You died getting lazy in the workplace

"I was thinking like you know when you're talking on the phone and you have to spell out a word, or no--like a name, and you have to pick a word to associate to a letter because you're not being heard clearly over the phone--"

"Like N for Nellie?"

"Right and like I was thinking when we pick that word, like today I'm like Wattlesworth: W-A-T-T--yes, T that's T for...tadpole, like that right I was thinking was that a Freudian thing?"

"You mean..."

"Did I hesitate to say something obvious like Tom, or Tugboat, because I was like sexually into the woman on the phone?"

"And were you?"

"She sounded like a prize."

"And.."

"Like did she feel it as well?"

"Did she feel your preference for tadpoles over men named Tom and or tugboats?"

"Ho-ho Dick Cynical, don't mind me while I'm here trying to dig up on a real thing."

"Dick Cynical. Straight up."

You'd been peering over the cubicle for a good ten minutes as these two took turns on the paper shredder and really between the three of you it was a close choice. It was the second Friday of the month and you knew full well what that meant but somehow their conversation had drawn you in as a passive observer, and it was really the passive nature of your activity, just idling there for a good ten minutes while these two, while doing next-to-nothing--still they were shredding paper--they'd set you up (whether intentionally or not, you would never find out) and bursting through the strawboard ceiling panel busting a perfect square like that from a chessboard, a good three meters of a tentacle uncurls then just the end of it re-curls around your neck jolting you up into the ceiling, and now besides the hole and the remnants of straw, there is no longer any evidence of you having come in at all. The sounds of your choking struggle hidden under blades agitated furiously through pulp, and the other too close-to-call candidates cross a glance contemplating just for a moment the eyes watching them over the next fortnight.

You died wreaking irreparable havoc upon Klad's Machavial

Kimmswick Community Hall, Kimmswick MO

"You say that there is this free floating planet...Machavia?"

"Falling."

"..."

"The Universe she is not some community swimming hole. She is not the Dead Sea." Low-laughter from the audience sitting cross-legged on the hall's splintery panelled floor. "But yes, Machavia, and yes she is falling to us."

"To Earth."

"Correct."

"On a crash-course?" More tittering from the audience. The interviewer's expression of mild perturbation.

"It's the concern in your question. As though this would be a bad thing."

"Klad, if I may call you Klad?"

"Mr. Klad."

"Mr. Klad."

"I'm kidding."

"Klad then, could you tell me and our listeners Klad why this would not be a bad thing?"

* * *

Fort Dale vs. Monroe -- Fort Dale Academy, Greenville AL

"Naw the Machavial was merely an instructional guide for anticipating what Klad referred to as The Great Congealment. Machavia being described in the text as a core-less ocean planet consisting of a liquid not unlike cerebrospinal fluid which would envelope Earth. Cere-burrow-spahn-al that's one word. And uh, it was kind of a sink-or-swim preparatory manual to transcend functional dependence on Earth and to rise to the occasion as it were--Mickey you go get us some dogs would ya? Dog?"

"I already ate thanks."

"Just make it the three for me Mickster. Get yerself something but I'll want change from that twenty--all that stuff about it spoiling young minds and takin a pavement saw to your free will I mean you've read the thing do you really think--"

"No I haven't read it."

"Hell I had a feeling I was giving you more credit than I shoulda had."

"Haven't got around to it."

"Around to it? It's a eight-fuckin-page pamphlet! Maybe you're a little consternated is what I'd say."

"I don't think that's a word."

"Well I went to Duke motherfucker and what you don't think could most likely accommodate the volume of Moby Dick had the pages been unwritten on."

"Haven't gotten around to that one either.."

"You wanna come down here and--fucks sake Mickey how about one that isn't sodden with what tastes more like yer Mom's diaper than it does mustard--you wanna come down and ask me about why I signed up for all that shit and I can give you the same answer I give everybody, and hell knows I've been asked enough times already--I can tell you I was coming from a bad place and I was vulnerable quote unquote but that's a pile of horse manure you won't ever get past on me cause you forfeited your right to getting in here" (index and middle finger of right hand tapping on his chest) "by being too much of a pussy to even read the fuckin thing you came to ask me about."

"I'm sorry you feel that way."

