ANDYconrad: electroJOURNAL

Everyone told me I’d go far. No one told me I’d never arrive.

God lit a fire in His mouth and it spread to His knees. That’s when He sat on his haunches, trying to figure out how He’d become a push-button machine, a wind-up toy for the elders to fondle as they please. They spoke for Him. But, He did not answer.

The world turned, spinning seemingly faster and hotter than before.

The reborn said they knew God. They were pretty good friends. I felt a little jealous that I wasn’t friends with God. He seems really laid back about a lot of things that would definitely make me do some "smiting." But, God doesn’t pre-judge, He anoints. It’s simple – those not anointed are not to be claimed. God, if you’d like to contact me, or, at least, send me a sign, go to my website.

God was hit in the mouth by a 7-year-long uppercut. He swallowed all the pink tears and was left with only a hardened perforation between His lips. His eyes never changed because He had to stay focused. To sway would be the same as wriggling away.

God's mysterious plan is to resurface from within and galvanize all He touches and fires His eyes upon. The boardroom clatter and chatter will be rescued by His communal spirit.

It’s a prejudiced world, and as it grows together through communications... fear and panic escalates. But you can’t outsmart a heart. There’s a fear of identity being lost and diffused as cultures mix and mingle. Isolationists selfishly hold onto their cultures through the society concept, and not through individuality and thoughtfulness and mindfulness. To throw a beam beyond the Earth and an anchor beyond unfathomable inwardness would be a true gift. At least try, and don't be disappointed when pride ends up killing the purity anyway.

The animals will finally realize that true salvation doesn’t exist. The fact that stardust can ball-bust is the testament. Embers. When they fade we cry. Soak up the glow. You create enough life and light to grow a hundred harvests with only one smile. True love is light and it's bright. Lust is dark and plenty. Both mistaken for one another.

Shedding the temporal importance to life is the Naturalists’ way. They lobby for corporate standards by exciting the will of the people. Naturalists are a secretive bunch, an ilk borne from grave concern, not one of them wears the chiseled neckties or listens to starchy songstresses.

God is actually a budding Naturalist.

The modern world is beginning to fall apart. People are fighting machines in a silent thinking battle, throughout the realms of industry, civics, medicine and politics. People are being run down. They are desperate to keep up. Drugs are so popular, they’re diminutive little icons. Designed to focus, energize and bring about a crash. The census is running down. The plaster is falling apart. Advanced societies are becoming unorganized, defensive, aggressive, and frustrated. Stretch-Armstronged beyond recognition.

Meteors are on their way. There’s no time to think like a canyon about the surface. Sound-bytten. Brains are contused and in need of raw rest. Fruitful verbal breeding is still-born. Now ideation is inbred, cyclical without release.

God loves the air about Himself. He dreams of Light. She is lust.

He never thinks He’s missed a moment without a preservation machine in hand. God would rather not eye the day or lust though miniature panes of glass. God owns a pair of prescription goggles, always perched across His oily nose.

Step away from the microscope... there's nothing to see here.

Agricultural beastly greed. It’s one of the greatest crimes in human history. It’s so ugly, people are afraid to look at it. Animals stripped, cleaned, frozen, labeled. It was confined to a life of slavery. Gnashers eat slaves to quench a longing for supreme importance, and then etch with fire a cleanliness that doesn’t exist. The ashes of an eternal villainy put onto the Earth. Now I see why fire seems so evil as it hooks and hypnotizes.

Cancer dusted sweet red peppers and Roma tomatoes squish in our mouths. Cancer runs into streams. Cancer seeps into seams. Money stacks, bodies stack. Agriculture will be the death of us all.

DNA begins to take on characteristics of unnatural chemical compounds not historically found in a human body. Bodies begin replicating these compounds, passing them on to future generations. I am preservative, conservative and a plow for the affirmative!

All of the things we’ve created to enrich our lives have gone over the rainbow with the compartmentalizing of every thought and every thought you’re about to have. We move further from the Earth, the ooze and ash and stone from which we were born. Our state has been altered.

But, the Naturalists would battle the naysayers and their own self-consciousness. Are they a true soft fighting force for the greater raw sugar of humankind, animals, plants, earth and consciousness, or are they just square pegs who didn’t fit, feeling left behind and unable to keep up with a world wrapped in binary code and lightning machines?

Flags and plugs wave, and conquerors bear-hug each other and toss a scrap to the onlookers.

Sexy light was born of Texas tea with a cigar in her mouth and a toaster betwixt her legs. A very strange congenital genital. She would face-punch herself to scare away femininity, which made her toaster bigger. Light’s breath reeked, not from cigars. But, God, was she beautiful.

When God first saw her, he stared for what seemed like an hour. She was all by her lonesome. splayed across a bridge that was out. A lumbering cement blockade kept the suicidists out. Painted on the blockade, with a cold psychotic hand, was a neat little phrase, “Work is slavery.” God giggled and darted eyes up to see Light tangling with a 4-ton truck that sped away behind some come-fuck-me sunglasses to hide the tracks and then crossed a river of sewage to drown the emotions. The ghosts led to a graveyard for graveyards. Stones left turned.

