I.
“The Desert, It Is Sleeping Now”

In the places where you slept
upon handkerchiefs of wings
there are the crashes of falling things
closing things.

I have built a soundproof house
what I should trade water for sleep
and await the day the desert creatures
see me as their own.

To my youngest son
I say grow, boy
and leave a suit the color of time
that he may go unheeded and unseen
into the world.

II.
My thanks to Heidi Rietsch and @buddyblanc’s late uncle’s journals for furthering this season’s emotional education, viz. their unintentional craft notes on isolation. The horse flies have resumed their bloodlust and the birds are eating all the tomatoes, but the ironwood trees are carpeting the sand with florets and leaflets like flyers for whip-wielding ladyboys up and down the Vegas Strip, and East Jesus is as lonely and lovely as I’ve ever seen it.

Title card. Peter Dinklage is smoking and looks sad. Why is Peter Dinklage so sad? The credits say Michelle Williams is in this as well. Perhaps as a love interest? That would be a hell of a pull for Peter Dinklage. I would be stoked. Or is the fact that Michelle Williams is in this film why Peter Dinklage is so sad in the first place? Because nobody ever lives happily ever after (or even lives after at all) in a movie with Michelle Williams? Michelle Williams looks like Carey Mulligan. Or is it Carey Mulligan who looks like Michelle Williams? Carey Mulligan was in Never Let Me Go, a depressing movie about clones. Never Let Me Go should have been about Carey Mulligan and Michelle Williams as clones. I would watch that film. Just two hours of Carey Mulligan and Michelle Williams romping around, not having their organs harvested. Oh I made myself sad now.

Peter Dinklage works in a train hobby shop. A young man seems surprised to see a little person work there. Peter Dinklage walks to the store. People stare. The cashier is a spiteful cunt. Peter Dinklage is drinking coffee with his (seemingly) only friend. They hang around train stations a bunch. Now Peter Dinklage walks to the front of the store and sees his friend is dead. I once rented a studio apartment in Pittsburgh with a busted heater and a toilet that froze over in the winter solely because the landlord told me the last two occupants hanged themselves there. I’m losing my high faster than I thought. This is bullshit. Now Peter Dinklage has a suitcase in his hand. I still don’t know what his character’s name is.

Peter Dinklage is walking on railroad tracks through a tunnel.

Peter Dinklage is walking on more railroad tracks.

Peter Dinklage is walking through a small town.

Peter Dinklage is walking on even more railroad tracks.

Jesus Christ, Peter Dinklage just does not stop fucking walking.

[On Saturday I walked down the wash and did not stop walking until I looked up and saw Salvation Mountain. I said to myself, "Well, since I'm already here, I might as well walk to the hot springs." When I got there I said, "Well, since I'm already here, I might as well walk to the cold springs." When I got there I said, "Well, since I'm already here, I might as well walk to Niland." I didn't go to Niland, because the only logical progression from there would be to walk to LA, and I am not Peter Dinklage.]

The hobby shop closes and Peter Dinklage inherits an old train depot from his dead friend in a sleepy and rusty bit of heartland called Newfoundland. It looks like a place where old ambitions go to die. His new old house seems suspiciously tailored for a man his size. Maybe I’m still just high enough to not understand perspective. He smokes a lot. I’ve been smoking a lot lately, too. We buy a pound of pipe tobacco and a box of pre-rolled cigarette tubes every once in a while, and make the cigarettes ourselves. It’s a lot cheaper than buying regular cigarettes. Thirty dollars gets us the equivalent of two cartons. We pay for the tobacco with the money we get from recycling beer cans. One bad habit supporting another. It is harmony.

A New Yorker in Peter Dinklage’s new town tries to be nice to him. Peter Dinklage is an asshole in return. His character’s name is Fin.

Something happened and Hulu crapped the bed. I had to reload it. Some lady offers Peter Dinklage a ride after almost hitting him with her car. I tried to hitchhike home to Slab City from Santa Barbara back in January, and got a ride back into Isla Vista from the guy who hit me with his car, but again, I am not Peter Dinklage. He refuses. He really does not like people. The same woman spills coffee on herself while driving and almost hits Peter Dinklage again. He refuses another ride. He turns down his New Yorker neighbor’s invitation to a bar in favor of going for another walk. Peter Dinklage’s character fucking loves walking. I suppose I could start calling him Fin now that I’ve learned his name, but I’ve written ‘Peter Dinklage’ so many times since starting this that anything else feels wrong. It is Peter Dinklage who loves trains and walking. His name is Peter Dinklage.

