Woodbridge's

It should have been a typical evening… after running a few errands, I expected to come home, heat up some leftover pizza and watch television until bed time. Nothing special, nothing exciting. Just a dull, flavorless evening. Destiny, though, can have different plans, and I suppose I found myself on the butt end of fate that night. From the moment I walked into that store, I should have known something was awry. It’s not often that one gets to wonder just how markedly different their life would have been if they hadn’t desperately needed to pick up detergent on their way home from work one Wednesday.

Our local department store chain is called Woodbridge’s. It’s small and its selection is paltry, but it’s directly between my job and my apartment. The Target is almost ten minutes out of my way, and the Wal-Mart is awfully run down these days. So unless I need something fairly obscure, I always stop at Woodbridge’s. I’m quite familiar with it, which is probably why I could tell something was off from the moment I walked in. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what the issue was, but it was definitely different. Maybe it was the lighting, or the smell of the place. I’m not sure. But it was off. I didn’t realize how far off until later.

The store was nearly abandoned that night. Now, this isn’t uncommon, especially on a weeknight (how, exactly, Woodbridge’s stays in business has always slightly confounded me), but it seemed exceptionally empty. Usually there’s a few stray shoppers, younger men, mostly, plodding over the dingy linoleum and looking pale under the buzzing fluorescent lights. But that night, I can’t remember seeing another soul between the front doors and the cleaning supplies. Every now and then, maybe, as I passed an aisle, a shadowy flash might skitter past, but I assumed it was just the tail end of a fellow shopper briskly moving in the opposite direction. I will admit that I didn’t really notice anything substantially odd at all until I picked my bottle of Gain off the shelf. There certainly had never been a stream running through the house wares department before.

I was dumbfounded, really. It was so nonsensical. But it was real. Only a few feet away from the fabric softeners and dryer sheets was a shallow brook dug into the white and blue Woodbridge’s tiles. The water was clear and running at a pretty fast clip, and there were little frogs and salamanders dotting the course of it. It looked freakishly natural, as if the store had just assembled itself around a creek... that is to say, there was no indication that the stream had been built into the store. Now, having stood in that exact spot countless times prior, I knew that that was not the case. The stream was obviously an addition. But the effort that had gone into making the storebound stream seem like a natural occurrence was staggering. It bothered me in a vague sort of way… I couldn’t fathom the purpose behind so much seemingly pointless work.

I set my detergent back on the shelf, bent down and cupped my hand into the water. It was cold. A tiny swarm of tadpoles darted away from my fingers as I broke the babbling surface. There was silt and a smattering of pebbles on the bed of the creek. I moved them around, kicking up a small storm of dirty plumes into the water. It felt so real. It was real, I suppose, but it didn’t seem any different than any brook you’d stumble across out in the woods. I stood up, flicked the excess water off my hand and dried it against my pants legs. Then I looked up and saw someone standing across the stream, just staring at me. He startled me so much that I nearly fell over.

There was a man across the stream. He was tall and lanky, dressed all in faded blue denim. I always hate how it looks when someone wears the same color pants and shirt. I’m not sure why, and given the fact that the man was tapping the blunt edge of a large butcher’s knife into his palm, I probably should have been thinking about something else. But I wasn’t. I was thinking about how stupid his faded blue shirt looked with his faded blue jeans. It didn’t take long, though, before I noticed the lunatic smile on the man’s narrow, craggy face. He had longish yellow-gray hair, the color of curdled cigarette smoke, and his lips were obnoxiously red. His teeth were certainly nicer than the teeth you’d expect a knife wielding lunatic to have, but his skin was almost stony in texture. All in all, he looked quite crazy and I wasn’t at all thrilled to see him. Helpfully, however, he had a nametag on his shirt. Unfortunately, his name was “T. Devil.”

We stood there, parted by the stream, and staring at each other for some time. Eventually, unsure of what to do, I sputtered, “What does the ‘T’ stand…”

He cut me off and said, “’The.’ It stands for ‘The.’”

“’The Devil,’” I replied. “I see.”

“It’s not my given name,” he clarified.

“Ah,” I said, wondering if should just run the hell away as fast as I could. But I didn’t. I stood where I was, conversing with a crazy man named The Devil while an inexplicable river ran between us. It was a bad decision, I will admit it, but it was the decision I made. I can’t adequately say why. I just stood there, almost transfixed by the man, or by the situation. After a brief silence, I decided to speak again. “Stream’s new,” I said.

“Nah,” The Devil said, never losing that horrifying smile. “It’s always been there.”

It hadn’t. I know it hadn’t. But I decided not to press the issue. “Oh,” I said.

“You just couldn’t see it before,” The Devil explained. “But it’s always been there.”

A brief silence passed again with The Devil and me just blinking at each other. Then, suddenly and chillingly, I realized that The Devil wanted to kill me. It just made sense given his demeanor and bladed accessory, but the reality of it sunk in at that very moment. My throat went dry with fear and I began to perspire from pretty much every pore. It struck me, then, that I should get a confirmation from the predator, and so I asked, “You’re here to murder me, aren’t you?”

The Devil nodded an affirmation.

The fear that overtook me was not the fear that I expected. It was not panic. It was anxiety, like the anxiety that comes along with being ill-prepared for a test, or the anxiety that accompanies a first date. I was nervous. I was nervous I would fail somehow and this crazed man would succeed in his endeavor to murder me. But despite the anxiety, I had no doubt I could keep him at bay if I just managed to focus. By no means was my situation hopeless. Something, already, was keeping him confined to his side of the creek. I began to formulate hypotheses. Perhaps it was the creek itself that was keeping The Devil from reaching me. I decided to ask him if that was the case. He had been unfailingly helpful so far, after all.