God was short. He stared down the dream of the hero laying across a bomb for all y’all. He decided, you and we deserve it, so don’t feel guilty. Because, the General always thinks generally and has no one he needs to love. But, you and we should stay specific and open to being shoved and shoveled to our forefathers to chat about using fists in fits of fury.

God thought, “It’s all happening in the wrong way. What the world really needs is a good joke about itself, and humankind could stand a good ribbing about being born of woman via a rib from some other guy." But, Light and all her digital friends saw God as a little prick who picked a fight with the big mother. They all sniffed with fee-fi’s and fo-fums and bit down– dug in with hydrogen heels and the feel of an apparition who is unplugged from the universal taste. When you say the word “tomorrow,” you’re a martyr trying to barter for fate.

Souls in empty shoes shuffle and lumber for acceptance at the hand of their own begotten reception.

Be a voice of the world. Every voice of the world will be vetted, but, still, give it a shot.

I crossed the cross of two major intersections.

My heart rate suddenly shot to red line! I vacuumed in every molecule of oxygen with a desperate gasp. Adrenaline shot through my veins and my face tingled. My face withered. My passed down, old gold, cracked vinyl dashboard Volvo with cassette player and breeze-flapping ceiling upholstery was forced into a screeching halt. My foot crushed the brake. Summer haunted every pore of skin on my face. The broken air-conditioner kept me firmly tacked to my seat.

An old man instantaneously came into view, perched in an oversized white motorboat, gurgling directly in front of me. The old whitey had his feeble arm waving over and outside his artfully lowered power window.

An unoccupied, old model Mercedes hovered in my front right. It had been blinded in my periphery by the old man’s boat.

I sat mentally hijacked for a moment… until an unattractive Olive Oil unrolled and inflated from the front of her Mercedes, flailing her arms in the air and shouting,

“I didn’t see him, I didn’t see him!”

I stared at her for a moment as the sun glared and squinted me through my windshield. My eyes scanned my brain… “The unattractive lady’s car had hit someone,” my brain exhaled.

Traffic piled up. And in typical fashion, the lines of impatient, rumbling metal boxes behind me were singing a dissonant song.

To my own surprise, I left my car in the middle of the road. I trotted stiffly over to the scene, much like the group of dazed deer still sitting in their cars. None of us were confident about getting involved.

I saw a decrepit man lying in the street. His face was rugged. It was wrinkly, scraggly and dusty. His full, dark hair was beyond greasy. It was dusty too.

Stretched out on the asphalt, and pivoting on his hip, the dusty man tried to pick up his stocking cap, which I assumed had been blown off by the impact. His arms were pitifully outstretched. I glanced to my right as I approached him and saw where his dusty body had cracked the Mercedes grill and the weepy doe eyes of the homely lady.

“I didn’t see him,” she cried.

“I’m all right… yous couldn’t-na been goin’ dat fast… yous only knocked me a few feet,” gasped the downed dusty man.

I stood over him, pleading with him to stay on the ground. My hands were flat out, pumping like flashing stop signs in an effort keep him still… without actually touching him. All the while horns tweaked through the air, and so did this weak, scratchy voice. It was the old whitey from the white boat.

I stared at the guy on the road as he muttered something about a bank.

Suddenly, I was somewhat embarrassed, still selfishly aware of the impromptu stage I was on as the crowd booed and jeered.

No one else emerged from the crowd to help. I am no saint, so who are these other people?

It didn’t look like the guy was going to die, at least not from being hit by a Mercedes. He smelled like rotten lettuce and his clothes were splattered and crusty. I’m sure he didn’t own a mailbox.

Could it have been his troubling appearance that was keeping everyone cowering in their cars?

He kept trying to get up. Even after pleas to “stay on the ground until the ambulance arrives…”

"Wait, did someone call an ambulance," I thought.

He again insisted on going to the bank! His head nodded knowingly, up and down.

“This guy has a bank?” I muttered.

He started to get on his feet and was wobbling around on what looked like a broken chicken leg. People had gathered. Some came up to me to ask if he was okay. Others kept a safe distance by standing on the curb. That dirty little skinny leg was just flapping around. It was sticking out of the bottom of some high-water trousers. Was he in shock? I don’t know, I guess.

Even worse, and unbelievably, he already had a crutch. Olive Oil had been holding it for him the whole time. When she handed it back to him I remember thinking, “Boy, they were fast getting that crutch here!”

My semi-entertaining thought was interrupted by that grating, feeble voice again… the one that lurked behind me from the white boat. It was the same phrase over and over but it wasn’t computing. I was trying to focus on the puzzle in front of me.

The dusty man was getting up no matter what, so I decided to lend my hand. I reached out, grabbed his arm, slipped the crutch under his arm, and, then, as if I was the victim of an elaborate practical joke, the homeless man’s crutch slipped from beneath his putrid armpit and jammed effortlessly into my cheekbone! I glanced around with a numbed cheek and perforated smile to see if a tv show host and his lovely hostess were heading in my direction with a microphone, an oversized cardboard check made out to me and a waiver to sign. No one was there.