Also, where is Michelle Williams? I’m starting to think it’s a different Michelle Williams altogether. It’s a pretty common name, after all. Maybe the woman who nearly killed Peter Dinklage twice is named Michelle Williams. That would be unfortunate. I don’t want to be accused of lookism, but I really like looking at Michelle Williams. Especially Pixie Cut Michelle Williams. There’s a lot of talking. If I nearly ran over someone twice in the same day, I would try to give them their space, not show up at their house with a bottle of bourbon, idly stating that in my younger years I slept with a guy because he rolled his own cigarettes. She gets to sleep on Peter Dinklage’s futon. Peter Dinklage sleeps in the tub. For being such a dick, there is a surprising lack of people who want to punch Peter Dinklage. I am not one of those people. Peter Dinklage is awesome.

I don’t know what this film is trying to tell me, though. That all little people are taciturn and unfriendly and stoic to a fault and highly suspicious of bigger folk? Or is Peter Dinklage just particularly angry? At what? I hope the film clarifies this at some point, because otherwise I’ll be forced to assume that social ostracization has long turned all little people into jerks. This movie is making me a bigot.

(Hey, it’s Michelle Williams! Neat.)

Fuck. Only a third of the way through and my high is completely gone. Cracking open a terrible Budweiser. Hang on I need to make another cigarette and see if they are still launching flares at the bombing range next door.

