Ernest Hemingway describes my Tuesday.

The hedges needed to be cut. 

I thought to myself. 

The November sun was high and winked through cumulus clouds that looked like breasts full of milk.

I should be in Sea Isle with a sky like that. 

In Sea Isle you know where you stand. 

Day, Night, Ocean, Land. 

You can keep your beer cool when you're on the jetty by tethering it inside a basin of water that collects between the rocks.

Crab cakes and flounder fried in sticks of butter, and so much beer and sand you begin to feel like you may have been that young university post graduate researcher traversing the Levant in another life during your brief walk from 57th to 53rd. The wind snaps through your hair.

"You better get up now."

"I'm coming."

Get up. Sit down. Eat. Shave. The cycles of odious tasks. I blink and sit up straight.

A half a pot of cold coffee. 

I try to fire up the Fire Arrow but something in the Otto cycle isn't giving me the juice.

The man we got this car from said that there had been wasps in the filler neck of the fuel tank.

He got them out though.

Wasps.

 

I light a cigarette. The world is run on tiny deflagrations. 

Every Day. 

Every Second.

I cut the hedges.

Dashiell Hammett describes my Sunday Night.

"Unlikely," I said to myself, sotto voce, as I eased my left hand down over the soft curve of the steering wheel. 

The sound of my hand and the friction of the padded wheel.

It made the sound of money. 

"I can't believe I find myself traversing this particular heap of creation again." 

It was Sunday. 

It was night. 

The world series was going to be on. 

And I was making quick work in my father's Yaris of a road I knew only too well.

The moon squinted off of the hood, and somewhere a 35 year old dentist would decide to get a turkey club, but the turkey club nor the dentist nor the moon could guess at the inscrutable designs the spheres in this brave o'erhanging firmament would construe to contrive the present circumstances.

I checked my rear view quicker than a bullet from a Luger from a Kraut on Pervitin.  This road is notorious when you get aways further, it's the Wild West. I was suddenly cut off by what was either a masculine female or the champion of the high school bowling teem. 

His/Her face was a portmanteau of the words "Perspiration" and "Ignorance."

I waved the butchy creature on with the tip of my hat as if to say - "All's well guy. No harm done."

But the harm had been done. Years ago now, in the ancient past, like engraved words on a tombstone, wounds carved into the soul of time that all the whiskey tears and bourbon rain could never wash away. The day you found the dear john, and she pulled a Nancy Sinatra on you.

As if on cue by the cosmic conductor, the fella on the radio played a song about self-esteem.

A Mazda Miata, black as an oil slick whizzed by me like a business women on lunch break. 

I was on Route 1.

I was picking my little brother up from Trenton.

The land that time forgot.

I was itching for a lucky, but since the tree-huggers got hold of the car owner I'd be facing a mild sanction if I lit up in the car, so the smoke and Trenton would have to wait. 

Traffic, at night, is a mysterious thing. 

If you can see past the worried mothers, truckers, aching backs, the unregistered plates, the rough and tumble scramble, the business men in rented cars with lipstick on their collar you'll begin to feel your head turned slightly to the side the way a child turns their head in delight and nostalgia when they watch a heartwarming Christmas special.

You begin to feel your vision pleasantly skewed like when your sweetheart lovingly touches the nape of your neck. Suddenly, the world isn't like the brackish baywater up close but the grand 'ole Atlantic with a view. 

Then the idea of Trenton doesn't hang on you like Jacob Marley's chains.

"All right fella" I say to myself, I say to no one.

"Here we go."

Rain

New Song and Slideshow. You can find it here.

The Silence (Abridged)

You can hear it in higher quality here.

The Flutist

The Flutist.

Funny or Die.

Hey "Poor, White & Stupid" is up on Funny or Die. 

Check it out and vote FUNNY, jerkfaces.

Exterior Day

EXT. DAY - The camera is lowered down from a GREAT HEIGHT amongst sky scrapers and plush apartment buildings into an anonymous CITY STREET. The street is bustling with motorists, bicyclists, pedestrians and PEOPLE from every social STRATA. Once the camera has SETTLED to eye level the camera moves FORWARD and begins to TRACK a young ASIAN MAN WITH A CELLPHONE. He finishes a phone call in MANDARIN and we see him slip it into the cuff of a DEEP TRENCH COAT POCKET. Once that action is completed the CAMERA is passed off, like a baton in a relay race to a YOUNG WOMAN who is walking swiftly and overtakes him, she too is on her CELLULAR PHONE, and we hear her utter the words

YOUNG WOMAN

(Garbled as though through a POLICE SCANNER)

I know I just got it. 

