Family matters. It really does.

Mother and I are at Zilker park, watching Frazier and some other guys play some combination sport, which mixes basketball (dribbling), soccer (kicking, heading) and football (endzones, touchdowns). I want to play and think I could fit in, as there are only three or four players at this point, but I have forgotten my athletic shoes. I didn't know there would be a fun game to join when I decided to go to the park. I didn't know friends would be there.

I am not sure which shoes I am wearing, but they are inappropriate, this is certain. Lying in the grass next to me is my older pair of cognac-tinted dress shoes. These will not work. I beg my mother to take me back home to get some appropriate footwear, but she insists on staying. I beg then to take her car, but she will not let me. I berate her as I would have as a teenager. It reminds me of the time we had teriyaki chicken and rice for dinner. She and my father would not let me go to the fair with my girlfriend. I must have stormed upstairs and told them they would be sorry someday.

Like in my adolescent arguments, she does not give in and I berate her further. "You're the one that always tells me if I don't want to be so depressed I ought to start exercising. Now I have the chance and you say no. You don't even care," I scream to her.

She begins to cry and I think I feel sorry.

And then at some point much darker in the day, I look up to find dozens of people playing this sport. I enter the field of play and ask if I can join, explaining that there is an odd number of people on the field and that I know Frazier well, but my audience does not respond with much, and what I do get it cold and despondent.

***

Memphis Pencils play a local version of CMJ in a movie theater. Eric Jensen is the emcee. Yani is in the crowd. I spend time on stage and in the crowd, studying the schedule to find that we are the best act at the festival.

***

I am with Maw Maw and my mother, watching an old film of the two of them and Paw Paw, the grandfather of whom everyone seems to think I am the reincarnation. They all look so young at this enormous banquet celebrating something like a wedding. Maw Maw is on stage, singing a song I think, and looks just like Aunt Sandra. Paw Paw takes his turn and looks just like me. They are so young, all of them.

I am then with Lois at the house on Ascension, in the living room. Upon my request we look at some old photos. At first Mimi just gives me a sheet of white paper with faded, black and white photos of my father as a child. I can barely make them out. Then she hands me a sheet of negatives. I hold it up to the light and can make things out a bit clearer. Each new sheet contains more recent photos. Then comes a book of photos of my father's baseball days. His face in the photo morphs in and out of mine, as if sometimes we are the same person.

***

My mother's side of the family and mine are gathered at my parents' house on Lafayette for Christmas dinner. Paul Rawlings is there too. Things are going well. Cousin Eron plays guitar while Mariana sings the words to some combination of Hank Williams' "There's A Tear In My Beer" and "Hey Good Lookin'." We are all so impressed that this five year old can read, and even more so that she knows the melodies of Hank Williams, her father's namesake.

Soon my father and I get into an argument, the content of which is not clear, the intensity of which is apparent to everyone. There is no dining room table. I take a break from the argument to get a beer from the refrigerator. It's slim pickins, just one bud light on the top shelf, which is for my mother, and some nasty stuff on the bottom. Paul is in the kitchen with me. He seems confused that I'd be drinking at a family gathering. For some reason this is not even acceptable in dreams.

I go back to the living room where my father and I continue our spat. We begin wrestling in a manner which I find no more than playful, but he seems to take it quite seriously, as does the rest of the family. My glasses are broken, probably in the process, and though he has fixed them once before, he says something to the effect of "Well, that's your problem."

"Then I guess I just won't have glasses," I counter.

***

My mother and I are watching a mystery unfold on CBS. We know not what is going on nor whether it is fact or fiction, nor whether it is documentary or dramatization. But we are perceptive enough to see that it is strange.

***

Growth And Potential: It's Like A Motivational Speech!

In a house I'd never been in before I am watching TV. I am in a dark room where the only light is from the television. There is also a light on outside the room, in the hallway leading to the bathroom where Neil is, I think. The carpet is brown and not at all sexy but comforting still.

The program on TV is an 80s version of Pokemon, supposedly. Pikachu only appears briefly. The other characters are played by Sarah Schultz and Jocelyn Smith, whom I have known since childhood. Jocelyn is dressed in black with a veil covering her face and this last detail makes it difficult at first to tell who she is, but I do after some time.

I call to Neil who is in the bathroom, or hallway leading to it, out of sight, to tell him I have seen familiars on national TV. He comes in, shaded greatly and obscure and not impressed. He probably doesn't even know Sarah. My father is in the bedroom across the hallway, sleeping with the door open and is annoyed by my calling, whether he says so or not.

