He was shooting from on top of the school with the gun BENJY aUKAmp used to keep back at the bench in the tree grove in the corn field behind the school. BENJY WAS A JUNKIE Who'd been on the stuff from before junior high school, noone knew his history really, this was the early 1970's and everyone was afraid of hi,m, at the sa,me time he was a legend because allkinds of stories circulated about him. LIKE EVERYONE KNOWING HE KEPT THIS GUN HIDDA=EN BACK at the bench, but everryone bing afraid to go near it because it was Benjy's gun andd also because it was a gun, a handgun ans everyone knew Benjy had gotten it tio shoot somebody and that's why it was hidden up there, guns weren't hat special everyone went smallgame hunting with shotguns or deer hunting where I grew up but handguns that Benjy Aukamp got and hid were real specialbecause there was no question that it involved shooting a person and just knowing it was there, yea you could sneak up and dig it up anytime but noone would noone was gonna touch that gun. You stayed on the good side of Benjy like you did a snake that was poisonous, he had no real friends, looking back, I know he was on heroin because he was always on the nod, I wouldn't have been able to tell thsat at 13 , but I knew he was seriouly into heavy fucked up materes this didmn't have nothing to do with reefer, it had to do with stuff I was really scared about, but already was pssing into the underground world of the 70's into, I was into black Sabbath for instance, And I remembered the guy who got put on death row on our neighborhood for killing a50 year old printer and his 17 year old girl friend by tying them up and literally kicking them to death and stabbing them over and over and over, him an some friends had come t rob the guy after hours , but this guy evidently knew the printer would still be there, he told all the other people who were there for the robbery to wait outside where the safe was, he went in alone, duct taped the two at knife point and then killed them without any witnesses , just the three in that room, and they couldn't scream because there was ducy tape over their mouths, and blood in her hair and two really messy dead bodies and nobody ever knrw his motive foir doing this, he was 21 when he killed these two, quiet had an aura of menance about him, was a leader cause everyone was afraid of him, but in thise days that just meany everyone followed him, and parents had no idea that any of this even existed, theyt were busy building patios and buying boats and realizing the early stagews of the American dream, because the economy was expanding and even working men could afford thingsa. Its just that there was a dark undercurrent of nihilism and dread , I lived in, a shivering thing, I lived in alone in, exposed too, my parents couldn't protect me, they were too sheltered maybe I didn;'t want them too, everry factory town has its really dark sshit you come directy in contact with and your too young and its too much more overpowering and it gets right through to you, maybe it addicts you or violates you, I don't know, I never left it. Saw the world through its filter forever after. Pointless violence, I always had to live in a place where i'd always be afraid, I couldn't live in a safe place. I remember that's when the Manson killings happened and I had to sneak around reading Helter Skelter because m psrents wouldn't let me and I wanted to watch the T>V mvie so bad and couldn't, it was thre most popular things for kids there was, that movie. Everyone wanted to know more about manson. I don't know how many times I read that book, a lot I know that. It scared me, that's why I liked it. It scared me like my life, only more, it seemrd like the ultimate fix wheras my life was just nibbling around the edges. It definitely was the precursor to Columbine. Figure out the first sentence in thios piece yourself. That's why I write noir andlived the way I do.
Birth of a noir writer; Title

chosen one

TribAL dEATH DANCE AROUND THE CHOSEN NE WHO WAS LAYING IN A STRAW MANGER, STILL UNWASHED, JUST BORN FRM its mother's womb, covered in blod, mouth open like a tiny orfice, eyes not open,lids down over its eyes like a blindfish from a cave, fists beating in the air mouth gurgling blood in bubbles. This is the first of them, the chief said, the first of the children who amount to being more than the tribe can feed with its provisions, this is the first child we can no longer all sacrifice so it can live, because look at us we're below a subsistence level, each andevery one of us in fact wearestarving. This is the first child that we must do the unholy thung we dared not think of up to now this is the first child which proves we areno longer a civilization, but a people who if they are to live and precious few of us will, there are too many of us, we are prone to diseasres, we are the society of attrition, from now on, life will not be sacred to us as a society, as infdividuals yes, but asa society life will be a curse, the more of us that are born, the moreof us that live, the longer each of us lives, the more of a drain it puts on the rapidly diminishing food supply and the closer we allcome to extinction. This child signifies a grave and solemn moment, a moment we swore we would never come to as a civilization, an abyss up to now we refused tolook down the gun barrel of our toes tied to a string which is tied to the triger so that in the process of leaning forward to be able to see our future our reality, we would have no option whatsoever, coordination wise it would happen our looking into our future to see our future and experience the lucidity of prescience we would have to well we would have to embrace well our extinction, which is our future, this is the turning point, the point at which feasible deniability has been removed from our brain, hell for years now it has just been a microsoft chip implanted in there that let us see a delusional world we thought was our future but really was hedonism careening towards an out of control overdose, once we crashed through the walls of those lies we'd come upon this bald and naked moment where the truth woulkd become incontraverible to allof us and as a community we would all as one cooperate participate and bond in this act and thus all at once be incapable of denying any of us our overall future, ansd each individual's future, this child must be killed in its cradle because it is the first child that if we let live we know absolutely that his drain on the community foodstuffs will make our society be incapable of feeding every member and furthermore he can't contribute to the work to build up the foodstock, he is a charity case. We have no choice, this is the turning point, this is where we face reality. And the tribe each and every one took a flint splinter knife and drovre it into vital organs of the child, each blow would be enough tokill the child. Blood was everywhere. The wizened corpse in the manger looked like a fetus stillborn in the womb. The tribe drifted apart after that to their individual dwellings, they didn't want to look at each others faces now.
Title: The chosen one