"...And maybe Klad hung himself in that Mount Vernon holding cell, or maybe Missouri's finest decided to practice a little retribution of their own, cause if you ask them he was nothing but a broad shit stain on the community. But I don't have time to ponder conspiracies. The point is it doesn't matter that he's dead, Machavia is still comin for us. I know it, you know it, the difference is you're too frozen with fear to even want to try and survive it. You wanna be a survivor like me?"

"..."

"...You earn a pair and learn yourself two things: how to read and how to swim."

* * *

Kimmswick Community Hall, Kimmswick MO

"So this original manuscript, what significance does it hold over other copies?"

"Meaning is it...blessed?"

"I didn't--"
"You bet your ass she is blessed!"

"We can pick this up again tomorrow if--"

"It's right of you to assume that the oracular stout I have mixed in with half of this forty of High Ten is manifesting itself hideously from my breath. But tonight I bring you here to show you something that no alcohol would dizzy."
"I'm with you."
"Behind this modest curtain--you were wondering about this curtain?"
"You've mentioned the curtain serveral times already."
"For emphasis I mention it again! Behind this curtain are words set immortal and pulsing with a warm glow like a hot spring beneath moonlight. Transcending the experience of any Xerox or Kindle-friendly downloadable content. The real tamale."
"..."
"Son of Klad! Whose labrador is this?? And apple butter?? Who the fuck left a thing of apple butter--"
"Uh--I think, I think they were using it to hold it down."
"Hold it down?"
"I mean it's only like four pages double-sided."
"Who?!"
"Those guys that left a couple of hours ago in the Saturn? A & R?"
"And the dog?"
"They're intelligent creatures sir. A lot of it has to do with the length of their nose I think. With breeds."
"..."
"Evolutionary."
"..."
"Uh sir? Klad man, wait. I don't think the Luger is a good idea. I'm sayin A & R would shit."
"..."
"Oh hell man what did you do?"
"A shot has been fired."
"The sound of Ronny in promotions losing his bowels. You've lost it man."
"People are now exiting the hall on mass, many are getting into their cars. A small group attracting interest in the car park, perhaps some kind of vigilante, the family of this beloved chocolate lab, bottles and rocks are being passed around, now it's a case of will authorities arrive in time."

You died with a million year-old sample of Lead Belly's urine eating away your butt cheeks unravelled in glacial agony (upon butt cheeks et al.)

"I just flew in using the propulsion of my own jizz shooting me backwards and boy are deez nuts tired!" He said pointing down to his crotch at the respective spoken cue with his right index and pinky fingers extended, before proceeding to furiously wave this gesture of "the beast" back and forth in front of his genitals which fortunately enough were concealed by baggy light blue jeans scrunched up in heavy creases around the cuffs over shoes which extended the perceived girth of his feet no less than threefold. His face pulled a cross between invisible vomiting and staring directly into the sun.

"Listen muchacho," his words directed to you at the bar twenty-three minutes later after he'd door-nailed five boilermakers and he was kind of heavy set but kind of hard to see how much fat from muscle was what from the medley of hiphop apparel he'd chosen to poignantly represent tonight's get-the-crowd-going-in-mock-enthusiasm-for-this-d.bag-who-obviously-brought-the-hell-of-all-parties-with-him-2nite-until-the-crowd's-choice-of-shitty-beer-eats-away-at-the-buffers-of-irony-and-the-crowd-here-now-caterwaul-said-d.bag-for-real-way-before-even-the-curtains-close (so to speak) so it's hard for you to know exactly how fucked up this guy is fixing to get before the half hour is out but he speaks still clearly enough and maybe any traces of intoxication are only still part of the act or at least a rehearsal for something yet to come. You knew you were in on him on some level, just you weren't sure how deep the dude's persona went, or if in fact the whole layered persona thing was, in the spirit of all disappointing performance art fossilized in ephebic arrest, a bottomless pit of reflexivity.

"Listen," this was his sixth "money these days," he slides his non-drinking hand along the bar away then back in toward his barrel-chest gesturing the acquisition of an invisible currency, "some people are blessed in that they can just be given to do--but, my friend, there are those of us, I think you know who I'm getting at here--but those of us who have to not only chip at it, not just that one thing--many things--in the hope of a nibble" he adjusts his crotch then raises his non-drinking hand back to the bar and using the backs of his forefingers gestures a bowl of peanuts toward the bar waitress and holds no particular qualms staring down her top because if he were a geologist he would make a comment about the perfect cubic nature of those titties against one another the way they were framed in that circle of overwashed gunsmoke cotton but that if he were to take her home later that night he didn't want to be running his hands up the notches of her ribcage so for heaven's sake baby eat a thing--here, eat "we keep chipping until we realise that the rest of the picture is not even anywhere where we thought it would be. It's like digging up half a dinosaur in Cairo then having your uncle ring you fifteen years later telling you he just shat out the skull and that he's probably gonna have to do a bit in the hospital to get him sewed up all right again."