He nodded again and I breathed a sigh of relief. I would be fine. He was trapped in sporting goods and I was free to just leave the store with my life intact. A close call, certainly, but no harm done. I backed up, slowly distancing myself from The Devil and my protective creek. I kept my eyes on the lunatic the whole time, worried that, somehow, the status quo might up and change on me. He kept smiling. “I’m going to leave, now,” I told him. “I hope that’s ok?” I didn’t think I really needed his permission, but it seemed like the polite thing to do.

This time, The Devil shook his head. I didn’t like that. Not even a little. I decided to increase my back-up speed, hoping to make my way to the store's foyer a bit quicker. Instead, I tripped over myself and fell onto my rear end, landing with an echoing thump on the pockmarked tiling. All the while, The Devil continued staring at me, still grinning maniacally and still tapping his knife into his palm.

I was a bit shaken by my fall and growing more and more unnerved as moments passed that did not lead to my exit of the store. Sitting on the ground, amidst the surprising amount of dirt and detritus that had probably accumulated over the course of a single shopping day, I felt my limbs and my body become very heavy. Each finger felt like tiny weights had been tied to them. My bones felt leaden and dense. A soreness rippled across the muscles in my back and I felt ridiculously exhausted. I stifled a yawn, trying to keep a direct focus on my would-be killer, before noticeably wincing from my heaviness. I struggled to stand, but I overcame gravity and lifted myself from the ground. As I did, my armor creek shifted, changing course by making an L-like bend into the main aisle, veering sharply right through home goods and resuming course by cutting back through the row of plastic garbage cans and Rubbermaid totes. The creek was now running behind me. Without changing my position at all I was suddenly standing on the same side of the brook as The Devil. And, of course, that brook was the only thing keeping him from killing me.

My heart began to race. My nervousness escalated into a full blown panic. I no longer had any delusion that things were going to be just fine. Because a murderer was moving toward me. He was slow and deliberate, but he was moving toward me and he was going to plunge his butcher's knife directly into my heart. I knew it. I could feel it. I tried to back away, but now I felt trapped by the very same running water that had protected me mere moments before. I couldn't move. I was held fast by some sort of force, a compulsion I couldn't explain. I shut my eyes tightly and envisioned a place where I wasn't about to become the victim of a gory assault. But even with my eyes closed, all I could imagine was The Devil a few footsteps away readying a sharp object to pierce my skin over and over and over again. I wanted to scream out something, a demand for The Devil to stop, to leave me alone, to drop the knife, walk away and never return. But I couldn't make a sound. Nothing came from my throat but a sickly little gurgle. I was about to die and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Time seemed to freeze, and the agony of anticipation just hovered over me, heavy and thick like dripping molasses slowed by the cold. I was dying a hundred times between each heartbeat. I was ready, but I wasn't ready at all.

And then my brain created its own reality. Still in my mind's eye, still with my real eyes clamped tightly shut, I pictured the ground moving. I pictured space coming between The Devil and me, as if the store was growing from its middle, pushing us outwards and away from each other. New ground just rose up out of nothingness and took its place, seamless, in the new gap that separated us. I moved one direction without taking a step, and he was carried the opposite way. The world just filled in between us and I was safe and he was far away. It was a wonderful little fantasy, a glimmer of stupid hope to break up the tedium of my panic.

But when I opened my eyes, it had happened. Suddenly, I was standing at the edge of a huge gulf of new space. The world had moved us. I had moved us... with my mind. I don't know how, exactly, but my vision was absolutely accurate. The Devil had been pushed so far away that he was no longer visible. Instead, there was a wide expanse of empty store, just floor and walls and ceiling with exposed rafters and buzzing fluorescent lights high overhead. The aisle, the one where the creek had once flowed, the aisle that had separated The Devil and me had become miles wide. I couldn't see the other end of it. The horizon faded with emptiness. For all I knew, that space went on forever. Had it not just saved my life, I imagine I would have found the event wholly disconcerting. As it was, I found it to be an almost mystical experience.

Having successfully dispatched The Devil, I decided to return to my initial task of buying detergent. It seemed rather hollow, though, considering everything I had just experienced. Somehow, getting my whites their whitest paled in comparison to the power I had exerted with my mind. I wondered if my abilities extended beyond self-preservation. I decided to try a new trick.

I stood very still, shut my eyes tightly again, and envisioned grass growing beneath my feet. I imagined trees in time-lapse growth springing up from the ground, gaining heft and dominating the landscape. I imagined my creek changing directions again to flow through my new little patch of nature. Woodbridge's store would still contain it, but the new growth would be a tiny refuge of natural beauty in a sea of poorly lit artifice. I imagined dandelions growing between blades of grass, and mosses bedding down on the roots of the gnarled maples and oaks that stood in rapt attention on the banks of the babbling stream. I imagined birds nesting in the branches and singing out beautiful, spring-time hymns through green and red leaves that fluttered in an air conditioned, industrial fan generated breeze. I imagined grasshoppers leaping through the new lawn, munching on all this novel greenery, while worms and ants dug tunnels below the surface. Surrounded by aisles of cribs and baby clothes and displays of bargain priced DVD's, I tried to create life.

And I did. I opened my eyes and my park was there, just as I envisioned it. Just as I had done with The Devil, I had transmuted space, changed reality to my own accord. It was lovely. It was amazing. My attention to detail was incredible. I had made something beautiful spring from the recesses of my mind, and now it existed. I ran my hand over the soft grasses that had risen up from the shattered blue and white tile and I was amazed by how legitimate it felt brushing against my skin. The bark of the trees split and splintered in convincing jags and patterns. The leaves were variegated correctly. I caught a grasshopper and marveled at each little exoskeleton plate. It was all as real as anything made by God, but it was there because of my will. You can see how this could inflate an ego.