Time-in. I’m liking this movie so far. It looks like it was shot on a budget based entirely on coupons and IOUs. It’s funny and quiet and Peter Dinklage is a great actor and Michelle Williams is hot. I’d like to say that, in the end, Peter Dinklage gets over his cynicism and misanthropy and finally realizes that Michelle Williams is really, really hot. But I’m pretty sure Michelle Williams is an ancillary character at this point, and the bulk of the remaining film will revolve around Peter Dinklage’s budding friendship with Cuban-American Joe (New Yorker. Cheery and persistent and annoying.) and middle-aged white woman Olivia (chronically depressed shit driver who almost ran him over twice in the same day). Because no one is going to buy a little person getting it on with someone who looks like Michelle Williams who looks like Carey Mulligan who looks like Michelle Williams, not even in a movie, and especially not in a movie set in a bucolic little backwater where the socially acceptable response to seeing your first little person is to drop what you’re carrying and shriek. But it’s not all bad, because little people can make friends with Hispanics and actresses too old to qualify for our standards of beauty. Progress! Damn. I just realized I’m fifteen-hundred words into this, I still have more than half the film to go, and it’s already close to 1 am. I’m going to stop writing for a little bit, and just drink and enjoy the film. Which is a shame because a young black girl named Cleo who ran away from Peter Dinklage the first time they met just walked up to him and asked him what grade he’s in, and then asked him if he’s a midget, and I’d love to write more about the starkly contrasting morphological and racial juxtaposition of all the cast members and how that theme runs throughout the film in a latticework of nuanced knots, but, no. Just no. Don’t ask me why. You’ll just make it weird. I am going to watch the movie for a while and then I am going to write a little bit more and then I am going to bed. Okay I’m back and have drunk too many beers to care about paragraphs. Call it a metaphor for life. I want to go to bed so badly. This beer is terrible. This is a good film, and Peter Dinklage might just be the best comedic actor who doesn’t actually do any comedic acting, although I really hope that he didn’t base his performance on any real-life experiences of being tormented because of his size. But the world is a horrible place for good people, so of course he probably did. Or is that inferred guilt just for my benefit? I hope Peter Dinklage is a bully and a complete prick in real life. Either way, I feel bad for referring to his character as ‘Peter Dinklage’ instead of ‘Fin,’ mainly because ‘Dink’ sounds like a word you’d use to insult a little person, and ‘Dinklage’ sounds like something we’d use to refer to their balls. I’m not being prejudiced, am I? Oh I feel worse now. Is it being prejudiced if it’s right in his name? Also, am I the only one who thinks of the term ‘little person’ as even more condescending than ‘midget’? I just don’t think it’s right that the proper socio-legal designation for a certain minority group begins with an adjective, that’s all. We don’t call harlequin babies ‘crunchy kids.’ Middle of the film and I’ve yet to lose hope of seeing Michelle Williams’ breasts. She tends to show them a bit in indie films like this, and they are wonderful. Hulu made me register and sign in because the film contains “ma-toor” content. Boobs are mature, right? Whatever. There are bullies and train chasing in Joe’s food truck and Peter Dinklage refers to himself as a dwarf. I don’t like that term, either. I was right: this movie isn’t about Peter Dinklage boning Michelle Williams. Which is fine, and a little bit preferable actually, if only for the movie’s assurance that walking on railroad tracks with friends was never the exclusive domain of Tumblr fodder and young, hip, skinny, pretty, white people looking for the freedom of the open road and pastoral pre-Internet pastimes and, like, to just be alive in the now, man, you know? It’s 2 am. How is this movie still not over at two in the morning? I must have left it on pause longer than I thought and the silver-haired guy from Mad Men is here all of a sudden as Olivia’s douchey ex-husband. Olivia turns into a bitch. Peter Dinklage gets a library card from Michelle Williams. His first name is Finbar. Michelle Williams likes his chin. Peter Dinklage finally agrees to go to the bar with Joe. Olivia gets more and more depressed. She snubs Peter Dinklage. Peter Dinklage finally shows an expression other than looking like he just smelled something unpleasant. My god, Hulu, you don’t need to call them “ad experiences.” They’re fucking commercials. George Carlin ranted about euphemisms for the better part of his book, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? Offering someone the choice of which of three commercials they get [have] to watch is not a choice. I hate everything that isn’t Peter Dinklage or George Carlin right now. This beer is terrible. A little person walks into a bar, and the punchline is that Michelle Williams starts hitting on Peter Dinklage. I’ve never wanted to be more wrong about where a movie is headed than I do at this moment. This movie was released in 2003. Was Michelle Williams showing her tits in 2003? I was 18 or 19. My tenth-year high school reunion was two years ago. Dear god, what am I doing with my life? Whoops. Michelle Williams is pregnant. Never mind. She shares her fries with Peter Dinklage, though. Her boyfriend shows up. He’s an asshole. Dumb, but smart enough to realize there’s nothing to be gained by beating up a midget. Peter Dinklage gets shoved and hates people again. Michelle Williams shows up at his house. They share a chaste, boobless night on the couch together. God damn it. I answer the same Hulu survey for the third time tonight, tell them that I have no role in selecting which movies the members of my household watch. It’s either that or another Jumbaco commercial. Olivia is bitchier then ever. Peter Dinklage is a drunken dwarf. There’s a lot of Rolling Rock beer in this movie. I drank a lot of Rolling Rock in Pittsburgh. Once I drank enough to sing David Gray’s “Babylon” at karaoke night, but not enough to sound good. Peter Dinklage is a drunk-as-fuck dwarf. He passes out on the train tracks. This should end well. Oh, shit, did Peter Dinklage just get hit by a train? Wait. Nope. Looks like train undercarriages are specifically designed to harmlessly pass over little people (but not their pocket watches). Olivia swallows a bottle of pills. Why are white people so depressed all the time? Man, this movie got dark suddenly. Seven minutes left. Peter Dinklage and Joe pick up Olivia from the hospital. Peter Dinklage walks into Cleo’s class to give a talk on trains. “What about blimps?” “They’re both cool. Trains and blimps.” Nighttime. I will never get tired of watching this little person, this plucky Latino, and this emotionally unbalanced white woman chill on a patio and drink beers together. They are the most strangely beautiful trio I’ve seen in a long time. Something pithy is said. I don’t hear it. I’m too tired to rewind. It doesn’t matter. Roll credits. Good movie. I liked the trains. Peter Dinklage is awesome. Also, I just read the back of the Adaptation DVD case during one of the commercials and saw that there is no Charlie Kaufman commentary track, so I’m kind of glad that I didn’t blog about watching Adaptation now, because then the two Nicolas Cages staring at each other’s awful hair would have been all I’d be able to write about. This beer is terrible. I’m going to bed. This is going to be a pain in the ass to look over tomorrow. Okay. Good night. Good night. I’m going to bed. This beer is fucking terrible.