Chosen one letter

Dear Editor,
This is a horror story. If you look at it, really close you'll probably see you can't possibly write a more contemporary horror story than this one. If you don't feel like doing that, its still a good terse piece of horror that's guaranteed to scare the hell out of you. It sets itself up with mounting tension and ends on an ironic note I don't think anyone sees coming. Its called the Chosen One for no good reason at all.
Thank you,

The remnants of the republican party, after the shambles Bush's cronyiusm and ligarchy left it in has been reduced to a party without ideas, it is a party of mere reaction, chauvinism and it is right now been reduced to the level the pre civil war antebellum south was. It can't reach out to any part of the country, it can't deal with modern realities and it is anti intellectual. Like the old south, it is completely anal, incapable of evolving beyond the good old boy buddy system of politicsand it willnot accept a world which disenfranchises such an arrangement. It is thereby announcing that it willfire on Fort Sumner and secede from the union. The defecit, the economic crisis willnolonger be its responsibility,it will be the north's,or the liberals who the remnants of the republicanparty will demonize as having caused all the problems anyway as a massive scheme to give tax cuts,particularly topoor nonworking uppity lazy niggers so the liberals can take over America and then let these uppity niggers rule over the white man who made this country and wh is only represented by the remnants of the republican party which is led by RushLimbaugh, Sarah Pailand and Sean Hannity. There is no world wide economic crisis, it is a liberalplot used to get a nigger into the white house to crush the true patriots of America who want to keep fighting in Iraq where there were weapons of mass destruction,liberal blogs are lying whren they say Saddam Hussein was not the threat toAmerica after 9-11. Like the recent rrepublican refusal to vote in favor of a stimulus planto try and create jobs in America and thus to create a flow of money in America and possibly create a middle class again, the republican party has taken an entirely adversarioal position to the America they are leaving. They will not even tell what their economy will be based on in their new nation, it is reputed they will retreat to the Ozarks intoTrailer Parks and live off money, the lords of the manor at least, in a feudal system off money they made off war profiteering during the bush administration, corruption unchecked and lobbying.In fact many of the WallStreet bandits that caused this crisis and got a bailout intend tomove to this new republican land with the bailout money, set up a feudaL SYSTEM NOT UNLIKE THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH and the rest of the Americans who cannot accept the new system, the new America are welcome to move to these plantatatial manors and live in cottages as sharecroppers and they will be guaranteed a job even if it is largely subsistence and is based on the acceptance of a caste like class system where you will always be subservient to the family of wealth whose plantation you work on and there will be a nobility that willexist generation to generation, the first generation of course was the thieves who loted The former America in the Bush administration tobegin with. Nothing will change from here on, the liberals will be fought if they try to extend their nonreligious soveirnty over the republican America, but otherwise, as with the antebellum south innovation wioll be discouraged, science will be illegal and there will be little or no education even among the upper classes. Things will not change. And the defecit, and the economic tumult willbelong entirely to the devilliberals. And the republicans will follow Phyllis Schaffley's advice and have enough H bombs to destroy the rest of America, even themselves to guarantee the balance of power and their soveirnty.
The Republican Agenda announced for the economic crisis Title