I worried very much for my sanity and doubted my ability to use these new powers in only a constructive manner. I worried that any stray thought, now, would suddenly be made real. As if on cue, horrible things started entering my mind without any provocation from my consciousness. I was hit with the notion of my family perishing. I fretted, now, that it had happened. It struck across my thoughts like lightning... my childhood home, up on an abandoned hill in the wilderness, still populated with my parents and siblings and pets, lit up with squares of yellow light as twilight spilled out around the countryside. It was so peaceful for one moment. But my brain conjured up a terrible event. An airplane overhead, a giant jet aircraft, stalling like an old car on a winter morning. The engines just sputter out dead and the tons of steel and plastic and glass fall like a stone from the sky. And the plummeting craft, of course, is headed directly for my house, for my family. I can't stop the train of images. My family is inside of their house. They hear the cacophony above, but they don't know what it is. It's getting louder. They don't have a clue. Before they can even guess that the thundering rumble is dangerous, the jet crushes their house in a fury of gravity and fire and apocalyptic destruction. And because this has come into my brain, I am terrified that it has happened.

More stray thoughts come and go. They vary in complexity and in malevolence. Some are almost benign, others are horrific. The United States capital building is now made of croutons. Every home in a nearby neighborhood is ransacked by ghostly marauders riding ebony, skeletal horses. Knives grow in the bellies of my former classmates, slicing them open from the inside out. Thriving metropolises are reduced to flaming planks and cinders. Trees morph into giant men who spend their time meditating by the shores of the oceans. Frogs rise up from the swamp on two legs and begin a conquest of all mammalian life. I am wreaking havoc with my mind. I can feel it. Every stupid thought breed something terrible, something nonsensical, something deadly. How many people are suffering for my ability? How many people are dying because of some new trick that I've discovered.

The exhilaration of what I can do has drained from me. It's too much to control.

I decide, perhaps, that I should bring The Devil back.

Facade

What she had done, mostly, is try to hide behind a mountain of pretension, piling on layer after layer of subtle meaning and cryptic red herrings, hoping to dissuade anyone who bothers to look, hoping to misdirect the more tenacious amongst them. Like a roaring industrial anthem, she hides a melodic core under thunderous distraction and angry dissonance. She’s afraid that what’s beneath the noise isn’t good enough, isn’t interesting enough, isn’t real enough, and so she tried, desperately, to bury herself in a cacophony of meandering free verse and thoughtful, mysterious little scribblings. She worries that there is a hollowness to it all; she knows that there is such fragility to it that a simple gust of wind will send the entire house of cards crashing down. Even her name speaks to a certain inherent falsehood. Her parents named her, of all things, Lyric. And Lyric is tired of pretending to be more than she is.

Lyric pictures herself, when she pictures herself, as short, slim enough, with ratty black hair and too pale skin and grave gray eyes that seem a little too big for her face. Her lips seem strange, and she will become almost entranced by the way their slow pink fades almost imperceptibly into the white of her flesh. She will stare at them in the mirror, trying to determine where her face ends and her lips begin. Her teeth, she thinks, are too crooked, although they’re less crooked than most peoples’. And while her nose is perfectly acceptable, she is happy she can hide her ears, because one, she accurately perceives, is quite a bit larger than the other. She likes the way she dresses, even if other girls don’t, and she wishes she was more adept with mascara and eyeliner because she likes the way make-up looks on her when it’s applied correctly. All in all, she would say, she is a relatively plain girl, but on the right side of pretty. She is fairly objective in this regard, and feels head and shoulders above other girls her age who seem obsessed with weight and hair and tanning, and she’s never really felt bad about how she looks, which is nice. She’s never felt thrilled about it either, but she assumes indifference beats an eating disorder any day.

Lyric knows she is smarter than most people. This is not braggadocio, but instead, a very accurate hypothesis based on years of field research and reams of empirical evidence. It is also, she notes with sadness, not exactly a ringing endorsement of her intellect, as most people are pretty stupid. She sometimes wishes she wasn’t so smart. She wouldn’t give up what she knows or how she thinks or anything like that. She’d just rather that everybody else was elevated. It would make things easier on her, and maybe keep her from feeling obliged to let Tara Gimble always copy off of her math tests. But things are the way they are and Lyric is bright and most people aren’t and there’s nothing she can do about it one way or another. It’s still annoying, though.

Her hobbies are myriad and too many and the extreme variety in her pastimes precludes excellence in any of them. She doesn’t like this about herself. She doesn’t like flitting from one passion to the next.

She loves music, older music especially, and she has a closet full of grunge t-shirts that her Aunt Sara gave her. She likes that nobody she knows has a Smashing Pumpkins tour shirt, or a Screaming Trees tee or a homemade Nirvana hoodie. Sometimes people think it’s cool that she’s a decade behind, other kids can’t understand it. Adults love it, Lyric noticed, when a teenager likes something that they, the adults, liked when they were teenagers. Her Uncle Steve loves to talk about Soundgarden with Lyric. His wife, Gretchen, was a fan of Hole and L7 and the whole riot grrrl thing. She has an older cousin, Doug, who saw the Meat Puppets play when both of the Kirkwood brothers were alive and well. Lyric makes them feel less old and less lame by sharing their passion with them. She feels this is a valuable service to men and women on the verge of losing their youth forever. Her tastes run similar with books and movies. She feels slightly out of time, and that’s ok with her.