COLOSSUS

The natives tried to tie me down at first, but soon found it unnecessary; I’ve been unable to move since I awoke on the beach. My bones won’t allow it. I’m too large, too heavy. I take quick, shallow breaths — any deeper and my chest trembles as if to cave in on itself. My lungs push against ribs like steel girders. It is excruciating. I can hear my heart struggle to hold itself together with each mammoth beat, feel my massive balls droop closer and closer to the sand.

I think I’m on an island. I’m not sure. The weight of my head pins my right cheek to the ground, and the twin vertical lines of the horizon and shore run up and down my field of vision like prison bars of light and surf. A swath of demolished beach the size of a football field lies between the sea and where some unimaginable wave washed my bulk ashore. A copse of trees lie smashed into kindling beneath the small of my back, stabbing into me like splinters. On my outstretched, upturned palm, two islanders no taller than my little finger are busy fucking. Several more are on their knees in a ring around my hand, linking arms and chanting ecstatically at the young couple. Others armed with knotted sticks patrol the sides of my body, batting at tiny crabs too small for me to see picking at my flesh. A few more run up and down my torso and head, waving scavenging birds the size of flies away from my eyes and genitals.

The sun is slipping sideways out of view; I’ve seen this sunset three times now, but I have no idea how many hours have passed between each one; no idea if time here means the same thing as what I’ve known, or if it means anything at all to a mountain or a redwood, if it isn’t immediately warped and rendered inert by the gravity wells of their vastness.

How large am I? How mythic and godlike do I appear to these people? An old woman with naked, empty tits swinging like satchel handles against her distended belly burns pungent herbs and sweet-smelling grass beneath my nose, ululating endlessly and frothing like a punctured lung. Beside her, younger acolytes lie supine in the wet sand, their gleaming bodies positioned in repentant imitation of my own as they twitch and convulse in frenetic glossolalia.

I haven’t eaten yet. I don’t dare shit. I pissed myself the first day when I couldn’t hold it in any longer; judging by the tinny, faraway screams, people died. The urine cut a channel into the beach and spilled into the sea; black and silver scabs of dead fish washed onto the shore afterward. I’m hungry. My stomach rumbles, a thunder-like thing, and in response the locals shriek even louder — as though their convictions carry all the enormity of my mass — press their shoulders deeper and deeper into the sand, seeking to vanish under the earth and perhaps be reborn as gods themselves.

I want to shout at them in return, to bellow a storm and an order to sate their angry deity’s appetite, but there isn’t enough air traveling the million miles of passageway inside my body for a scream. All I manage instead is a strangled rasp. My chest shudders with the effort like a failing truss bridge. I am faintly aware of the altar of my palm; of delicate toes curling against my skin as climax nears; of the worshipers straddling the length of my penis, a pale shark dragged onto land to suffocate on my abdomen. A tiny arm reaches into my urethra to pull out something scuttling and too-many-legged. The last red and gold tendrils of sun extinguish themselves against the ocean as tiny fires flicker to life on the shore, dark-skinned natives spinning around them like imps in a fairy ring. Not for the first time, I wonder if I’m in Hell, and, if so, how much of this torment was decided by that last maddened thought, slipping beneath the waves for the final time, as, legs pumping futilely against the tide, she screamed my name from the shallows.

Now she’ll never know I’ve been sleeping with her sister.

But if this is my Hell, then it’s a gentler one then I could have come to know, and whenever I think I cannot bear the thirst anymore a young woman with black black hair and breasts like molded drops of dew climbs onto my cracked lips and empties pails of water onto my tongue and the back of my throat. Her cheekbones are set high on her dusky face and she balances herself on my teeth and tongue with the fearlessness and agility of a mountain goat. Where her kin avert their gaze as though mine were the face of the sun, she alone seems able to grasp the sheer scope of my visage, smiling like my oldest friend in the world. In no time her visits became the sole source of solace in the ceaseless crush of my impossible being; this morning I opened my eyes to her perched on the crook of my mouth where the upper lip joined the lower, and I knew that my delirium had won, that I loved her as one could only ever hope to love something so small and perfect.

Shit! If only a giant could survive on thimblefuls of water at a time and a lusting need for her to dwell in the chambers and walls of his heart, then I would live forever as lord of this place.

I don’t know how long this has been going on, this creation of a new god. Already the sky teems with stars, the distance between them no more comprehensible at this size than any other, and the tide is reaching now to my knuckles, ebbing around the faithful on their knees in the surf, oblivious to the wet and the cold as the the copulation on my palm reaches its crescendo, the sounds of orgasm drowned out by another peal of thunder from my gut.

