Jetties launch themselves into the night time ocean almost every two hundred yards on Folly Beach, near Charleston, SC. Travis has came out on the urging of some local fans. He hit a couple of the local bars, too, with his friends. But last call came too soon and he found himself out on the beach with no where to be. So he plopped down on a jetty and after he let his eyes glaze over for a while, he pulled out a pen and wrote this down:

Read the whole story so far: Incunabula

Characters and Places: architect, night sky, poetry, the beach, Travis Fleeting's Poetry

“Let’s go get a couple of beers and soak up some of this sun,” Ian suggests, stretching his arms and taking a deep breath.

“Yeah, sounds good,” Travis agrees.

John, however, still clutching the mixer box just looks down at it and whines, “I wanna’ play with my new toy.”

“Ah c’mon,” Ian says, waving his hand in dismissal. “I’ll buy you yours.”

John smiles brightly, but Travis just says, “What about me?”

“You can buy me a beer if you want,” Ian replies.

“Where do you wanna’ go?” asks Travis.

Pointing down the street, “Flanngan’s? They got a patio.”

“Sounds good to me,” offers Travis.

Read the whole story so far: Carousel Cowboy

Flanagan’s Irish Pub—an old Athen’s fire station—doesn’t look like it sounds. Outside, green wood paneling and old clay brick drape the front, the name of the pub running along the top in carved gold letters. The inside resembles a church more closely than an Irish pub, square and long, the altar of the bar running along the length of the east side of the room, opposite draped windows facing Jackson Street. There are hardwood floors, hardwood walls and polished Mahoganey tables that sit placidly around the room and on the balcony in the back. In one corner, towards the front of the bar, a video blackjack game sits and blinks yellow and orange.

Read the whole story so far: Carousel Cowboy

At a little after four o’ clock, the June sun is still vibrant, flexing its solar flare biceps and drenching the asphalt with humidity. The Thunderchicken blasts down Clayton street like a smuggler’s ship through a blockade, as John looks anxiously from one side of the street to the other for a parking spot. Ian is turned halfway in the passenger seat, with a cigarette in his mouth discussing “business” with Travis who is lounging in the center of the backseat, mafia-style. The bluesy rock and roll sounds of John’s band—Simple Symbolism—blare through the speakers at Ian and Travis’s request.

“We’ll chill out tonight and tomorrow night, kick back, have some fun, until we get the information; and then get the shit out this weekend. We’ll have it done in two days.”

“Well…” Travis considers it for a moment. “Three,” he says, skeptically.

“Nah, dude, don’t worry about it. We’ll get it done.”

“Are you getting all twenty in a bunch?” Travis asks. What they needed were passport photos and index cards with information on height and weight and such. Plus, they usually demanded the money up front—a price which fluctuated wholly dependently on how well they knew who they were dealing with.

“I’ll get most of the stuff by tomorrow, I’m sure.”

“Right on.”

Read the whole story so far: Carousel Cowboy

Clayton street shoots through downtown Athens, Georgia like an clogged artery, bringing into central downtown both the oxygen of consumers and the more primordial plasma of wares to be sold, but always doing so in a congested manner. There are bars, clothing stores, a few restaurants, music stores and more bars. Clayton street alone has fourteen bars, and most of them are packed on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. (Thursday nights exist as a kind of strained extension of the weekend, probably due to the fact that liquor and beer cannot be sold on Sundays in the state of Georgia.) It has been this way for hundreds of years. In the old black and white pictures of downtown hidden in the Spaghetti Store or Rocky’s one can see the kegs lined up in stacks on horse drawn carts before Prohibition.

The Clayton channel is different from the veins and arteries in a body though, because it accomplishes both tasks of push and pull. On any given afternoon, an onlooker can find the push of at least two beer trucks and a UPS van parked along its five block stretch. By five, the business men and women filter out of town, dispersing from the banks and shops, sometimes stopping in for happy hour somewhere before being pushed into the suburbs. There is a moment of calm before the storm then. A quiet afternoon requiem settles in around the dogwoods, oaks and old brick buildings before Clayton adjusts its flow and a sucking sound starts. Around seven, the push of the streets becomes a pull, and the drinkers and smokers and partyers of the evening begin to trickle in. By ten or eleven o’ clock, the downpour has begun. All parking in the city vanishes. The lights go down and the fun begins. The bars fill up and spill out onto the street as twenty-somethings in flocks of friends, gaggles of smartly dressed girls, and herds of late night gentleman thrill seekers, migrate from favored hang-out to favored hang-out.

