof.”  The girl smiles; she’s eager to please.

***

We go to the pool on the roof and we get naked.  Tina lays the girl onto the concrete and caresses her as if she were something sacred, holy.

James whispers to me, “so much for innocence…”  He puts his tongue in my ear, I turn around and we begin.  We’re male animals, with nothing to lose and little to gain, so we grab, eat, suck, and devour each other.

Tina has her head between the girl’s legs, licking and nibbling delicately.  She lays her palms on the girl’s taught skin, cupping her small breasts.  The girl stares up at the starless sky.  Her eyes widen.

We hear it before we see anything.  The sound gets louder, like an air conditioner kicking in, so loud that we can’t ignore it anymore.  We look up from where we are and see it coming toward us.

The girl starts screaming.  Everything goes cold. Tina pulls us close, lumps us together and tries to wrap us in her arms.  We watch the sky and await our immediate destiny.

You will drive/walk/bike/whatever out to a gas station.  It doesn’t really matter where it is, that’s up to you.  Personally, I’m going to choose one that’s out in the country, in a rural place that I have never seen before.  I’m going to try my best to get lost, and actually, I would suggest that you do this too.  The further away you are from your own recognizable environment, the better.

Then, ditch your car/bike or whatever at the gas station, and hang out for a while.  How long you hang out is up to you.  What’s important is to get a feel for the people who are passing through.  There will be a lot of them, transient people in the middle of where they came from and where they are going.  You’ll be looking for an approachableness in them, though this depends on your comfort level.  Hopefully, you’ll know who you’re looking for when you find them.

So, approach these people.  Let’s say, for instance, that they are goth teenagers who’ve stopped for cigarettes and 20oz bottles of soda.  Now you have to work up your courage, and you’ve got to strike up a conversation.  One idea is to ask them for directions, or for the time, it doesn’t really matter.  Just open up an avenue, and see where it leads.

You may strike out at first, and that’s okay.  Not everybody is going to be receptive to a stranger approaching them, and that’s okay – we want to weed those people out.  It’s important for the final outcome.

So say you strike up a conversation with these fictional goth kids.  You ask them their names, you tell them yours, you tell them you’re from out of town and don’t know the area very well.

You do not lie to them, in all things you must be genuine.  You do not choose them because you find them funny or amusing, you do not look down on them.  If you are brave enough to approach someone or someones who do not share your life experience – say rednecks for instance, or gansta-type black people – you treat them with respect and a healthy curiosity.  If you look down on them, you may as well give up then and there.  You’re not going to get anywhere in life or in this project.

While you are talking to them, try to envision their lives, try to imagine where they are headed, what they are doing, who they are.  These people exist in your world, but at the same time, they don’t – they have their own worlds, which we want to know about.

Now, here comes the tricky part – you somehow need to integrate yourself into their evening.  I’m not totally sure what they key is to doing this.  I imagine it will be easier for some people (and with some people) than it will be for others.  Drugs might be a good way – tell them you have a joint, or a blunt, and you’re wondering where a good place to smoke it might be.  Tell them you’re in town for the night, you’ve got a case of beer in the car and you’re looking to get fucked up.

These are sneaky ways, and if drugs aren’t your thing, you could try an approach that may be more admirable, and may even yield better results:  tell them the absolute truth.  Tell them who you are, and that you are interested in them as people, and you would like to know what their lives are like.  Tell them it is for something you are writing (and resolve to make that true, afterwards), that it is an experiment, that you don’t want anything from them, that you aren’t around to cause trouble, that you just want to observe.  See where that gets you – if it works, I think you’re in for an incredible night.

So you somehow get in with them.  Now, sit back and enjoy the ride.  Observe, but don’t judge – watch, but don’t be a voyeur.  Participate.  Let them know who you are.  Let your curiosity run amock.  Maybe they’ll think you’re crazy.  Maybe they’re crazy.  Maybe it’ll get bad.  That’s a risk you run, but hopefully you should be able to determine dangerous types during the initial contact.