In addition, Lyric is a writer. She is an artist. She wants, desperately, to make something of value and wants her time to be spent just making things, producing things, because she is very afraid of not leaving a mark when she’s gone. She isn’t particularly good at any of the things she does, although she’s not laughably bad at them either. She puts forth a good effort, usually lagging at the end as she becomes bored and longing for something new to do. She has half-written snippets of songs in her head, a shoebox full of photographs she took of old factories and churches, a sketchbook with the skeleton of a teen drama graphic novel, a list of titles for the books she might someday write, and a notepad scrawled over with the seeds of a thousand unrealized projects. In this way, she has constructed a wall of creativity to hide behind. She has, in essence, built a faux persona, an exoskeleton that she crawl into to make herself appear, perhaps, deeper than she is. She can stand behind this pile of potential product and say, with regality, “look what I will make (someday)!” And in doing so she affords herself the role of poet, of painter, of stalwart chronicler of human existence and she allows herself to rest on it, to believe in it, and hope upon hope that she can follow through on something, anything, to substantiate her claims. In reality, she feels she has very little to say, very little to offer and she struggles with what’s behind the superficial charm of witty chapter headings and intricate magazine logos. So the superficiality descends into esoteric puffery, and the false starts and copious notes become increasingly stranger and harder to decipher. This has the added benefit of reducing scrutiny. It’s hard, she discovered, for anyone to objectively judge something they don’t understand. Better still, confusing things had an unintentionally hilarious side effect of forcing people into finding meaning. She found that teachers hated admitting they didn’t understand her papers or her journal entries. As much as they preached the value of substance over style, they were loathe to admit they didn’t actually know the difference. So Lyric’s persona of eclecticism and inscrutability continued to grow, unabated, and before long she began to feel suffocated by the gripping hands of a monster of her own design.

What she wants is for someone to see through her bullshit. She wants to be called to task for the overblown, overstuffed, shambling importance now ascribed to anything she does. But nobody seems to do it.

Lyric writes a column in her school newspaper. She feels like she has nothing of value to say, so she gussies up self-help aphorisms and sub-Ann Landers advice with artistic flourishes and strange linguistic trickery. She adds snippets of foreign phrasings and spellings cribbed from old “Krazy Kat” comic strips. She bends meaning to the point that it snaps and then reassembles it in a completely novel and useless configuration. Then she adds a quick pen sketch that is apropos of nothing to really sell the package. And people love it. It drives her crazy.

Lyric has talented friends who started an online e-zine. Her friend Mitchell writes short stories with plots and believable characters and genuine insights into being a young adult. Her friend Coriander takes beautiful photographs to illustrate Mitchell’s fiction. Her friend Leticia has well thought and intricately reasoned political views. She expresses them with grace and force. Her friend Carmon draws a hilarious comic strip called “Pack-N-Play” about a pregnant teen and her overbearing single mother. And Lyric provides nonsense, day after day. She never knows what to say, so she rattles off stream of conscious beat poetry and simplistic, rambling narratives or bumbling reconstitutions of her dreams into something like a letter, something like a play. It’s all miles beyond comprehension, not because of brilliance or genius, but because if it were reduced to something understandable, it would be absolutely laughable. But when obscured behind barbed wire non sequiters and middling art pretending the lack of inspiration is intentional, nobody seems to notice. Lyric is able, every day, to cram another load of nothing down the throats of her online fans. There are plenty of them. They don’t seem to care that she is, in essence, a sham artist.

Lyric won a scholarship when her art teacher, Mister Monroe, submitted a terrible painting of sparrow that Lyric had made and then hidden behind thick walls of goopy paint and spattered ink that added a dimension of (in the teacher’s words) “sorrow to the malformed shape of a poorly loved songbird.” Lyric felt guilty, especially knowing that her fellow student, Rickie Garamond, had spent weeks on his beautifully crafted rendering of Westminster Abbey only to lose his scholarship to a girl who was so ashamed of her terrible work that she blurred it as much as possible to avoid anyone seeing just how mediocre she really was. Even Rickie believed in her, though. He seemed thrilled to have lost to her. He even mentioned that he wished he could make art on a deeper level than just copying lines in a technically perfect manner. When she received the notification, she wanted to throw up.

She doesn’t watch much television, because she feels it distracts her, although she’s not even sure, now, what she’s being distracted from. She used to like jigsaw puzzles because completing them felt like an accomplishment… now, it’s hard to feel any level of satisfaction from completing someone else’s work. She used to love going to Denny’s at midnight with her friends. Now, her friends and their genuine and increasingly sophisticated discussions of art and literature and cinema only cement her feelings of cultural inadequacy. She hates speaking to them. She’s certain they will see through her façade and realize that she is a fraud, that her whole oeuvre is nothing but a pile of half-realized ideas and warmed over bits stolen from people that are way better at everything than she is. But as yet, they seem to believe in her sketchy, foggy talents and the value of the fluff that she pumps out.

Lyric sits, sometimes, in the dark, racking her brain trying to think of something sincere to say. She tries, desperately, to think of her passions, of music, of movies, of books and replicate that feeling in some way. But everything she does belies a sort of Xerox mentality. She feels incapable of real creativity. And when she does, in those dark moments, think of something genuine, she immolates herself in self-consciousness and burns the idea to the ground with her. If she does it, if she displays herself in a way that isn’t warped by frosted glass or spun through a kaleidoscope, she is certain there will be no doubt as just how mediocre she really is. And that scares the hell out of her. So she keeps up her charade, wondering if anybody will ever point out that she’s an empress and she’s not really wearing any clothes at all.

Lyric wants out, but she’s not sure how. She picks up the phone and calls her cousin Doug and hopes maybe they can go see a show. And she hates the fact that Doug thinks she’s just so cool.

Unstuck

Slowly wandering through the yard at dusk, Annette looked up into the darkening sky and tried to maintain a sense of self even as the barely visible panoply of stars above made her feel tiny, insignificant and alone. If she had been the crying type of girl this would have been a moment, maybe, when a tear or two would have streamed down her soft cheek. She couldn’t explain why. She wasn’t sad, exactly, and not quite upset. She was just slightly overwhelmed and slightly underwhelmed and she felt a bit of a mess inside. Annette was not the crying type of girl, however, and whatever difficult-to-express emotions she was feeling, she kept them as tightly bottled as usual.