The genocidal clown

There's this theory that I read in John D. Macdonald and thenin Phillip K. Dick that since humans have nonatural predators to speak of, there is really noway tokeepthe humanpopulation from expanding far beyond the capacity of the earth to hold all the human beings particularly as technology tames nature and medicine eliminates diseases. The predictions of Malthus would have to be right, ultimately there would be somany humans on the planet, they'd have nowhere tostand,insufficient food and they would die. The theory of which I speak is that nature periodically gags up from the gutter a Hitler or some other pathologicalphenomenn, what we call a mojnster, but what this negation actually does is live for war, murder and slaughter and this is how the excessive humanpopulation is kept from exploding, this is how nature keeps humanpopulation expansion in check. It produces psychopaths periodically who Friedman like take advantage of crisis situations to get power, ignite inpopulations from positions of leadership Hysteria and the result is wars, genocides, mass murders, horrors of all sorts, and this is how the humanpopulation on earth is kept from exceeding what the earthcan support. Crime on a mass scale, absence of conscience, mass hysteriathat killoff for instance in World WarII as many as 39,000,000 people, thus bringing down thepopulation of humans for several generations and preventing population explosions from causing Malthusian conditions. Monsters, John D. says in his Green Ripper novel come along to spread their madness because humans have no other way tolimit their population growth. Now imagine thepresent economic crisis which has spread around the world. In every country millions without jobs. Countries in huge debts unable to jumpstart their economies, unable to get loans to create infrastructure, unable to invest, businesses disappearing, jobs disappearing. The consequences? Social chaosis allover the world, starvation, we can't at present even guess how it all will end, we just know we have reached a point where evenour subsistence needs are exceeding our resources, and the end result can only be catastrophes of different forms. Will this count as one of those times when human population will be limited from expanding to Malthusianproportions. One can guess it'll get that bad. And what was the cause of this. What was the negating force that will destroy human civilization, security and probablydestoy large blocs of human population. Was it a monster?A Hitler. No it wasn't. The comic element of all this is the realfault of this disaster can al;most exclusivelly be laid at the feet of a single dolt who stubbornly insisted he could run the most powerfulcountry in the world, and when he got that position, he initiated policies that Inspector Clouseau of the Sourette probably would not have put into practice. Clouseau might have done some pratfalls, but its doubtful he would have done things like cut taxes to the very rich while fighting two wars thereby running upa huge defecit. Its doubtful he would have destroyed the american middle class by encouraging corporations to shipjobs overseas thereby leaving us with an economywithout consumers. Its unlikely he would have so dereuglated the stock market to the point where he called a Ponzi scheme like Enrn while it was ripping off California one of Amrica's free enterprise success stories, even as it caved in andd took billions of people's pensions away. Its unlikely he would have let allof wall stree follow the Enronlead after Enron, doing similar questionABLE BUSINESS PRACTICES AND CALLED HIS ECONOMY A COMPLETE success WHENIT WAS JUST ABOUT TO CAPSIZE INTO A GREAT DEPRESSION AS HIS ADMINISTARTION ENDED,ONE SOBAD NEARLY EVERY MAJOR BANK ON wALL STEET FAILED AND HAD TOBE BAILED Out. Its unlikely he'd have let housing scams go so farthat banks cmpletely froze up, went bankrupt, still can't loan any money and this would cause worldwide collapse of industries that reled on investments in supposed solid legitamite companies.Its unlikely he would not have had a clue any of this was happening at allwhen he's supposed tobe the Ceopresident. Wait Clouseau might have done that last one, him and Bush do have an incredible self deceiving narcissism in common.Whowould have thought, whowould have thoughtthast the force of negation we had to fear next, hitting us like a monsoon would not come fromnuclear missles or any predictable madness, but simply be the product of a dunce whosomehow wriggled his way to a positionin a million years he should never have held. It's black comedy for sure, and not even Terry Southren or Celine could have cme upwith cosmic human absurdity on this level.A clown, a fucking buffoon with a 91 IQ who can't be convinced he's wrong ever. Unprecedented.

