Dead City Scrolls

Mantracker is the single funniest thing on TV.  Nothing is easier to MST.   Speculating about what he`s going to do when he catches his prey, coming up with new names for him (MANFUCKER, etc) and detailing Mantracker`s romantic entanglements with his assistants all make for easy gold.  And that`s just the gay jokes.

Nurse may be linked to multiple suicides, tracker says

Eight meters!

I really like fluff news stories.

A recipe to give you that “I’m drunk and I know where to get soup” allure that’s so popular with the homeless.

We see the scene through the eye of a CCTV camera that faces a BMW dealership. Long shadows are dragged across the lot by morning light. Vehicles blast by and bundled pedestrians crowd the sidewalks but from our vantage there is no sound. Spotting something we zoom in on the shining cobalt bumper of an elongated half oval of a car. A bluejay is alighted upon it with its feathers flitting up repeatedly, settling further each time until it finally looks neatly groomed, and then it flies away. Zooming out again we see some peregrine citizens meander the lot, a sample that grows by ones and twos as we pull away.
A blimp drifts improbably overhead, perhaps wayward from a football game.
In the margin of our field of vision a sliver of a cafe’s patio. We can tell what kind of place it is from the few people we can see. Two old men have their bodies oriented toward something outside the frame and they lazily argue, circular arm waves and little grins breaking through looks of exaspiration. A dazed mother in a long coat and a purple and black checked scarf gradually chugging an enormous cup of coffee reaches feebly for her child when it whips past.
Looking back to the lot, a few new people have arrived. A single purposeful soul cuts the fog of window shoppers and moves straight for the crystalline dealer’s office in the center of the lot. We can see everything that happens inside perfectly thanks to the prevailing trends in car lot architecture. A crystal cathedral to the motor vehicle with its own Robert Schuller, though younger and Hispanicer, and a young man has just arrived to kneel and pray. The cross divided into quadrants that alternate blue and white.
The dealer leads the young man through the central room into his own office, or the one he’s using for this transaction, and once the door is shut has to force himself to make eye contact with his patron, who starts to argue perhaps loudly before recognizing the uselessness of doing so. The dealer is nodding, agreeing, rumbling discontent along with the customer now. He throws his arms up and the young man whose ranging stride has been reduced to a repressed urge to kick something reiterates the gesture even larger, as if for our benefit or to say “THIS is how it’s done.” Not content to waste any more time on the matter, the customer leaves, gambolling for a few steps and then looking around warily when his toe catches on a broken knob of sidewalk. Composure diffuses back into his gait but his shoulders stay hunched slightly. He’s scanning the street for a cab when he leaves the frame.
Cars have been parking and pulling away on the street unnoticed but the latest draws attention. It mumbles to a stop like a freight train. The fore third of it is rumpled and pleated and bumperless, but the rear of the car is lovely and expensive. Pristine black with a low shine, approaching matte. A man and a woman in the front seats sitting still without getting out or conversing. Studying their surroundings, studying collected gadgetry in dashboard and pockets, studying each other with quick glances. Maybe this is how they communicate best, without need for words. After a while the man gets out and the woman drives away. He leans against the decorative wrought iron surrounding the cafe patio and looks quite content waiting.
Elongated morning shadows are starting to retract into dark cutouts the shapes of the objects they represent. The old men pay for their coffee, get up and go, and then the woman does too. They’re replaced by a trio of good looking thirty somethings, two women and one who might be a woman. They lean across the table to speak conspiratorially sometimes, twice throwing their combined glance toward the waiting man. It looks like harmless gossip.
A mass of small gray and yellow birds skirts the right frame, blotting so much light that we might infer from what we see of them that all the sky beyond our view is bird laden.
The waiting man takes a call on a sliver of cell phone. Again: we can’t hear a thing from their conversation, but his body language freezes up so that we know whatever’s being said isn’t good for him. His lips almost don’t move when he responds at first. Then he slumps for a second and springs up, animated, howling at the caller while looking down the street in the direction opposite the one he came from. He stands right at the edge of the curb, listening, yelling, listening, yelling and yelling more. He power walks back to the wrought iron fence and lowers the phone to yell something past the edge of the frame. This startles the already on edge trio of women and they have to reconsider what seemed to be a positive prior assessment of him. Someone seems to respond from the patio that lies beyond the frame. He throws his hands up, speaks into the phone again shaking his head vigorously, and jogs off, jay walking across the street and down, folds the phone up and vanishes it like a magic trick, keeps running steadily and dodging pedestrians until he exits the shot.
The three women settle back into their seats and make faces that show solidarity in slight malice and lingering surprise. A newly seated girl’s arms unfold a laptop in the margins. The dealer from the car lot jay walks to the cafe and in passing spooks a blond squirrel from a lone tree.

For a couple months now and even beyond that I’ve been in a slight slump, writing only small amounts at a time.  Pecking.  Quality over quantity is the ticket and all, but one of my favourite studies ever pitted two teams of people against each other in a pottery class and had one team aiming to make as many pots as possible and one having its potters work towards a single perfect pot.  The grades of the former were based entirely on how many pots they made while the grades of the latter were based on a single pot of their choice that represented their best work.  Not only did the quantity potters score better by far, but they scored better when they were graded for quality too.  They made lots of pots that were better than the quality potters’ best pots.

So I figure I’ll put myself on a deadline for the thing I’ve been dabbing at for the last few months on and off.  Let’s give this five days.  Keep an eye out.

“mary catherine porn”

can somebody please tell me why people looking for porn always find me  or why prostitutes’ blogs always end up linking back to Dead City Scrolls in the automatically generated related posts?

David Bowie’s version of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Alabama Song is perfect.  Cut to unnerve with laser precision.