Where will you go?  Out onto a country hillside in the dusk, smoking from somebody’s bong they just picked up in the big city?  Out to a club you’ve never been to before, or invited into somebody’s home?  These are adventures – you are an explorer, really, an explorer into other people’s lives, and it’s just as valid as somebody who would dive to study the ocean floor or fly into outer space.  You’re exploring the inner space, the inner lives of people you see everyday but never know.  And your purity of spirit in this operation is critical – it is the only thing that will see you through.

Now comes an interesting part – seeing how your initial fantasy of their lives stacks up to the reality.  My personal fantasy is of kids who live fully, wildly, with no thought for tomorrow, with rules and rituals all their own.  Maybe some of this is true – savor this, but let it go – do not try to hold on to any beauty, it’s slippery and dangerous.  Do not let your fantasy get in the way of what is real.

Similarly, observe the harsher truths of their lives, but don’t dwell on them.  They may be poor or sad, they may live in ways that make you uncomfortable, ways that are fundamentally unhealthy or even abusive.  There may be sadness, even fear, but there is sadness and fear in every life – it is no more the truth of their lives than what is good.  What we need is the entire picture.

Live it, live to tell about it.  Lose yourself in the process.

But before you go, invite them into your life.  Inform them of the party, which we will have at the end of the month, when you have hopefully completed at least four of these explorations.

We will all gather in a large hall, all of us will get together, and we will share what we’ve gained.  Not in formal terms – we won’t sit down and introduce each other.  But we will know each other, and our new friends will, by extension, know all of us.  We’ll create a network, a self-contained thing.  Most likely, there will be impossible connections between completely disparate people.
We will have created a new world that night, something that will live on in the experiences of all of us.  And if we’re willing and open to this, it could be a beautiful thing, a life-changing thing.

First, you find an old house.  Ideally, you buy it.  Maybe it’s on a dead end street by an old factory.  Maybe it’s out in the country, all alone under trees on a sprawling, green property.

You don’t live in it.  Or you could live in it for a while, but you’d have to restrict your living space to a small part of the house, and eventually, you’d have to phase yourself out.

You decorate this place in a particular way.  Maybe you only furnish it with things from thrift stores.  In my version, I make everything appear as though it’s from a bygone era, like a lost seventies dream.  Shag bathroom mats that look like rainbows.  A corkboard on the yellow kitchen wall.  A refrigerator magnet that looks like a chunk of chocolate.  Weird green candles melted onto a heavy wood table.  Pink stuffed animals with crusty matted fur.  Stuff like that.

As you furnish it, you begin to create an imaginary family who lived there.  You designate rooms for certain people.  The parents would probably have the largest bedroom, and maybe there’s a room for a son and a daughter.  Or maybe a broken family lived there, like some deadbeat parent who never was around, and the kid just took over the place, inviting all of his friends to stay there and trashing the place.  Then again, maybe he cared for it, and made it into a private teenage paradise.

You’re furnishing the place according to might have lived there, but since you’re buying everything from thrift stores, you’re getting this nostalgic, weathered effect, which I think is important.  I don’t know.  I guess you could buy all new stuff, make it really modern and sterile…but I’ll get back to that.

So now you’ve created a living space for these people.  The next step is understanding who they are.  You have to create an entire life for them – letters, diaries, old telephone bills, recipe books…everything.  You have to create this family out of thin air.

They will have secrets, and you will know all of them.  The youngest son may have a trunk full of things that are important to him, but only you will know why they are important.  To everyone else it’ll seem like enigmatic junk.  But you’ll know.  You’ll write a journal for him, you’ll write his life.  The daily mundane realities of his everyday existence.  The first porno magazine he ever saw.  Who picked him up from school on Monday the fifth and how he got to the roller rink that Friday.  Everything.

It’s a lot.  You need to know the parents.  Letters they wrote but never sent.  Books that they underlined passages in.  Why?  Things, so many things that one accumulates in a single life.