The young man rolls off his partner and onto the ground several feet below, where he turns and extends a hand to my water bearer, struggling to stand on tremulous, coltish knees. Small and distant as she is I can still see firelight reflecting off the wetness on the inside of her thighs, and I feel my head grow faint as a great flood in my veins rushes south, scattering the congregation on my cock. Too heavy to rise, my dick purples and inflates like the monstrous, gas-bloated corpse of a beached whale.

An older man joins her lover, and the two take gentle hold of her elbows and reverently walk her towards me. The others drift in their wake. Again, she is the only one to meet my gaze, and the head of my cock squirms against my stomach, tumescent with love and want and greed. I feel multiple pairs of tiny, splayed hands press against my shaft, kneading the engorged flesh. I let out a low susurrus, a sound of countless waves breaking.

She stops in front of my face, where the crone and her priestesses await. The old woman undoes the beaded leather thong around my water bearer’s neck and the woven cloth around her waist, and my love stands naked before me, the damp smell of the swollen sex beneath her pubic hair rising in contrast to the acrid smoke in the air. A younger man breaks from the crowd, steps forward; he is holding a wooden bowl of water. My love dips her fingers into the bowl and washes her hands, her feet, her cunt. The crone cups a handful of ash and charred herbs and, eyes and tongue protruding grotesquely, flings it over my water bearer, who only smiles ever wider, and with that smile for once the heavy hurt in my heart seems wholly removed from the ponderousness of my godhood.

The natives standing by my penis thrust their hands into me again in concert, and my lips part slightly further at the sensation; it is all the opening she needs. She hauls herself into my mouth as the gathered explode into fresh exultation and, bracing herself against my palate and tongue, works her way into my throat.

A swash of hair against my uvula; a taste of salt and smoke, sand and cum.

My water bearer is inside me. I feel her squatting at the entrance to my esophagus, filmy with saliva, her fingers searching for purchase on the glistening walls of muscle and meat; I feel her solidity and weight, indescribably trivial next to my own, yet somehow stretching to fill every part of me. She sings now, sings, into the heat of each tortuous breath, the vibrations burrowing deep into even my titanic bones, the soles of her bare feet sliding smoothly over my larynx, inviting me to join in. She sings in a voice loud and big and strong as all the colossi of her world: the sun and moon, the mountains and men from the sea. She sings, and on the beach in front of me the beautiful boy holding the wash basin sings along, clear and bell-like; his grin holds even as his eyes fall on mine. She sings and, my heart and my cock feeling moments away from bursting, I surrender myself to love and swallow.

***

[Port Morsby, 2012]
[photo courtesy of Flip Cassidy]

Homo Urbanus is a collection of words about, and photos and videos of, cities. And other things.

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, by P.D. Smith

“The Regionalization of SimCity,” by Tyler Falk

Anthropocene, by David Thomas Smith

Ecumenopolis

Diagram of the Unité d’Habitation by Le Corbusier

Narrow Streets: Los Angeles, by David Yoon

“How Many People Can Manhattan Hold?” by Amy O’Leary

Blade Runner street scene design

“The Myth of the Fourth Estate,” by Gregory Shaya

Dwellings, by Ellie Davies

“Towers of Light,” by Matthew Pillsbury

Charlie discovered a “Giant Hole” in the universe on the same day I turned twenty-three and stuck myself in the thumb snapping the plastic guard onto a hypodermic needle.

tree of life
our (homo sapiens) closest neighbors (on the perimeter)
cw:
mus musculus = house mouse
rattus norvegicus = norway rat
oryctolagus cuniculus = european rabbit
alligator mississippiensis = alligator
turdus migratorius = american robin
gallus gallus = chicken
heterodon platyrhinos = hognose snake
sceloporus undulatus = eastern fence lizard
pseudemys scripta = water turtle
latimeria chalumnae = coelecanth (!!)
ccw:
typhlonectes natans = caecillian
ichthyophis bannanicus = banna caecillian
hypogeophis rostratus = (another caecillian)
grandisonia alternans = yet another caecillian

If anyone is interested in adapting all of this into a screenplay, please contact me and let me have some of your drugs.

And so begins the first year of my new, stupid, little war. It won’t be pleasant for any of us, I’m afraid.