I am in the kitchen of my parents' house with my cousin, Luke. Standing in front of the toaster, I look down to find a single, larger than usual egg on my plate. It is covered in pepper, really covered, and the yolk has been punctured and runs just barely. The orange is quite stunning and beautiful.

I am looking at myself in the mirror, in this house here in Austin, at my beautiful, long hair, which reaches my jaw. It is shaped perfectly, which tells me, at long last, that there is nothing wrong enough with me.

On some road to nowhere or another

As he was constructing some sort of taco [watermelon shell; dark, flat celery; fuck ton of butter] and before he had instructed me to the store for orange juice (he asked if I could handle that), my father told me the story of marijuana through the eyes of the Native Americans. "They all did it, though sometimes it was a little scary."

Stopped in my car on some road to nowhere or another I am with a girlfriend, unidentifiable and in the driver's seat, and two friends, unidentifiable and in the rear. Somehow Pepperdog is implicated and it turns out he is dying, his black parts fading quickly to a blizzard white.

It is hard for me to say how or why, but I am at one point searching a Turkish-English dictionary for the morphology of "kadın," which of course becomes "kadınlar," a bunch of other things, and according to this reality, "adının."

*Kadın = woman
*Kadınlar = women
*Adının = name

It should be but isn't a surprise that the stereo in my car works. I suggest we turn the motor on as not to disturb the battery too deeply. What should be and is a surprise is that outside the car, the ground beneath the dirt dust on the ground is frozen solid. "It's tundra," I said as Todd Gill delivered a pizza next door.

My breath really does smell pretty deathy.

It all started on TV. Mike Conley was playing for some Laker-colored basketball team most of whose members had ridiculous mohawks. Mike didn't though. And he wasn't wearing their jersey either, now that I think of it, so maybe he was on the other team. Way to go, Mike. Beat those stupid haircuts.
The jersey I was wearing was from my first year playing basketball with the Washington Wildcats, one of those reversible bits. I was wearing it with the white side and not the blue side showing. It was so tight that when I decided to take it off I had to get help from my father. I was quite grateful until he told me, at a volume audible to every person near, that my breath smelled horrible. And so I played the angry pout.
I couldn't understand why there were no instructions further than "Write about the Civil War." I couldn't get an explanation from anyone and time was winding down and I couldn't decide just what to write about and WHY CAN'T I BE ASSIGNED A MORE SPECIFIC TOPIC? "Surely I will fail," I thought, mesmerized by the scoreboard.
On our way out, my father and I ran into a rather cheery Yani. She needed a ride and my father more or less ignored her. We were the ones giving her a ride, but she led us to our car, which wasn't quite ours. It was an old Subaru-looking piece. She got in. And so it ended right there, Yani, in the car my father was supposed to drive, and I, standing outside wondering where the car came from, wondering where any of it came from.

A Moment Pale And Frozen In Time

In that jungle, which is anything but sublunary I follow a family from Italy along that river that leads to either Rome or hell. I am greeted first by Father's penis, a moment pale and frozen in time.

Mother and Father come from different sides of the river which rushes through Rome and shares its name - she from the bank of hardliners, he from the compassionate. This distinction all made sense once we reached the waterfall, a thing nothing if not vast and vertical, as Mother suggested they throw Son - about my age or older - down it as if he were some action figure one lets slip joyful down summertime backyard water slides.

Father refused, though without the anger one might expect. It was never made clear to me just what happened to Son about my age or older.

We made our way through that jungle on that narrow path. All was rainy save the sky, which seemed to have given nothing for quite some time, but remained grey as grey can be. And then at last, just as the path had become most narrow, perhaps too narrow, we reached a cottage, something like a cottage, with small screened-in porch whose coziness I knew all along from the blankets and rocking chairs and overall air of dryness.

But before I could decide that it was there that I should stay, the Italians insisted I take the impressive path which led below, the path vertical just like that waterfall I'd seen before. It was arduous to say the least and murky despite a mostly non-liquid consistency, but the descent flew by (as I remember nothing of it).

Next thing I know I am at the bottom, part of some army preparing itself, ourselves, for some rope course drill, which I handle with ease as it was more like a soft and swinging non-metallic set of monkey bars from youth. The reward for this entire journey is my arrival in the locker room, a sepia place less masculine than I expected.

I have a dark memory of floating at night some satanic river through Rome. The red, judging statue is ablaze and glowing from the inside. The sentiment is mostly blood.

This is the perfect street for collusion.