The word she used to describe this unpleasant and annoying sensation was “unstuck.” Annette felt unstuck rarely, but when it happened, it was hard to remedy. It was a vague sense of non-accomplishment, of disgust at her own perceived mediocrity, of nebulous worry that she was missing something better and a prickly fear that she had settled for too little. She wasn’t displeased, generally, with the state of her life, but she did, at times, ache for something grander or bigger or more exciting than her day to day routine could throw at her. While most of the time that routine settled on her shoulders easily, like a comfortable shawl, other times it felt like an unbearable burden of obligation and repetition. And when she acknowledged that weight, she felt herself becoming unstuck from her life. And she disliked that feeling a great deal.

And so, as the world draped itself in its starry quilt, Annette moved in slow motion through the cooling evening air, feeling every footfall as it sent tiny shudders through her bones and nerves and muscles. She was very aware of the cricket chirps, a far off freight train, the cries of children at play and the low level hum of traffic on a nearby busy thoroughfare. She was very steady in her breath and very measured with her heartbeat and she felt uneasily at ease, a condition that she was all too accustomed to. It brought with it a sort of melancholy nostalgia, the type of creaking bone weariness that falls like soft rain in a crackling, black and white old film. It brought with it a set of memories, of half-forgotten waking dreams that began to unspool in her mind’s eye. It brought with it a heaviness that made her slump, cross-legged, on the newly damp grass.

Things were fine, she would tell herself in those moments of being unstuck. But they weren’t fine enough. As she sat on the lawn, her hopes, usually tamped down by reality and subverted into half-attempted hobbies and diversions, rose up out of her like curling steam breath on a frosty winter morning. Her eyes, normally heavy lidded and rimmed in sleepless black circles, opened wide and began to sing out with brilliant color and radiance. She was almost luminescent, barely lit by a sliver of silver moon, but somehow glowing of her own volition. Her veins were lit from the inside, spidery highways of hot pink and electric blue showing through the pale shell of her skin. Shafts of white shot through from her fingernails, phasing through the night air and rising up to the spackles of drifting black clouds like ten miniature spotlights. Quicksilver seemed to pour from her shimmering mouth, lifting up into the air, zeppelin-like and beautifully awkward, and it formed unheard notes from some imaginary symphony still being composed in the recesses of her brain. Owls beat their wings above her and flew from the crests of nearby trees to form a halo of ghostly feathers around her flowing, liquid hair. The bones of dead things rose up from the ground beneath her, clattering and yellowed with age. They seemed to build up a cage around her, a barrier wall to protect her. The air around her crackled with electricity and power. Her neighbors’ televisions lit up with white noise static. Their phone calls were shredded with a squall of shrieks and whistle. Annette, unstuck and unglued from her life, was Screaming Potential, a being of pure creative energy, like a pocket of God alight in the midst of her tiny suburban neighborhood.

There she saw it, every thread, every conceivable movement and motion and possibility. Reality lilted around her, made of nothing more than crepe streamers of reflective chrome, filaments of pulsing emerald, drizzled lines of deep crimson and shadowy strings of smoke and soot. They drifted about in insanely intricate patterns, forming geometric webs and slippery amoeba wheels that spun into amorphous nonsense before reverting, strictly, back to grotesque organization. It was revoltingly complex and disturbingly simple and it would have driven Annette mad if her brain were still designed with folds of gray matter and neurons firing across synapses. She was greater than it, now, though… aloft in the formless and rigid sea of creation. Her life, her tiny little life, was spilled out in marvelous array across a hundred, a thousand, a million… an endless parade of happenings and moments and instances and events.

Her childhood rewritten in every conceivable language.

Her first kiss, retold in infinite variety.

Each and every version of her love and her desire and her want and her need flashing in seizure strobe chromatic chaos across the depth and breadth of all time.

She saw the best of it, the worst of it, and the crushing middle space in between it all as she stared off into the types of woman she could be, should be, could have been or would become. She felt it, then, the twinge of insignificance burrow into her skin and cut, razor sharp and scalpel accurate into the deep gory bends of her soul. And all at once, the power was cut, the show was over, the damage was done and the curtains, singed by the stage light heat, were drawn. The potential drained out of her, lost through the pores in her skin, through her nostrils and her lips. She felt a nauseating loss of control and a wave of gut-kicking dizziness that sent her crashing, still cross-legged, onto her back. The cold dew of the grass was refreshing and the stars above were still lovely and still gapingly vast in scope.

Things were fine, she told herself. The world righted and she sat up, barely aware of what had happened but aware enough to still need to stifle the urge to cry. She wouldn’t cry about it. There was nothing to be done now. Choice after choice, circumstance after circumstance had led her here. And it was ok. Not because of anything she’d done, not because of any fate or destiny or reasoning or plan, but solely because it had to be ok. She was blinking and she was breathing and her heart still pumped and warm blood still coursed through her veins. She had no choice but to accept it, to break down the wild hopes and stuff them back down where they belonged. She had a life and it was enough, even if it hadn’t been the bliss filled adventure she’d been promised as a little girl. She swallowed her dreams back down, felt a shudder of regret or remorse or worry or something maybe a little like all three and then held her breath as some dark tufts of cloud shut out the moon and left her alone in the dark.

Things were fine, she told herself. She lifted herself up from the ground, brushed herself off and meandered inside the house. Things were fine. But they weren’t really fine enough.

Outsider Art

So, I guess I think of myself as an artsy sort of person... I draw, I paint, I make cartoons. I write stuff. I doodle. I take copious amounts of pictures of creepy dolls. I try to fill my free time with art. I'd like, someday, to maybe make my living via art. I think it would be nice to get paid to make things. I don't think I'd ever call myself an "artist." Not yet, at least. I'm just a guy who dabbles in art. A hobbyist with some vague long term goals.

I wish, sometimes, I was more involved with the artistic community... I wish, sometimes, I was more immersed in that world. But I'm really on the outside of it. I appreciate it, but I'm also somewhat cynical about it. I enjoy it, but I feel out of my depth in it. I often find art frustrating, pretentious, obnoxious, confounding, overwhelming and wholly destructive to my ego. I've never quite belonged with the real artists. I'm self-taught and under-educated. I'm too linear and too pop. I'm no visionary, no innovator, no provocateur... I'm just some guy who draws weird pictures of U.S. presidents as Good-N-Plenty's.

