"Fuck it, here's that fiction."

Some new microfiction comin' soon, y'all. Guaranteed, seeing as how it's in my notebook waiting for transcription. I just gotta conquer this semester, and then I'll have a couple-three months of relatively free time to jaw about whatever comes to mind. Exciting topics may include Chinese radicals (the linguistic kind, not the political), ruminations on skate park life, brutal Houston summers, whatever. No promises.

Fuck it, here's that fiction. Penned 二零一零年四月二十五日。 No editing.

Another batshit heat day out here, they all observe while mopping sweat from brows & crevices. Eight, ten hours on the blacktop in uniform for all, with a changing of the guard so to speak every two hours, time for hot coffee served in metal cups, no sitting allowed and cigarettes must be smoked w/in four minutes or else. Then it's back to formation until- if not when, at least on a small scale, a day scale- one of the figures in the bleachers comes down with the manual and invokes some rule or another, rule more arcane than the last, no way for most of those soaking their starched collars to ever figure out the whole thing. But there is no whole thing; the game is made up on the fly, rules from the manual quoted & put into play for the sake of a game using the manual as a prop. Nobody sees over the cinderblock wall east of the field, doesn't know what else is part of the larger scheme, knows anything but fields & barracks and hot coffee that blisters the mouth daily.

Gravitational Constant: G = 6.67 x 10-8 cm-3 gm-1 sec-2 (AKA More Shit Taken For Granted Until It's Too Late)

INT- 4843 BRIDGEMONT LANE, SPRING, TEXAS, 77388. NIGHT.

The year is 1993, and a young DAVE SMITH sits five feet from the television, watching Headbangers Ball. His parents and brother are all sound asleep, as they usually are at this late hour. DAVE is entranced by the current video, which appears to be a song by a band of imposing, vampiric Eastern Europeans surrounded by hot women and freakish extras. The frontman of the band plays an upright bass like a guitar, rolling his eyes back in his head and flashing literal fangs. DAVE tapes this video and watches it numerous times, sharing it with his brother SCOTT on the old TV the family bought years earlier in Italy. Time changes DAVE's understanding of what he's seeing, but it doesn't change the meaning. He has discovered Type O Negative.

INT- SOMEONE'S FAMILY'S APARTMENT, CARACAS, VENEZUELA. NIGHT.

1996. DAVE SMITH sits in a tile-floored room with several friends, listening to Type O Negative's cover of "Paranoid," but only DIPTO CHAUDHURI is into it to the same degree. It seems like everyone these two dudes hold dear is leaving, and they revel in Type O's amazingly bleak take on Black Sabbath's classic, playing the song over and over.

INT- PETE'S CAR, HUNTSVILLE, TEXAS. DAY.

1999. DAVE SMITH and PETE SWULIUS sit in the latter's car, smoking cigarettes and absorbing the first minutes of Type O Negative's newest album, World Coming Down. "It's Type O," they say approvingly.


These are my three strongest memories involving Type O Negative. There are more, of course, but these are the ones that come to mind when I consider the news that Peter Steele, TON's frontman, died yesterday of heart failure. I remember when Yi-Lei Wu came back from a trip to the States with a copy of October Rust. I remember smoking a bidi with the Swulii outside Numbers after seeing Type O in '99. I remember buying Life Is Killing Me years after it was released, during a period when I realized I hadn't listened to TON in a while. I remember Fran Torres playing keyboards for my brother's band, Last Eve, and looking particularly like Josh Silver, hair- and playing-wise.

I remember a lot of things that have involved Type O Negative over the past seventeen years, but of course it takes Peter Steele's death to make me remember just how much I loved, and still love, this band. Maybe that's what death is for, aside from being something to fear and make hilariously tasteless jokes about. I don't know. Every time I think I'm getting a handle on things, shit like this happens and I realize the scope of my assumptions about life as I know. Christ.

Hail Type O Negative. Requiescat in pace Peter Steele. Those chicks in the "My Girlfriend's Girlfriend" and "Black No. 1" videos were hot. Thanks for everything.

Sinister.

Among the recent things I've done is a short-lived attempt at doing things with my right hand. Being fortunate to have been born in a time not insistent on having my natural tendency toward things sinister rather than dexter beaten or cajoled out of me, I took an opportunity last night to try to brush my teeth with my right hand. My teeth ended up clean, sure, but it was not an easy task. My brain knew what to do, and my hand valiantly followed orders, but in a manner most awkward and tedious. A task that would've normally taken two minutes took more like six. Afterward, I tried writing English words and Chinese characters right-handed, which was an even clumsier undertaking. Ambidexterity might be achieved some day (or month, or year), but I think I'll postpone attempts until something tragic happens to my left hand... in which case I won't be so much ambidextrous as unidextrous, albeit with my new dominant hand.

It's Tuesday night, but it feels like Thursday, because this week's academic hurdle came, and was overcome, earlier in the week than usual. I've taken to staying up until well past midnight on Thursdays, writing and generally soaking up the witching-hour atmosphere, but tonight I can't afford to do so. Duties call, so I'm going to torch one more gasper and call it a night. I won't even read any of Anathem before turning out the light.

In lieu of delving further into my well-over-a-decade-old obsession with late nights enjoyed in quiet domestic environs- a situation in the midst of which I again find myself- I instead urge you to listen to the Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation's Succubus. Accompanied, perhaps, by tobacco and alcohol, and silent rumination on subjects best left undiscussed.

Good night.