The world is coming to an end. I get this feeling because people are worried that the resources they are using are limited. But no one wants to cut back. Other than my family, people still bathe twice a day and use their electricity as if these impermanent privledges are eternal rights, even though everybody knows the end is near. The Alesian Church is especially guilty. I was holed up at my parents' house trying to avoid marauders one evening, the sun having just gone down, when suddenly I heard, and seconds later saw, a white helicopter, descending wobbly and grotesque into the driveway. Either man or machine had been drinking, that was certain. I asked the pilot where he got such a thing and, moreover, gas for such a thing. He chuckled and said, "Well, the Alesians, of course."

He took me to their church. I thought it was "Elysians," but alas, the front door of their "temple" had it spelled all wrong. "They've got it all wrong," I thought. But they didn't. They had electricity, and they were all happy. They weren't talking about God or Jesus at all, just having fun and not worrying. Lots of apocalyptic games like tag and hide-and-go-seek.

A man came by my parents' house the other day. He was looking for my brother, said something about arms dealing. My father said he wasn't home. He covered for him. So he was pretty pissed when upstairs he found the square, clear plastic zip-up travel bag with two .38 revolvers in it. He yelled when he found the guns. My brother deserved it, the yelling, and my brother knew he deserved it. And this fact made him giggle. Usually when my brother giggles it is when he knows something is wrong and everyone else knows something is wrong and he makes it clear that he endorses that wrong something and this was no exception.

So my brother sat down next to me on the striped couch in the living room and yapped on about what a wuss my father - his stepfather - is. I told him he was wrong and he responded by momentarily paralyzing me. I'm not sure how he did it, which is something I often say about my brother (actually it's more like "I don't know how he does it"), but as my body was gradually returned its right to motion, that right I did exercise. Gradually. I began by rubbing his hand. I think we called it Injin burn - or something like that - when we were kids. But that was the nineties, back when we ate dinner at a table and prayed before meals. Then I bit his arm as dilligently as possible.

Then I punched him in the face, but not so dilligently. At first he laughed, but after a harder strike he said something soft and surprised like "Oh, that hurt." It was the kind of thing brothers might do to each other when they're young and horsing around. I guess you'd say we were just horsing around, but really I wanted to kick the shit out of him.

I have to get going now. After all it is snowing outside, the world is about to end, and I have to meet some friends at 40th street, which - I am about to find out - is the perfect street for collusion.

This is clear despite a marked lack of pavilion.

I found out after wondering for some time that Bob Saget gets his mouthwash from Estonia. Also, it turns out that while Estonians speak Estonian, they print all their mouthwash labels in Turkish.

I am on Hendrix campus, which has apparently undergone a total makeover since I last saw it in real life. There is a deep, rectangular hole in the asphalt of the parking lot and it is, for some reason, important. So that is where I park my car.

It looks like Memphis Pencils are playing another show at Hendrix. It is at this point - when I realize I am to perform - that I am back at my parents' house, snorting and licking cocaine off the kitchen wall. The walls were white, don't ask how I found it.

I apologize to my mother for getting blown just as she is leaving. She forgives me, though; she's in a good mood because she and Neil are about to see Frank Zappa.

I'm back into the party atmosphere. It doesn't look like Hendrix. It is probably still Hendrix. The first Hendrix didn't look like Hendrix either. There is a family-renunion/county fair/church picnic sort of thing going on. This is clear despite a marked lack of pavilion. Jesse Belt and I go to the nearby gas station where they return drunk-from beer cans to the shelves. I stock up on watermelon as he is probably buying cigarettes.

There is some boring shit with my family in there somewhere. Where we're going to eat, who's staying at home, whose birthday it is, who's driving which car. There is some really boring shit with my family in there somewhere.

I'm back at the real Hendrix, the real reimagined Hendrix. There is probably a pavilion somewhere. There are some acquaintaces from junior high standing on a sidewalk and I decide not to say hello. Memphis Pencils are about to perform, but alas - I'm in a dermal dilema. My ass is showing. Because my pants are assless.

Don't worry, I've ended up with a towel. Well, shit: it keeps falling down. It keeps falling down and people keep seeing my ass. Shit. Someone asks me about my shirt. I tell them all about how I designed it, but Neil reminds me that it was a gift from JD, that JD had done the design. Oh, right.

More importantly, Jamie Claire approaches me to ask where she should park her car - "Should I park it over in front of that building? I wouldn't want to get an arm on it."

"Oh, Jamie," I think, "I didn't know you were into non sequiturs!" But it turns out a bloody arm, cut at the elbow with hand and all and a Luger next to it, is lying in the perfect fucking parking spot. Now no one can have the perfect parking spot. That is so rude.