But I love art. I do. And I love all kinds of art. All kinds of writing. All kinds of music. I love that there's so much variety, even as I lament how little of it I'm capable of. I love how talented people can be, even I as fret over how talentless I usually feel. I find inspiration in it, even as it makes me question why I'm bothering to make anything at all when so many people can do it so much better than I can. Good art is beautiful and amazing and thrilling and it makes me feel like dirt. Bad art, on the other hand, inspires me to keep trying... my thought is always "If this jackass can make a go of it, than maybe I can too." There's a definite catalyzing power in mediocre to terrible art... It spurs me to try. Awesome art usually spurs me to curl up in the fetal position.

I do this mostly outside of the company of other artists and writers and creative types... It's partly because I find passion of any sort to be irritating. Irritating because I don't have it, and irritating because... well, passionate people have a tendency to go overboard. And creative types tend to have passion in surplus. I stay outside, too, partly because I feel like a poseur. Whether it's in art or writing or anything, really, I feel like I'm a pretender... some dude with a tiny smudge of potential standing amidst people who have made art their life. I was showing my paintings at a local art show, once, when a man asked me what my art meant to me. I didn't have an answer... at least, not one that satisfied him. I told him I just liked making things. I just put paint on a canvas and moved it around until it looked interesting. I didn't have any deeper motive than that. I didn't have anything that I was trying to say. I didn't have a message I wanted to convey in blue and green swathes of acrylic color. I just like, at the end of it, having something that didn't exist until I made it. This made the man inexplicably angry, and I felt like a complete tool. I should have at least made up an answer!

It's just hard for me to take it so seriously. I do think art is important, but I can't easily articulate why. It's definitely something that improves life... an amenity that keeps existence from slipping into mere survival. But it's more than that. It gives depth to society, and to culture... For example, having the gorgeous Calatrava wing of the Milwaukee Art Museum gives Milwaukee a real landmark, a cultural touchstone that can act as visual shorthand. It adds a dimension of character to a place with no skyline or real monuments of note (I don't think the Bronze Fonze counts...). It's art with a purpose. It's not just beautification, it's identification... and I think that's important. Still, most art isn't that grand...

I get envious and sad when I read about gallery openings, or shows, or curated exhibits at museums... I want, sometimes, to be part of that world. But I don't think I belong in that world, either. I don't know how I would respond to people wandering around, discussing my art... mostly because there's little to discuss. Even at the little arts & crafts fairs I've done, it gets unnerving listening to people talk about things I've made as if I'm not sitting there hoping to make a sale. One man explained to his wife just what I was trying to accomplish with the way I utilized brush strokes (I think he said I was trying to create an atmosphere of claustrophobia or something similarly ridiculous). I didn't have the heart to say I wasn't trying to accomplish anything... I sort of felt bad that I wasn't.

Does anybody really set out to make Art with a capital "A"? And if they do, don't they feel like pretentious knobs when they do it? Who buys into it? Should I? Am I missing out on some key component of art appreciation that would make me a better person, a more enriched human being and maybe help me catapult out of the realm of mere hobbyist into that of a real artist? Do most people who make things have these same questions? It's like a crisis of artistic faith.

At any rate, I can't see the status quo changing... and that's not so bad. But it would be nice, I suppose, to get the hell over it and maybe fall in line with some other folks like me... But I'm pretty sure they'll think I'm just a big lame.

Eight Musicians On God (From "The City")

PORTIA

There is magic in every tiny crevasse of this world. Imagine a place of such intricacy and wonder - there is no chance in it, of course. It's all gloriously designed. My breath, my footsteps, my words all drawn out in perfect detail on Her meticulous blueprint. Her hand, plotting the story... but She has enough faith in Her creations that she allows them a fraction of Her boundless imagination. You think of a sonnet, or a symphony, and what, more who, is it there that spawned it? What is that profound inspiration? Where is that well of creativity that the work is drawing from? And I have to think that Her art is multiplied a million times over. Each of Her works birthing even more works, things that, in as much as her omniscience allows, can maybe even surprise her? Think of this: for so long we have copied Her creations. We tried to recreate nature in static image, or describe it with inadequate language. But even in that dawning era, there was the spark of novelty. In our mythology we invented a whole world outside of what She'd shown us. An imitation, to be sure... in our limited capacity we can, at best, rearrange what She's given us in relatively novel ways. But think of how many pieces She's seen fit to bestow! Think of the seeming unending variety of Her world, and the huge palette it allows us to work from. There are a thousand bits of creation in even the smallest stone. There are such minute diffusions of color that every single shade of green can take on its own unique meaning! Our toolbox is filled with a staggering amount of possibilities, of near infinite variations on all the splendor She has shown us. God has given us so many gifts, but I can't imagine a single thing greater than that bit of Her she's bequeathed to us. The greatest gift is Her own ambition, that impetus to create that She's been kind enough to grant.

