From the Depths of the Pocketmachine: Parts 6 & 7

(Editor's Note: this cartoonish short blurb is dated Thursday July 2nd, 2009 at 2:17 p.m. I sent it to Zach but he never wrote back. Although I never actually instructed him to do, deep in my mind I was hoping that he would respond with a continuation of the story. A failed experiment but an experiment nonetheless.)

"An Invitation From the Lionfish"

Sitting in his mailbox, the soft shell crab spied a foreign envelope. He picked up it with his claw and left it on the kitchen table.

He was concerned, but more so with his pants. Work pants are uncomfortable. He also loved coffee. He started a fresh pot after changing pants and was ready to open the mystery envelope.

He opened the envelope with his claw. The front of the card was a picture of himself and the heading "You are Mister Crab".

*****

Editor's Note: I think this is a "poem" but it might just be more of a midnight ramble. An email to Dan, dated Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 1:13a.m, which means I'm in the driveway after a Bandits gig at Lat43, with a song on the radio and the adrenaline still blasting, not quite ready to call it a night...

"The Dark Cover of Night"

A success on many fronts. The thumping thuds of bass erase the faces of the workplace. I try to keep pace in the jumping mud and swallow complacency in large gulps of rum. We rolled til the rocks folded under the controlled thunder, electric blocks tumbling. we Squeezed every drop of seconds. from the tops of free trees.

From the Depths of the Pocketmachine: Part 5

(Editor's Note: This entry, an email to Dan, is dated Sunday, May 10, 2009 at 6:56a.m. and was the return of a missed phone call the night before. It's been edited because I am a vile and nasty boy sometimes. Dan is getting married now, which is nice....)

"THE RIP"

There's a picture of the new england coast on my dashboard. There's a blue car ripping down a pink line, which is basically how I feel.

We split a bottle of morgan between 6 and 11p...

My jeans are wet. My shoes are soaked so Im barefoot. I have no wallet and my change jar is running low and there are Many More tolls to come. And many miles to go, before I sleep.

Robert Frost never went to Maine. He wrote about Massachusetts. I've got the "Maine Blues Project" on the radio and half a rocket down already. I should remind you that this is being composed at 80 mph at 648am. That should give the prose the Edge that we really need.

I don't know the name of this bridge Im on but its magnificent. Im not sure the exact piece of water Im 200 feet above, but she leads right to the ocean.

Heavy swerves. Quickly I'll share the feeling of captain morgan in my belly. Stomach grumbles foreshadow horrible things to come. The alcohol is thin spreadly in my blood from my nose to my toes. I can feel it. The sugar is a typhoid typhoon in my gullet. Horrible natural bile and acids have eaten at it, for at least the last 3 hours I slept to no avail....

How was your gig? I can't believe I was down and out by midnight when you called. Devil rum. Its been my drink lately. Summahtime. Life is good.

My regards to the queen b. Enjoy your sunday

Love

Joey

From the Depths of the Pocketmachine: Part 4

(Editor's Note: This entry, an email to Dan, is dated Tuesday April 21, 2009 at 2:15p.m. which means I was at the Joke Shop, an extension of Vampfangs. A retail store on Main Street in Gloucester. I learned some interesting card tricks there, one real good one that I still remember but need to practice.)

"The Walk"

I had a good jive in my brain...I decided to park at home and walk to the joke shop. Foolish. It had been threatening rain all day and started spitting exactly at the point of no return.

The cold salty spit felt nice on my face and I felt my soul being cleansed and myself being reborn into the same person, which was now completely unchanged in a beautiful yet dizzying way.

Towards the end my shins started burning and I passed a guy in an apron out front, smoking under the overhang. He wasn't real and he floated away in a ferocious current that streamed in between the sidewalk cobblestones and out onto a deep puddle on Main St, where he drowned and his imaginary body floated out miles into the harbor before being eaten by lesbian sharks.

The spitstream increases. Bad for business. She had 2 customers between 10-2 which means there should be 1 and one third people during my shift. I would settle for just the third of a person, which would either be a dwarf, goblin or midget, or a baby that comes in by itself...

From the Depths of the Pocketmachine: Part 3

(Editor's Note: This nonfictional account is dated Saturday, July 11th 2009 at 1:25p.m. which means I was with my love on her birthday. The description below mentions the video being attached here, but here is no longer Here, and thus it is actually not.)

*****

"Nature"

We finished our picnic lunch and she called to me.

"Look, Darling......Nature."

A wasp was struggling in a spiders web on the barn. He was a shade of blue we had never seen before.

"Tragic", we agreed.

But there was more...the spider herself had this mighty blue wasp in a deathgrip. Her long legs tried to wrap around Blue's wings and her mouth seemed be biting the neck.

"A battle royale!", we realized.

They wrangled for what seemed like hours. Finally, the struggle itself freed Blue from the web, but not the spider. She still clung to his neck as he crawled up the barn, searching for a proper spot to fly away to Freedom. That particular moment of the battle is captured by the pocketmachine, and attached here. This very email.

Afterwards, they did fly off, together. Attached in the throngs of battle. Did the violent flight finally shake the spider off of Blue's majestic body? Were the puncture wounds to his neck of a fatal nature? Would the devil spider ever again find her barn home?