Read the whole story so far: Carousel Cowboy

Ian bursts out of the bathroom, his small frame wrapped with a towel, his face completely transformed. His hair is straight, more vividly black, and hung comfortably—his blue eyes lit up like dayglo denim. He looks more like his normal energetic self—though energetic wasn’t quite the word for it. Ian was usually more than energetic. The average person thought he was on speed if they didn’t know him better. And the strange thing was that most people universally agreed that Ian’s demeanor rubbed off like a virus. The moment he walked into a room, it seemed that the party had arrived. Nick often referred to the effect as his “daily dose of Ian.” Searching the room through piles of clothes, Ian looks for something tolerably dirty (or tolerably clean depending on how you look at). “I made about twenty sales last night,” he announces to Travis.

“Really?” Travis seems genuinely surprised—the summer was always slow.

“Yep.” He speaks in his mile-a-minute style. “We had a bunch of people over here last night. I told a couple people that I could hook ’em up, and before I knew it I was talking to a whole crowd.”

Read the whole story so far: Carousel Cowboy

The search for the zero code might continue here, in this way, and Eugene takes famous poems and runs them through babelfish translations from English to German to French to Japanese and back again in the hopes of unearthing those meanings that were intransmutable. He stared at the screen at his most recent endeavor:

Read the whole story so far: Incunabula

The television chatters at him as he toasts a whole wheat multi-grain bagel. It is a window of chaos and color leaking into his zen-like gray palette and cleanliness—emptyness, even—of the apartment. He wonders, only briefly, if he always eats meals in front of the television to simulate company. He was never sure. It was the only time he watched television. There are what are called mirror neurons in the brain, specifically “designed” to deal with modeling human interaction, abstracting from it, deciphering it, and turning it into some sense of yourself in the situations that you observe. The mind’s model of other minds. In a very real sense, you are never alone. Every one you have ever known—their movements—are encoded in you. But he’s never sure. Could just be the noise. Maybe it was just something to stare at.

Read the whole story so far: The Memory Thief, Unthreaded

“Hey, Fat Kid,” Travis calls. “You in here?”

The room is a jungle gym of four-by-four posts spread around the room to support a loft that, in itself was another room. The front half of the spacious room, not covered by the loft, had three giant windows that looked out to the pillars of the front porch and Milledge Ave. There was a couch under the windows, and another one situated opposite of the first. From this second couch emerges a head, crowned by tattered black hair and bejeweled by two blue swollen eyes. “Oh,” says Ian.

Read the whole story so far: Carousel Cowboy

The intimidating amount of intensity and determination etched into his sweat-dappled brow is enough to make the occasional onlooker presume him to be a neurosurgeon, mathematician, or rocket scientist; though, he is never aware of these disembodied suspicions floating around him, and the preening bystanders never guess that they are right some of the time. Not yet. Even at a good heart rate (somewhere between 130 and 140 bpm), his vermilion eyes are as still as a frozen pond as they search inward, inward for answers, answers to questions about the brain, questions that plague him. A traveling electrical storm surges through the occipital lobe at the back of his skull forming the steady pulse of a million strands of electrically charged threads of tissue, networks of cells that somewhere in the visual cortex may eventually point to the answers, but not in the visions that every newspaper machine and garbage can he is jogging past, occupy him, lost like he is. Somewhere branching out from the hippocampus, the seat of memory, are another million weaves, forming the pristine hologram of a patient’s fMRI that he is searching over, looking for an explanation for her newfound inability to recognize faces: prosopagnosia. As he enters the topographic map pf her brain, the obstacles on the sidewalk vanish.

Read the whole story so far: Brain->Wash, The Memory Thief