Automatic Writing 1

Auto-tuning my automatic rifle. The countryside crickets playing bowstrings alongside oxbow meanders. Never heard from Miss. B again, but can’t help but think she was a rollicking lesbian in a big fur coat.

Welcome.

“Yes, the weather is fine today, and I have a master’s degree in punctuation. Would you like to see all the cool tricks I can do? Never thought I’d abruptly—”

Been thinking about Germany and its backwashed streets and wounded pride making its way down its backwashed streets and believing itself ignoble to the human race, or in the face of it. Dan wasn’t happy when I told him, so I tried to keep the whole thing hush hush. You know keep a Pringle’s lid on the son of a bitch. But the crickets’ backs break as they bow to Breton, Breton, the Surrealist. It’s a bunch of shit anyways, and now you’ve got a dead-set potty mouth.

Miraculous mummification, this automatic rifle, or rivulet trickling down in the quiet places of Southern Illinois in the creek in the quiet places where cows lull and mill about somewhere by Devil’s Den. You know the place. And it’s important to keep fresh, to let go of the million little sand-washed, rolled-glass things we keep to ourselves on quiet Sundays. Always loved the sown-in straps on the backs of old 40s box coats, and writing you letters on Sundays I don’t send because you don’t read them and I can’t blame you for that.

The comma is an executioner; I’m just the delivery man, the milkman, 3¢ for your sons and daughters beating the anti-mother to death. Beat her until she bleeds; beat her at her own game but let her live. That way Breton smiles in his white-linen grave, the dumb sons of bitches. Thank you, Steinbeck, for the broken hearts and the turn of phrase and Jim losing his head for a dubious cause. This is battle, this is my mind, and all of you are just wandering here.

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The Level-Based Category Mistake

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Excerpt from Kubin’s The Other Side