MICHAEL

If there's a God, and let's be clear: I'm praying there isn't... but if there is, it means all I can do is a pale copy of His creation, and even in that, I'm nothing more than a tool of His oppressive will. How can you claim responsibility for what you've made if it wasn't yours to begin with, or if all you are is a cog in His machine, or a character in His book? To be artificial, to be created by an authority, well that's no better than being a plaything, right? That's nothing more than being an automaton, guided solely by some greater force's whims. If there is a God, if there is an omnipotent thing, all present in this world, then I don't have a single original thought in my head. If there is a God, then I don't have a choice in any action I take, in anything I create, or really, in anything at all. That poem I wrote? It's God's. The song I composed? God's. The cake I baked? Even that's God's, right? He put the notion of it in me. I'm just an instrument. A means to an end. To even suggest there's such a thing as freedom is a joke. The thing can't be everywhere, can't be all knowing without having wholly dictated what I am. At best, I suppose, if there's a God, maybe it's a dispassionate being. Something that made us and then let us be. But even then, that thing, if it created this world, it couldn't really grant us freedom, could it? Even if you claim freedom, that being, that dispassionate God, would've had to make the rules, the rules that decide everything. So even an uncaring deity would be responsible, at least indirectly, for every last thing knocking around in my brain. What I'd hoped for, what I wanted to be true (but am now quite sure isn't) is that there is no creator. No divinity overseeing his world. If I am an accident, a byproduct of an unfeeling cosmos, at least then I am free. Responsible entirely for my own fate. But then, I guess, the cosmos itself is God, and I face the same problem. All of which leads me to the inexorable (and hopeless) conclusion that I am nothing but a lifeless thread in someone's, or something's, immense tapestry. So my only consolation is in the thought that if there is God (and let's be clear: I still pray there isn't), He's hopefully just as artificial as I am, another thread in someone else's weaving, and feeling the same impotence as I am.

THOMAS

We can be cogs, understand? We can be no more alive than the bits of wiring in the telex machine or the circuitboard in the computer. We can fill that role, I suppose, letting ourselves slip into our preconfigured notions of what it is to be made. But, under that, there is still a warm heart that beats in us, and we are full up of the irrational, and the passionate and even the insane. Filter us through logic, and you might have chess pieces predestined by some greater being, sure. But the sting of loss and the kiss of loneliness resonate in me, and so I know (I don't really know, I'll admit it) I am more than just guided missile parts and machine gun accuracy. We impose our own prison walls, we hide in the shadows cast by autocrats and claim no responsibility. We let it all wash over us and blame, with some validity, sure, the monster or monsters in power. But I can't shackle God with that. We might be hardwired for something, maybe rote, maybe divine... but you have that heart beating in you and the capacity for independence in it too. Argue logically with me, I don't mind. It sloughs off, because what faith is is knowledge of what you can't ever really know. We are more than a whirring collection of internal machinery and programmed destinies. I know it, even if I can't really know it. I feel. That's enough to give me all the faith in something greater I need. I won't say that God is necessarily active, or even real in the way a brick or a car or the moon is real. Obviously it's not something to touch with your hands. You can't see it with your eyes. But it figures. We are mystery. Our whole being is questionable and if you can question yourself you can bring the whole Sea of the universe into doubt. And it doesn't matter. It's simple to get mired in the crush. The world we built, though, isn't God's. His is elegant... savage, sure, but chugging along of its own accord independent of the ruinous little monkeys unable to get along with anything. We are not tied to any stake except the stakes we've imbedded on our own. Free will. And it only matters to the extent that I do not have to be confined to just one tedious world. Why bother the unknowable with your ideas of what it means to be free? Exercise it, that freedom, and I assume that's enough to keep it pleased.

TOM

You can question His existence, I know it. It's easy, because you'll see a child trampled by life, or an innocent swallowed up by the earth, or a knife in your jugular and there's no reason in it, you figure. And maybe that's right. It seems to be an easy out, doesn't it, to keep citing some grandiose plan He didn't see fit to share with us? Doesn't it seem awfully cruel of Dad to constantly let his kids suffer for the sake of some perceived greater good? And, sure, I can see that. But at the worst, you can say the guy's ambivalent, or that His rule is pretty arbitrary, right? I don't think it's even a question... I don't know that you can hold God accountable, guilty, for what you think are His transgressions. Really, it's probably more like indifference, huh? But then I look at something pretty or something amazing. Look at the way the sunset ignites the sky into a gorgeous inferno of pink and red and orange and yellow. Look at the purple strata of a canyon so deep that the bottom blurs from your sight. Look at the head of an eagle, or the tail of a swan or the markings on a clown fish. And you can point at it, and you can tell me that it's all science and accidents but it's not. It's no less than the greatest work of art conceivable. A project so massive it incorporates the whole of existence. And the detail, the detail just here on our little corner of the universe is incredible. And we dovetail into the rest of it, a picture so big you can't even really imagine it. And again, scream science and accidents, it's just not. You can feel Him, there in the pitch black of an infinite sky, or the murky deep of some algae smothered bay, or the architecture of some moldy pile of bones that used to be a man. Reflections of Him, his brush or chisel or clay or whatever the hell it is you make a world out of. Maybe it's just words, I don't know. And are you a speck to Him? Probably. But I figure if something's, someone's, important enough to design everything ever, you can't expect to matter much. So, I won't fault you claiming God's indifference, and probably His biggest mistake, the most egregious lapse in omniscient judgment was His letting us see our own insignificance. It does seem unnecessary, almost mean spirited. But I'm gonna succumb to the cop out. Who are you, you dust mote? Who are you to question what brought you into this place? You're a trifling nothing bobbing around in something so gigantic that it doesn't even pay to try to think on it. And you can say it's unfair. It probably is. But so what? You stand up to the giant, little tailor, go ahead. See what it gets you. You're an insect. As for me, I'll just be content to watch it, and try to leave my stinger in where I can.