And secrets.  Interpersonal relationships – the deeper, the better.

I’m not sure what it all adds up to…but wouldn’t you want to see it?  Once you had it all created, all laid out, you could invite people there.  Or, you could just leave the door unlocked and let people find it.

The house would be stuck in time, as if the occupants left one afternoon and never returned.

They could snoop through the detritus of this imagined life, pick and prod through these people’s things and get to know them, create this grand story that you’ve conceived only through what you’ve left behind, these certain clues, pieces to the puzzle.

It would be meditative.  It would be voyeuristic, for sure.  You could put on a record if you wanted to, and the music would sound through the dead house.  Other than that, the silence would be key.  The house would have a pervasive sense of uneasiness – you’re not supposed to be there.  You are an intruder, but you are also the key to keeping all of this alive.  It doesn’t exist without you, only you can put it all together and bring these people to life.

In my original conception, the house is messy, like a Gummo house, just gorged on stuff, filled to the brim with things left behind.

But let’s suppose, like I mentioned earlier, that you make this into a contemporary story, a house with all modern furniture and new settings.  That might make it even creepier.  Secrets would be even more hidden, more heavily buried.  You’d feel like even more of an intruder, creeping around perfectly shined and polished places, looking under glass tables, trying to draw clues from master shopping lists and Wal-Mart receipts.

Things might be buried in the garden there.  Holes in the floor.  Cobwebs in the basement…yeah, I like that.

I guess what I’m getting at is the idea that our lives are just a construction of certain things, materials and memories, and that when we’re gone it’s only the stuff that remains.

But I think memories remain, too.  I think, if done properly, you’d be able to feel the people in the house.  You’d birth a ghost.  The hairs on the back of your neck would stand up, there would be a presence there.  You will have created a story, a life, and not a virtual one.  Something tactile.  Something you could feel.

In these trying times, when the very notion of a democracy is beginning to seem like fiction, it’s important to remember the little things that unite us all as humans. Like our ability to express ourselves creatively, or our capacity for love, or the fact that each and every one of us has an ass.

Yes—an ass. An ass that can be stimulated, penetrated…and loved. What could be more democratic than the concept of ass-fucking? Everyone has an anus, to use in any way they see fit. And just like the democracy that we are currently enduring in America, everyone can get fucked.

Yes, I do believe there is something quite beautiful in the fact that each and every human has the right and the ability to have their sphincter pounded into oblivion. Ass sex can be a tremendously exhilarating and transcendent experience. It allows males to feel what females feel—to be prodded, invaded. On the other hand to get fucked is to feel the power of enveloping another human being, of drawing them into one’s self. Ass sex just might be the ultimate weapon in the battle of the sexes.

Not to mention that it bridges the gap between cultures in a world where diplomatic relations between countries are strained to nearly the breaking point. Ass sex has always been quite prevalent in Arabic cultures, and think of how many lives could be spared if, instead of terrorizing other countries with bombs or other forms of attack, we could all just fuck each other in the ass and get out our aggression that way? It is a dream that I have.

Straight white men, are you listening? You are the ones who run this world, after all, and maybe it would be beneficial for you to feel how things are at the other end of the stick, so to speak. Perhaps it would do this world a bit of good if you got your girlfriends to peg you, or at the very least, bought yourself a nice rubber dong and slid it up your tight holes.

Vaginas are great, really. I mean, pussy definitely trumps ass in certain obvious areas (less muss, less fuss), but when you get right down to it, isn’t pussy fairly exclusive? Only one half of the population has one. The vagina is an elitist orifice, and elitism has no place in a democracy, at least not in my opinion.

The way I see it, if you really believe in enduring freedom and want to make the world a better place, you should be willing to make sacrifices, and one of those sacrifices should be your ass. If you are a true and proud American, and you believe in democracy, then there is no way you can not believe in the unifying and leveling force that is the anus. You’re either for us, or against us.