(Director's note: I leave the particulars, such as art direction and casting entirely up to you and your crew, you get that I'm going for an enormous metropolitan, heart-of-the-city scene here, right? And this really IMPORTANT initial camera shot that I actually spent ten minutes thinking of with the question "How can I visually re-enforce the social standing in the great chain of being of our two protagonists that are sitting undercover in a refurbished 1993 Ford Taurus at the corner of what could be W California AVE and W Cermak Road in Chicago ; could I perhaps integrate a vertical camera movement that is neither a PAN nor a CRANE SHOT that would descend from the rare air where the good and the great live down to street level, the sordid underbelly of this apparently flawless beacon of progress and modernity?"on my mind, doesn't count and will most likely be disregarded, overlooked, on the editing room floor. The only reason I feel safe typing this is because I know nobody, and I mean NOBODY actually reads these things. But Hey, It's your money, actually it's the studio's money)

INT. FORD TAURUS - DAY - Two young overpaid Hollywood-type detectives with bronzed skin and flawless, pearl-white smiles sit pretending to pay attention to something the director tried to explain to them two minutes ago, but are just thinking about the one make up girl they both want to bang. They will have a fight about it two days from now, and one contract will be renegotiated. But that is neither here nor there. Ahem...TWO HARD-BOILED Detectives in PLAINCLOTHES sit in the FRONT SEATS. THE DETECTIVE in the DRIVER'S SEAT is DWYER, the DETECTIVE in SHOTGUN is ROURKE. Over the POLICE SCANNER we hear the YOUNG WOMAN'S VOICE

POLICE SCANNER

I know I just got it

DWYER

(to ROURKE)

She the one?

ROURKE

No.

DWYER

How do you know?

ROURKE

Because I know.

DWYER

This is the 8th person today that fits this profile. What makes you so fucking sure that that ain't the lady that we're looking for?

ROURKE

Detective Dwyer, how many people did we see the first time we had a match?

DWYER

We saw that hot blonde, about shit, I dunno, around 11:00.

ROURKE

And then...(he waits for DWYER to consult his NOTES)

DWYER

Then at 12:00 we saw one, and at 1:00 we saw two, at 2:00 we saw three. And at Fuck we saw You. WE could have been DONE.

ROURKE

one, one, two, three, five...(Nothing registers with DWYER)...Look it's just after three o'clock now, I'll bet you all of my O.T. tonight that before 3:05 we see and HEAR four more women matching the same profile either receive that text or give us some kind of confirmation that they're being contacted by the same individual, group, individual group or group of individuals who are or who is the subject of this, our investigation.

DWYER is LAUGHING. Through the REARVIEW MIRROR we see a small group of NATTILY DRESSED, ATTRACTIVE WOMEN gather on the SIDEWALK. They appear DISTRAUGHT.

DWYER

You're bullshitting me, it's already after three?

ROURKE

Amicule, deliciae, num is sum qui mentiar tibi?

DWYER 

I don't play that Altar Boy shit, you gonna welch now?

ROURKE

Baby, Sweetheart, would I lie to you?

(This is the part of the movie at the very beginning when our two lovable rouges start grab assing in the stake-out car and a crucial piece of shit happens in clear view of the audience that would have put this baby down like a lame horse if they weren't fuck-ups. But that's what we love about them, they're fuck-ups, like you and me. Always fucking up. Actually it's more DWYER'S FAULT and ROURKE brings this up to him in a crucial a.)Bar b.)Lockerroom c.)Social d.) Formal e.)Meeting with the Boss f.) All of the Above -scene in which tears are shed, punches are thrown, Rourke's formal education is made fun of and somebody is asked to turn in a badge. Oh and the killer, he's texting rich ladies, and killing them with their cell phones because he's rich and powerful and a psycho and the programming algorithm is Fibbonacci's Theorem for some reason, and ROURKE picks up on this because of something DWYER said when DWYER was shitfaced. See, they need each other, and NOBODY important died.

THE END