RICHARD

I guess it's one of those things where we pretend to know, because not knowing it is just too much on the overwhelming side. I can tell you what I think, or rather what I wish was true, and what probably isn't. But I want that kindly God. I want that God that resides up in some heavenly gilded palace, waiting on your prayers and doling out justice to the sinners and equity to the righteous. But you don't see much evidence of that. I wonder how much we make up, how much our fear and anxiety at being lost little children in a haunted forest dictates what we invent in God. When you're faced with the reality of life, of power and authority in the hands of folks just as flawed as you, it rumbles a bit, and really makes you long for divinity. And, too, it gets to be something to strive for. We wallow in the mud of imperfection, stuck by our inability to always make sense, or our unwillingness. So I think we try to see a future brighter in the eyes of the compassioned perfection. Or maybe we really do see it. Maybe we are allowed a glimpse, and our wishes maybe are more than just wishes. Maybe we get to reflect the ideal, even if just a fraction of it. There are times, and I do know the power of want is incredibly persuasive... but at times, you might just be overtaken with the sense of it all being bigger than just you and your petty real world concerns. You might be isolated, wandering the desert, and just be struck with it, a bolt of lightning and the scales slipping off your eyes. We see the Angels, we feel the jabs of devils' forks and above all those there might be a greater force. Or not. It has a sort of ambivalence to it, because as much as you might want to know it, you just can't. Maybe when you pass along, but never before. But what you want to be true is sometimes more real than what is true anyways. And no matter what the truth might be, I'm going to have to believe in something bigger and sweeter than the muck we find ourselves rolling in now.

CASEY

To talk about it is really pretty useless, ain't it? Think about it. If there is a God, there is. If there ain't, there ain't. We can't do nothin' about it. God is most useful, anyways, as an idea. Or most harmful, I guess... But He can be something to check yourself against, or pray to when you've got nowhere else to go. I mean, it's not like He's answering you when you ask Him something, right? You might feel like He is, but He's not. Honest. That's not sayin' He's not up there, somewhere, watchin' over us. I can't say that. Nobody can. Either way, y'know? But we do. We preach ham-fisted sermons on soapboxes and nail our theses in bold type to the church door and shout our condemnations at who we figure to be lowlier and more sinful'n us. Or do it opposite. We tell you you're a fool for believin' in what you can't see and that everything is just random and God ain't nothin' more than myth and legend. But truth is, we don't know. It's a funny thing, sorta, people gettin' so worked up over their baseless opinions. Baseless, like what can you do to prove it? Nothin'. You can't. And you might spend your whole life tryin', either way, but you won't come to any conclusion. You think what you're gonna think, and nothin' but tragedy or miracles're gonna change your mind. So, whether I think there's a God watchin' over me is pretty irrelevant. Well, it's irrelevant whether it's true or not. 'Cause the power ain't in it being true. The power in it is how strong your convictions are. So that you can use Him as strength, a crutch in your hard times. Or you can defend your bein' an asshole by pinning your bigotry and hatred on Him. Or you can revel in the lack of any cosmic responsibility, thinkin' that spiritual ethics are nothin' but the invention of petty men trying to control your mind. Or you can live in unending fear of the oblivion spiral that's waiting for you at death. That's what God really amounts to ain't it? A collection of hope and fear played out in your head... justification in any means of what you want the world to be, or what you're afraid it is. So, God doesn't matter. Not directly at least. But what I think of Him does, I s'pose. So what do I think of God? I guess I don't know. And I probably won't until I die.

TUCK

I imagine a God no better than me. A God just as flawed and lost and hoping to make sense of Her world by creating Her own world. We do it. We create in an effort to understand. I don't know if we're replicating that godly desire, or really just thinking along the same lines. Is that profane somehow? To humanize God, I suppose... well, it sounds awfully arrogant. But I don't mean it to be. I don't mean to take away from the power of something that could create an entire universe. But that's what's so amazing about us, too. We have that ability. We can create the whole universe in our mind's eye. We can conceive of our own place. I don't really think of it as God's gift or anything, imagination, y'know? Like, I think it's just the byproduct of thought. You exist in this place, and you can't always make sense of the way life works. So much seems outside your control, not even just control, but like, even outside of your understanding. So we fumble around, blind, stupid, hoping for something better. Some people are content, I know, to live without realization. To accept it at face value. This is the world. This is what you get. But then, you can scratch down one more layer. Copy it. Tweak it and make it something your own. And you'll get to a deeper understanding, not a full understanding, I know. But you copy it, you make it something else. Something better. Or try to figure out that it could be worse. And maybe you'll find some reason in it. Some kind of empathy with God, like, here's why She might've done it the way She did. I can't say that for sure, obviously. I'm not gonna go out preach this as gospel. But I think I'm right. I think that God's up there, somewhere, confused and lost in Her own right, and trying to figure out why Her God made Her world the way She did.

LEO

It's easiest to be cynical, and I find myself most often reverting to that mindset, just because it's easiest, I guess. The empirical evidence is pretty staggering. Let's face it. God is dead. He has been for a long time. And the guy comes in so many flavors that somebody just has to be wrong. And then how the Hell are you supposed to choose? You're best bet, like with almost everything else, is that no one is right. And, wow, does it seem made up. Wow, does it seem like we're still a bunch of Neanderthals afraid of the rain and so we burn lambs to appease some mythical monster in the sky. I mean, it's a pretty mind-blowing thing, this whole being alive deal. There's so much that we just aren't privy to. So much that we aren't cut in on, and it makes you feel pretty worthless. And that too, man, I totally get inventing meaning in the face of the meaningless. Because otherwise, really, why? 'Why' is a dangerous little question, and answering it with an all powerful father figure is awfully convenient. So, on most days you catch me, that's what I'll say. I'll say I might be wrong, but I'm probably not. Okay, so that's my inner agnostic. The little philosopher tugging on the strings of my brain. And I really think that that dude is right. He's the one who should be calling the shots. But, and maybe it's just some remnant of that collective unconscious spawned at the dawn of civilization, but I feel like I'm bucking a lightning bolt every time I knock the guy. It's like, no matter how much I rationalize Him out of the picture (and trust me, I can make a damn good case for the non-existence of God) He's always just peering around the corner, winking that big all seeing eye at me, and laughing at my crumbling towers of reason. And what's left then, in those ruins, is this: I don't think I could exist without that cosmic watchmaker. I am going to be the dolt that stands in awe of his creator, whether he wants to believe in Him or not.

(c) 2008 Jason "Danger" Block