"My point is is that my kind we have to be ready to get it from all angles. The money part. My eyes are peeled so far back you can see the fucking stones, you dig? So I look at a guy like you and immediately my intuition tells me--just my gut--I mean I could have my eyes fucking glued shut and I'd know a guy like you. Could sniff you out in this mouldy beer trucker fart air a mile off. You been chipping away just like me brother. Not pissing in your pocket. But well, heh heh, that kind of brings me to what I'm willing to offer you."

The guy lifts up his breathable NBA jersey to reveal a girdle and attached to it several vials in a specially designed leather caddy.

"Without a shadow I can read a cat like you for being all about the Deep South. It's not just in those eyes brother, but I tell you a lot of it's in those eyes. Heh heh. Muchacho if you haven't guessed by now my hand is not now firmly placed on your shoulder merely as some late-in-the-drink patronising gesture. Yes, believe it, these are indeed vials of piss dating back to the very cardiac centrifuge of Delta Blues. Brother, I'm talking of none other than the Stella-pluckin' stone smashin' whitey shaftin' left only now in the narrative pervading heavy through our souls brother, the Lead Belly hisself, the agua of ol' Hudy's very being saved by such good fortune as to be delivered into these very hands" (the palms of his hands) "by some on the skirts of Houston like Saturday yard sale. The hell was I even doing at a yard sale? The hell was I even rolling awake in bed that hour of the A.M. without a dry mouthed lady friend unstickying her eyes making those cute alveolar fish-mouth clicking sounds in the generous indent left by my whore of a teenage-sweetheart ex-wife? Fate on my shoulder bros; time to get the pick-axe out of retirement and start again the chipping, if you're all with me on the metaphor."

There was a crumpled twenty somewhere in your pants that ended up on the counter top and one of the vials he had unhitched from his caddy was rolling to meet that twenty. He explained that he had a copy--if you so required it--there was a copy of the certificate of authenticity in the glove compartment of his car. It was a copy which had been stamped and signed to signify that it was in fact a certified copy of the certificate of authenticity and so was as good as the genuine thing, just if anyone ever wanted to call you on that shit, is what he was explaining.

* * *

You faced the warmth tumbling from circular glass doors, perched nakedly beneath your Blue's Clues bathrobe on the edge of one of the skintone polymer chairs slotted together to mirror the alignment of the washer/dryers like one rigid accommodating centipede. The LED countdown minutes away from rewarding you with a new clean week redolent of fabric softener boasting fluffy ducks in blankets bathed in harmless sunshine, not only harmless but somehow life-affirming in all its excess.

The door clicked to signify unlocking and you removed your favourite pair of jeans of the two you owned, your favourite because of the way they were shredded at the knees in a subtle enough way like some exotic reptile had hissed raw baby-killer acid all over them, just on the knees. Normally there was just enough rock in those babies so that you didn't have to commit to a musical instrument. On that morning unforunately for you you met the razor edge of a twelve-string blues god which left your denim coarsing with fatal mythology.

Never one to check your pockets before putting a load through, the rationale being you would wait til the end to scoop up from the metal cylinder coins and notes and ruined memos you had scribbled an either really basic or just really stupid chord progression on with something like Stoner rock desert jam lyrics regarding Hungarian chicken dish? Yum! written underneath but you would pretend it was like way more poignant and urgent to your development as an artist--what you had written--and so you'd hate yourself for letting it get ruined and blame fate for never giving you a break cause life is one random love distributing motherfucker and you were clearly off the radar. The love radar. So Lead Belly's urine or whatever the hell was in that vial stayed in your back pocket through the Full Cycle and the cork on that thing must have come partially dislodged so that it leaked mostly down the back pocket but also diluting into the wash liquid itself which then ended up somewhere we can only pray a stray dog wandering the storm drains didn't get a lick of it after seeing what the hell it was about to unleash on you.