I don't expect people to do a lot of literary mining when they read me, and I don't want to only write for a few highly sophisticated critics and eager grad students and Marxist reviewer's fro the Nation (who I love dearly... man, I would like to get a few of them over here for dinner... hey, Nation people, email me and we'll toke doobies in the windy city and blow the smoke on those stoner mallards who hang out at the park down by the lake with the junkies, who think it's funny to see themge...

Hectorly worked as a private detective out of a small office on Wabash, in Chicago's loop, with a window right across from the rusted metal tracks of the elevated train. Double Pane windows and insulated brick walls keep the noise out as the trains scream past. The room was ill-lit, one small grey, industrial looking steel lamp on his desk. On the floor was a mint green indoor/outdoor carpeting with numerous black cigarette burns and various unidentifiable stains of most colors. The off-wh...

Angels She’s late. The locals pause in the road and stare at the limo before slowly moving out of the way. "Why don’t they move a little faster, for god’s sake. Johnny, when we get to the flower stand on Marquez, I need to make a quick stop." His feet strike the road and brown dust rises. Black drops fall from his pant-legs. The street is lined with piles of bananas and apples and fish. Vendors pause to watch his hands as he passes. She had heard people say the heat mad...

Huplo Benlittle was at his computer every morning at Four AM for over two years, hours before he needed to get up for work, writing out lengthy answers to the questions in the Personality Development Workbookork that his therapist was sure contained all the answers that he needed to straighten out his life. By the time he ended up with his present therapist, Mac Gumm, he was absolutley desperate to quit drinking, after dissolving all he could handle of his life. Huplo meticulously research...

Beacho the Human Chair Humans were quite the novelty when they were discovered by the federation of prosperity for all planets. Their easily manipulated genetics made breeding creatures for specific purposes easier than ever before. Within a mere 50 thousand human years, Grackinlablitz Species was selling warm, living chairs, large eyeless meat balls, milk mothers... and hundreds shapes and sizes of industrial tools, like an arm with tiny legs and eyes that can go deep into l...

He had a messy memory of messes. Messes big and small, by governments and bosses and parents and neighbors... messes from the wind itself and quakes and eruptions. Messes from bad luck and bad decisions... and like he told a reporter from the Toledo Blade, he found his escape was to become the characters that he played on the stage. This is very much applauded in movie stars of a certain ilk, but he was a fifty seven year old convienance store clerk who was bucking a company poli...

No one around Cripville didn't have at least one story about being lied to by Frank Schlong. He told whoppers that no one much believed even as he was telling them, and little ones about nothing no one else would ever think to lie about. Other than this he was a fairly bright guy, decent athlete, funny. By virtue of sheer geographical scarcity of kids, he made freinds, and they accepted that sometimes he was full of shit. Frank's teacher's had an inkling about why he lied so much, rea...

We moved around a lot when I was a kid, passing silently, almost un-noticed through a series of small towns in Northern Indiana, mostly up around the Illinois line. Nice towns with town squares filled with a gleaming white courthouse and maple shaded streets lined with houses sporting long front porches -- filled with kids and old ladies, all rocking and waving as we passed. There were smaller towns yet, with just a gas station/grocery store, a long rectangular, dim bar named after the ...

Our story has thus far more or less concerned Mugily and Ralph, and basically ignored the other occupants of the RV during their much less than epic trip, though they too had been enduring the cruel fate of being slaughtered over and over again by the Mormon Molemen High High Council and the Kabbalah-kooked Ass Face Kurcher and his slut hound (a creature consisting of the head of Mad Donna and the body of a bassett hound, which the wealthy near immortal slock-pop singer had done to herse...

This is part eight of the story of OUR GOD RALPH, a tale of the slacker god and his disciples cruising across the country attempting, usually unsuccessfully, to avoid being assasinated by a cabal of Scientologists, Kabbala-nuts, and the Mormon Mormon High High Council. Ralph and the crew stopped for breakfast at a diner. The celebrity janitor took one look in the door of the dingy room filled with small troughs containing various types of gruel and said, "No! I will not eat in a fu...

Ralph has the RV stopped in a rest area, overlooking a vista of field after field of the grey, muddy sludge that had replaced the grass and the forests. A warm wind was blowing the stench of a putrid landfill into their faces as they silently stretched their legs. Ralph occasionally, like just then, had regrets about the way he had played the whole god game on earth. Every time a species died out he had killed a few humans before he could reign in his anger -- the accidents his follow...