It was brutlly cold, the wiknds cut through you and the cheap jacket ou had on didn't repel any of it. People take drugs because they can't handle harshnessand they didn't get nrtured enough as a child. They got thrown out in the world without adequate reassurances, their mother never made it sothey could take for granted they'd always be safe, that they were special, they were blessed and allthe horrible things in the world were either out of sight or could be urned off by a T> V> changer or called weird or rejected, those things didn't exist, they weren't real, you were, you and all the things like security blankets you could clutch ontoand feelsafe under, they were the things that existed. The closest thing ugly shit ever came to you was seeing something like commercialsd of starving people in Africa, and your capacity for suffering was so stunted, your entryinto the world, your progression from expulsion from the womb was so incomplete there was no way you could understand any of that, there has to be a place where you got hurt where your mom dropped you that irrationally acts upwhen you see sich pictures for them tobe anything but opaqu, the equivelant of an ordinaryperson looking say at an abstract expresionist painting,”it don't mean nothing,its just scribbling, a child could do it.”None of the patterns of logic dictated by pain desire, none of them have been developed in you so you can't unravelit,its in a languuage you can't translate, its a cipher, its not even interesting, it doesn't even engage your attention, the only things that engage your attention is the feeling of arms around you that are omnsciently guaranteed never to drop you, they are the whole world, or if they aren't what of the world you can see beyond themyou see throufh the filter of their all encompassing selfless security YOU are the reasonthey exist. People get born this way and they never start to feeklthe slightest pull of responsibility on them by life til they start aging and even the demandsof this coveted position can start to present a burdenon them, everyone ages. Then they get cranky and they expect mother, a world that's always blessed them to hold their burden even tihter so the little bit of weight they had to exert to exist evenin this condition can be lessened. That's whyold people get so unendurable sometimes, their simply isn't anyone or anything that can remove the burden of their condition to the extent they need, ther's only so much entitlement, so much codependence anyone can give another person, and as they get older and their need exceeds the maximum codependence they can get they become chronically bitchy. Addicts aren't born with any nurturing and then they are thrust into war zones, torture chambers places of constant helplessness and the constant violation of primal terror. This is what the world is to them anongoing barrage of artillery of anxiety that overdoses the mind into nonfunctiong and screaming for what=something they never had and have no reason to believe even exists in the world, they believe there's a God or a mother but in their world view, it isn't somethinfg that protects or was put there to protct them, its a dark double that follows them everywhere and its only purpose is to undermine them, constantly violatwe them, particularly at moments when they have to feel that their next act is most guaranteed. At the moment their sure their next act has to be most Guaranteed,that';s the moment that black doubled that is alwayds encompassing then swallowing them consuming themin flames,thsat's the moment it will strike with the most merciless vengeance, the most pitiless assauslt, and the addict knows one thing, he has no defense whatsoever against the full measure of pain and anguish that's gonna envelope him to the point whrere the pain is so grat he just wishes to God he could never have been born he could fade to extinction where the dark being can't follow him, he wishes he never had existed. Thjat's where the drugs come in and man the more of them the better and youlove them like nothing else cause even if they are killing you and all they areis the mother who cradled people in nutring safety you never had in your abandonment, they areis the closest thing to the mrciful god, of course their not merciful, your walking around looking like a corpse from their ravagement, but they are the closest thing to the merciful God that nurtures others that you never experienced or can't even conceive of ot ever. He walked through the cold and he was running away from his kids on Christmas to score and allhe felt was pirranha bites slicing into him and along with it a sense of anxiety lifting, he'd be there,he'd have it, the money was ready, he'd cop, this hell would go away soon.
Bad time christmas time blues

I found her by the side of the road. Christ, gashes, cuts, right to the bone where her elbow was. Ripped skirt one of them arty bohemian things that reach to your ankles and got the scotch patterns on them. Her top ripped completely off a wool sweater and all you could see was a bra. Laying on her back moaning, holding her jaw whichlooked like it was moving like a broke one would, big blood trickle hardened toa galena like finish she'd been there a long time and the blood from her mouth had just hardened there.I went over to herr , I couldn't penetrate the haze of pain she was in, I wouldn't say she was unconscious, just unresponsive. I kind of had a lump inmy throat, did you ever see violation. Not vulnerability, violation, like a bird with a broken wing, it got a big time will tolive, but not the means.I bowed my head down and looked away from the skirt swathed around those bruised legs. Christ. I thought. She wasn't no ravishing beauty, she was kind of a prep looking girl, a little chubby in the stomach, it wasn't a scene that titil;ated at all.It was a scene like coming upon a car crash and being there wellin the aftermath when you could make out all the aftereffects and absorb them really deeply and fully and seeing the damage it did to the cars made you cring because you could feel the force of the impact, but seeing what it did to the people as they were grimly pulled from the wreckage, that went throughyou, like a sudden moment where your wind pipe was cut off for some reason and you suddenly discovered you couldn't breathe, and as you fought for it, for the reassurance, your breath wouldn't come back and panic started to come and this awful feeling came over you that not only canyou die in a second, man you were goingto, you couldn't even yellout for help, you were a mouse's.voice, you weren't even that, you were mute, a shadow a hole, you didn't exist at all, you couldn't register your humanneed for contact on any radar screen another human would see, you were strangling man, dropping away and you couldn't find nothing to stand on it was all a big ayss as the conscuiodness swoped out of you. You looked down at her and she got more distant and more and more dissolved and you felt yourself not occupying the same plainof reality as her, you more and more occupied no plane of reality and the seperation between you and her became infinite and the wider it got the less of you there was and that includes awareness of yourself or of her or the world she existed in, the only awareness left as it all disintegrated as your distance from yu and hrr grew was the abyss and you were becoming it. I guess its guilt, I guess thats what I'm talking about here, some guilt frommy past, lodged inmy unconscios, I can't ever own up to so whenever I approach it annihilation is always my fate again.