Nature. In the sunny backyard, on a Saturday in July, is Free.

From the Depths of the Pocketmachine: Part 2

(editor's note: This entry is dated Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 2:17p.m. Which means I was at Vampfangs. I'm sure all my work was complete and I was taking a moment to relax my nerves before the final push at the end of the day...

I sent this to my friend Zach, I don't think he wrote back. It's fiction, but not that strange. Rereading it makes me think of one of Kurt Vonnegut's rules for writing a short story that I should have followed more closely.)

*****

"The Frenchman"

The Frenchman stood just inside the entrance to the cafe. He was torn.

On one hand, he was tired and parched. The stiff wooden chair appeared as a holy blessing to his tired feet. The tall dusty bottles with fire on the inside beckoned to his throat and to his Spirit.

But he was not welcome here and he knew it. The back table of bikers seem ready to fight. The bartender took one look at him and said "If you take another step, I will call the police" although no one except The Frenchman heard him say that. The patrons were calm.

The Frenchman twirled his mustache in his fingers for a moment and thought of a raunchy comment to make about the bartender's wife. It was true.

The Frenchman then turned and left, without saying anything.

From the Depths of the Pocketmachine: Intro & Part 1

My first smart phone was fun. It opened up in a fancy way. It had a large keypad that inspired jive.

Somehow these seven segments survived from that phone. 3 fictional short stories. 2 jivestreams. 1 non fictional short story. 1 post-gig reflectional jivestream.

They are as pure to their original form as possible.

*****

(editor's note: this fictional short story is dated October 22nd, 2008 at 5:46pm - which means I was on the train commuting home from work at Berklee. I might describe it as a dark delve into the pysche of commuters. I must have been reading the short stories of Roald Dahl at the time. *Warning* explicit language)

"The Muck"

The train starts deep down the coast. I get on at the second stop. We then go through the real nice towns, where the mansions are right on the water and the Maids' Quarters dwarf my parent's pad. The Maids Quarters also have excellent ocean views.

Then you go right down the Ladder of Society. The houses get closer together and then, before you know it, there are apartment buildings with burned out cars in the lot, behind the Burger King. Then miles and miles of triple-decker apartments all packed into each other. Clothes drying on ropes from the fire escape, even now, after the first frost.

Then you go past the industrial complexes. General Electric. The nuclear power plant. Big generators, silos, and fenced in areas with giant red warning signs in Spanish.

The last leg of the journey is usually nice. From the generators and silos, you go through some muck before the train seems to hover for ages over the open ocean as the city approaches. We were in the muck when I first noticed it.

Actually, there were baby ducks swimming with their mother. Or father. I don't know how ducks work. But the scene was peaceful...

Right then, I saw it. The boot.

I've always wondered about solo shoes and boots on roads and rails, and how they got there. Wonderful, nasty stories. This, I am sure.

The train was crawling along. We are usually at full tilt at this point, and the morning commuters were anxious because we were traveling so slowly, then stopping, then resuming a crawl. We would be at least half an hour late if we were lucky.

A nearby woman around my mothers age asked, "why the fuck don't they tell us what is going on?" My mother would never speak like that in public, but she's also never had to commute to the city for months, or years at a time.

So I was really checking out this boot when I noticed the distinguishing characteristic that made it much different from any other boot I had ever seen, or will see again. The laces were tied.

The laces were tied and I recognized the shape of a foot and leg protruding from it, plunging under water, into the muck. I felt sick. An announcer made a muffled announcement on the speaker system.

"Can you see that boot ma'am?" I asked the woman next to me.

"Will you please be quiet? I have been waiting for this announcement for 30 minutes so I can call my boss", she answered tersely.

"Ma'am please just look at that boot and tell me what you see" I begged her. We were crawling slowly down the track, but the boot and its ugly horror were still quite visible.

"Shhhhhhhhh" she spit at me.

I was baffled. Surely this was more important than Work.

"Does no one see the dead body in the muck" I finally screamed. All the people with window seats, instead of looking out their window and confirming my beliefs, looked instead right at me and began shushing me in the same nasty tone.

"Have you all lost your mind? Look there. We are nearly passed it. You in the back...Look. LOOK! Jesus...."

and I felt a sharp pain on the small of my back, and my arms were pulled together behind me. The next sharp pain was on my left knee, and I felt myself being dragged, my legs powerless.

"That's enough of that boy. We apologized for being late but there's always One who can't handle it. You're upsetting the regulars. You're off at the next stop." The train conductor had intervened. My wrists were bound together by a locking plastic tie.

"Sir, I am a regular. My pass is in my wallet, take it out if you don't believe me. Sir, there is a dead man in the muck back there." I pleaded.

"Im sure of it. And you'll be right there with him." he replied, looking me directly in the eye, and smiling. I noticed he was holding a blade...

In a flash, he spun me round, cut the tie on my wrist and pushed me out the door, onto a platform at the last stop before the city. I hadn't even realized the train had stopped while I was being detained.

"Next train ain't for two hours you might wanna take a cab to work from here, Boy. And next time you go shouting about dead people I won't be so compassionate."

His words got softer and softer as the train pulled away.