A Gilded Planet

This fear seems awful silly now, this acid belly flood when Dan the piano man says how he found your money blood We talked and talked like fans of Bird so many weeks ago of antics Dan had played absurd it was not just a show Some creeps on this side of the night are not so very bad but when he followed her with fright they knew they had been had

“In the land of Janaki, there exists a tall cylindrical edifice covered in alabaster that serves as both a tomb and a monastery for fertile academic minds. First built in the decades following the ill-fated Keshite invasion, it did not become a tomb until centuries later. The insectivorious King Grimmage III committed his life to quiet study in the building and when he died he left strict instructions to be buried in the structure that was from that day forth to be known as Grimmage Tower. “Grimmage Tower developed a reputation as the most prestigious refuge for those citizens of Janaki blessed with enormous gifts of scientific, analytic, artistic or literary character. To be invited to Grimmage Tower is a great honor, and many of Janaki’s brightest lights spend years working in its catacomb cells before eventually being buried in its mausoleum. The admission of an individual working in a field heretofore unrepresented inside Grimmage signals a new respectability for that endeavor, a...

Robots and Monsters huddle around the embers of our campfire fiends gnashing their teeth in your unimagined paradise with the Red Army here and the Blue Army there a tremendous wiggle loosed on the lot Guillermo Credenza that most magical bishop yields before the developing world of business disasters wishing most earnestly to be described as ursine How to react to these foreseen machinations? drink my laughs you old plate of soup before we prepare for murders Monsters must burn Robots must burst When Credenza sings "The Maltese Jew" at Christmastime Sweet Jumpin' Christmas Time! Oh how we feel ready to carry out his dark designs

An abridged version of this article I wrote just short of a year ago was originally published in the zine Connect the Dots. The online supplement to Connect the Dots can be found here. When my editor called with an assignment about a rumor she had heard in Solano about some Ohlone shaman who had apparently carved mystical Kuksu inscriptions on five great rocks in the hundreds of years prior to white settlement in what is now North Berkeley, I was intrigued. Knowing the Ohlone – famous for their giant shell mounds as well as their skill at dancing on the rim of the world – I was certain I had a killer story on my hands. So certain that I briefly considered hiring a semiotician to assist me in decrypting the strange Ohlone symbols before abandoning the idea because I did not want to go overbudget on my very first assignment for the publication. My editor directed me towards the Friends of Five Creeks, who have uncovered some of the history of Berkeley’s major rock parks as part their...

The sounds you create anywhere are repeated every minute of every day & if I can hear the hands of the clock then I will ignore those sounds you pro-duce at dawn and dusk because too much else is gaining and losing my attention thus I have none left for you except a thank you a God Bless You but he say you didn't believe in those old tales only the new stories that you tell Strings lonely with doubt out of the past crying dangerously for more of those hit pops off the record left to you by that wicked corpse you call a father.