Daylight comes and still no police have shown up, but that's okay because the annual Halloween zombie parade is here. We, without knowing who we are, throw rocks at the zombies and say, in all caps, "FUCK ZOMBIES!"

cheese jello

Jayson Black, and a combination of strangers that he embodies, and I are on our way to some small bayou town in Louisianna. We have a lot of trouble finding our way there because the roads are mapped for us on a napkin as a knotty oak tree. When we arrive, my father is the only person I recognize. Jason has even turned into someone I don't know. The party has an ala carte, self-service Thanksgiving feel. The Jello has, I think, cream cheese on it.

nothing surreal, or real, or revelatory

I was in Bavaria near Neuschwanstein. My mother or some respected woman was there to guide me. It was raining. From the edge of a mountain trail the local tourist tavern was in view.

Ascension

You had been in France and for some reason come back to lead me to the basement and tell me how to clean it. It was full of surprising minutia. I vacuumed strings. Maybe we were looking for something.

Later, my father told me that the repairs couldn't be done, or received at least, without taking a computer to the shop. A laptop wouldn't do.

When I gained a hazy consciousness, I was standing in a bar, dark as the rest and peopled by shadows that yelped about this and that, but mostly that.

I was vaguely on Ascension.

Having heard of fireworks

From the high-fenced place we raced, having heard once or twice of fireworks. We made it to the sculpted basin made of clay, and by then it was day. We had just sat down at the green-blue reflecting pool and ate a hamburger when I heard an automated voice on my phone that said mum had died in surgery. After some wrinkle in the fabric of time, we saw Renny Bover in the snow. He said he'd be back from Chicago soon. People are better at driving in the snow there.

No one has to know all this, but someone will probably tell.

Jabberwocky on TV

It was Christmas and The Jabberwocky was on TV. I had just done thirty bench-presses of eighty pounds, twenty-nine more than I at first thought possible. I was feeling pretty good.

I called towards the kitchen to Mum to tell her what was playing next. The TV messed itself, and so I had to figure out how to get it back to The Jabberwocky. Mum said it was on negative one hundred-something.

I also had to find the channel that the VCR required. A few channels worked slightly. Parts of human figures shone through the fuzz. I gave up and looked down. I found another remote. This might just work, I thought. But I dropped everything when I saw that the floor underneath the "entertainment center" was crawling.

Bugs and the cutest rodent, more like a tiny kangaroo with opal eyes the size of its feet. I went to the kitchen to tell Mum. She said there wasn't any Raid, but that I could use the imitation 409. Giddy-up.

I went to the bathroom to look at my acne. There was a lot of it. I thought maybe the yellow moisturizer was making it worse.

Naturally I found it curious.

I'm in the den of my grandparents' house in Little Rock, and there's a photo album that says "Herman: 1924..." Naturally I found it curious that someone would have compiled album of photographs of my grandfather five years before his birth. I never opened it. Naturally I found it curious.

If I had only seen this side of your face, and you were with a group of your friends...

I am in the supermarket. I don't really know what I'm doing here. I decide to check out the books, and soon I stand before the magazines, stuffing my own mouth full of toothpicks (the blood tastes like the cherry tooth-gelatin they had at the dentist's office when I was a kid). While my mouth gushes cherry, I focus on the magazines, which get only my brief attention; to my left, a lecture is going on in an infernal, terra-cotta amphitheater, in which my Spanish literature professor (a demon) discusses the ghost of José Arcadio Buendia. Like my maternal grandfather he haunts in a welcome way his family's gatherings.

I finally find what I'm looking for: Cormac McCarthy's The Road, perhaps my favorite book. Having accomplished a great deal, I walk to the pharmacy, which is also the bathrooms. As I am keeled over a tiny wastebasket full of paper cups, pulling the toothpicks out of my mouth, I realize that there are far more inserted than I remember inserting. And the cherry flavor is gone. Long gone. It is here that I realize why I am going to the pharmacy. I have diabetes. As it happens, the ominous "they" has found a link between bipolar disorder and diabetes. And I have both. I have been gone all weekend to Little Rock, remembered my bipolar drugs, forgotten my insulin syringes. I turn to my left and catch a glimpse of cousin Philip: "I hardly recognized you," I say.

"Yeah, that happens a lot," he says.

"I feel the same way," said cousin Thomas who has been standing nearby, listening in on our conversation. "I mean, we hardly see each other."

"I know," I say.

"If I had only seen this side of your face" - I take his head in my hand and cock it to demonstrate to Thomas - "and you were with a group of your friends..."

I look at them both for a moment:

"I don't think I'd recognize you at all."