Helping him to the curb, while delicately trying not to come into contact with too much of him, was quite a challenge. And to complicate things, this little guy, with the chicken leg that was hit by a Mercedes, was attempting to bite through the foil seal on top of one of those grade school-style orange juice cups. You know, one of those little 4- or 5-ounce jobs.

That feeble little voice behind me was rising above the fog of dying horns.

I turned around and it was that old man in that white old man boat, pointing at me and saying, “You got a helluva lotta nerve honkin’ your horn at me, Sonny!” I hadn’t honked my goddamn horn! I was helping this guy in the street!

I charged up to his window and had a few razor sharp phrases to spit into his window. But, his pointy, hairy finger and hand were trembling, slightly.

Calmly, I started with, “Come on, man, I'm trying to help these people... I wasn’t honking…”

So.

After hollering at me for minutes, the old bastard was satisfied with our 5-second chat about horns and ready to tackle the rest of his day. He’s driving away!

Now?

Bye, bye old man…

As the white boat curiously sailed away, I tapped the homeless man on his crusty shoulder and told him it would be okay. A sad, little cloud of dust floated away from his woolen sweater. Pigpen.

I believe in extraterrestrials because I believe in bugs.

“She used to like me, now she just loves me.”

On the road, I’m signing in as a visitor with my smelly pen, where I use my long sleeve as a protective glove to open and close the door. I’m tip-toeing, trying to float above the hair carpet. The walls are a little slimy black book. A silvery door handle serves as a micro-landfill. My reflection’s ancient in the blemished mirror. The olfactory experiment enables my fight or flight instinct. I rely on very minimal breathing, in case there are airborne, invisible monsters that could possibly be sucked into my body. If it’s deafeningly quiet, you can hear the microscopic screams like a psychotic Stravinsky-inspired chorus.

Never trust a politician with an elaborate comb-over because there's already a cover-up.

Took a bite behind the wheel and smiled an ugly smile. Horace Silver and I sailed into the city, heading for the loft district, strewn with fast food cups and microwaveable burrito wrappers.

Hops and other grains skimmed the highway from smokestacks. Brick by brick I could see the ages, the aged and the aging. Ghosts and soon to be ghosts. The approach in the lights. Bridges casting silhouettes of new lanes for the ghost traffic.

With the pavement all around me, I saw how unnatural this all was. Thought about 7th street. No one was beside me, so the gate was open. But, I wanted the drama. I continued on to the triumph of civil service, a symbol of forward progress and colonization and frontier glory and risk and ritual and art. The approach of the city. Its beauty from afar. The lights. Gateway to the rest. Let me roll four wheels through the swaying gate. Horace agreed , with a dissonant chord on his keys.

When someone dies of a dread disease, please refrain from saying "Joe Blow lost his battle with..." First of all, it sounds stupid. Secondly, have some respect. The person just died and you're calling them a 'loser!'

A compromise for the fundamentalist and the scientist: God does exist, but lives on another planet in another galaxy. Wow, war is over. That was easy.

Or, a Cooper’s Hawk. These conniving, dead-eyed bastards have been hovering and swooping around my yard all summer. I hear their shrill call high above the tree line and wonder if they’re going to sink their dirty, serial killer talons into the tense muscles on my shoulders.

These vulture wannabes drop small dead bird bombs all around my yard and send bones crashing onto the sidewalk. I imagine those soulless swoopers, perched on the highest branches, eating their prey like greasy chicken wings. Turning each one over and over. Examining every inch to make sure all the goodies have been stripped and devoured. Then, when they’re satisfied, they just drop-kick their mangled bag of bones from their bloody perch. My simplest days were often interrupted by carcasses lying about with heads pulled off and entrails thrashed upon.

One seemingly quiet day, as I approached my house for a lunchtime, economical snack, I spied a hawk on a low hanging branch, staring at me with his dead hawk eyes. There he was with his calculating stare, bulky chest and asshole face. We stared at each other for ten seconds as I murmured, “ You bastard, little fuck.”

I slowly squatted and blindly swept my hand along the ground to find a rock, keeping my furrowed brow and menacing eyes fixed on my feathered friend. The perfect stone rolled into my hands and I gathered myself ever-so carefully. Now that I think about it, I’m sure that little self-confident chicken hawk knew what I was up to, he just didn’t think I had the skills to make the shot.

Well… that stone left my outstretched fingers with a quick snap of my arm and wrist. “Oooooohhh, shit,” I nervously whispered, as the rock made a b-line for my astute buddy. He just sat there as my face puckered. Then, that stone hit one of his butcher talons. What’s so strange and eerie about a bird is that their expressions never change. They just pivot and move. The hawk stared through my soul then let out a shriek and let go of the branch, panicked and flying erratically.

The hawk was fearful of another attack and almost crashed into a very nearby tree line. He had to re-land in the tree line then disembark, embarrassingly, once again.

For the record, the stone throw was not a fastball, but more like a lob. It’s illegal to kill a hawk. But, no one said you couldn’t throw a little stone at their little bastard hawk talon to keep them from dropping feathers and guts onto your children's sandbox.

I haven’t seen a hawk or carrion flesh since then.