So everybody—black or white, rich or poor, female or male, your anus is essentially your badge of freedom and democracy. Remember, freedom isn’t free. Let’s show those terrorists and haters of democracy our strength by taking it up the ass like the powerful nation we know we are.

Remember to take it slowly, and God Bless America.

Start by standing in front of the mirror. It’s important to free your mind, so think: Your body could be better—you should work out. Then know:  If you joined a gym, you’d stay motivated for a week—a month, tops—and then you’d quit. So why bother?

Teeth could be whiter. Cock could be bigger. Beyond that, though, study your mannerisms. Slight lisp?  Short stride?  Hair too perfect or not perfect enough?

All of these things are important, especially if you want to get laid, and surely you do—you’re gay. You’re sex-obsessed and you fuck indiscriminately. And even if you aren’t fucking anybody, you’re surely thinking about it.

Remember this around relatives, workmates, people with small children. Nephews, young students—boys who are just beginning to bloom. Their parents know what you’re thinking. You can’t wait to get your hands on that impressionable flesh; you want to pound it into submission, so it’s soft, malleable, ready to be molded into a replica of yourself.

The gay agenda has little to do with social acceptance or pride—it’s about sex. Pure selfish hedonism. To you, morality is a thing of the past.

You probably have HIV (don’t even try to pretend it’s something other than a gay disease), which you contracted despite the fact that it’s completely preventable. You probably have genital warts and herpes and are on your fifth round of crabs. This is par for the course. Let’s just come out and say it:  You deserve it.

Why? (You’ve got to be kidding me.). Because you weren’t careful enough. Because you don’t have self-control. Because you can’t admit your culpability.

Maybe you’re a self-identified bisexual, or worse, you label yourself “queer.”  Give it up, this notion that sexuality is fluid, or permits a plethora of activity outside the bonds of standard, binary forms of attraction. You’re a faggot. Own up to it.

Of course, if you like to fuck other guys, it’s not the act itself that’s turning you on, other than the satisfaction you get from symbolically possessing masculine aspects that you’ve denied in yourself. (For this we can surely blame your father, who never taught you to play baseball.)

Hey, maybe you and I can devise some semblance of a relationship and pretend that we’re in love?  Maybe this will provide a brief respite from the crushing knowledge that we are, in fact, über-narcissistic men-children, forever slaves to a thumb-sucking mommy complex, destined to die in loneliness and despair because we can never love anyone as much as we love ourselves?

Anyway, we won’t bother with condoms. Do you really, ahem, respect yourself enough to try and protect yourself from a disease that—heavens forefend—you don’t already possess?

Please. Surely anyone would consider it an honor to receive an STD that might hasten their departure from a world in which they attempt to normalize behaviors that are obviously unnatural, a world in which they exhibit a denial bordering on psychosis, a world in which they do not see that men were given a penis and women a vagina for a reason, a world in which homosexual behavior violates the very fabric of human existence and the universe. Sex isn’t supposed to be fun.

But you willfully ignore this and go on with your fetishist and sadomasochistic games. Sure, tell yourself that you’re only role-playing, when deep inside you know that the very things that turn you on are a mirror of your hatred for yourself. You want to get slapped around because you deserve to be slapped around—you want to be punished for the sinful life you’ve chosen (yes, chosen) for yourself. You fetishize straight guys, masculine guys, because in your heart you know that that’s what you’re supposed to be.

So go ahead—cum. Enjoy that fleeting moment of pleasure.

Isn’t it depressing to think of all that you’ve just wasted?  Instead of taking part in the beautiful creation of life, you’ve resigned yourself to a state of suspended adolescence in which you espouse the futile and vile notion that the gay “lifestyle” is somehow “normal” and “acceptable.”

Your precious seed of life has become little more than excrement, to be eventually shat out of one’s bowels and cast into the sewer, the sewer where our kind most assuredly belongs.

But then you already knew this, all of this, and more.