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Ready When You Are

Lunch with Ugly Alan is always a B-movie horror film experience. I'm seated across the table from a low-budget Frankenstein's monster, who needs several extra bolts of lightning to become fully animate. Any normal person would require ten hours of heavy green make-up application and a prosthetic nose to look as hideous as he does. Just look at him as he throttles an entire bottle of vinegar onto his plate with gorilla-sized hands. Ugly Alan's body is an awkward assemblage of cut-price parts: graveyard eyes, discount legs, second-hand feet, torso found in the back of a junk shop. And his huge, misshapen head appears glued onto a broken neck, precariously balanced on his shoulders, about to fall off at any moment and roll across the restaurant's linoleum floor in the final, spine-chilling scene. Then the credits would roll as a busboy brings more napkins to mop up the mess and the waitress arrives with my check. Fortunately, Ugly Alan's head somehow manages to remain ...
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The Pound Keys of Heaven

Imagine your prayer is answered, but only by 'the first available angel,' and you are put on hold.  The hold music: an angelic choir accompanied by plucked harps interrupted by an ethereal voice, "We are currently experiencing higher than usual call volume. Please stay on the line. Your prayer is important to us."  How long will you wait? Perhaps your connection to the divine can be made hands-free, so you can go about other business while you wait, instead of kneeling beside your bed for an interminable amount of time, listening to the angelic choir, harps and ethereal voice on loop. But what if it can't, and you lose your place in the celestial queue, or worse, you hear the dreaded dial tone from a cloud as the line goes dead? What then? And what if Heaven has outsourced its prayer-call-center to Purgatory, so even when your call is eventually picked-up, your prayer is answered by a soul-in-Limbo who can only speak incomprehensible, heavily accented English.  ...
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The Ranter In November

Despite the wailing of soapbox Chicken Littles, we do not live in a "post-truth society." We've never been told any truth in any era. Politicians have always been bald-faced liars and promoters of historical fiction. Where we actually live is a post-literate society: a world of sound-bytes, out-of-context quotation, and the gamification of government. We can no longer read between the lines, which is admittedly difficult to do when the lines all converge into a meaningless scribble of platitudes and empty promises, but we don't try anymore.  After so many centuries of bitter disappointment and profound frustration, we've finally given up hoping for integrity and honesty in our public figures and settled for simply taking sides, no matter how odious are the teams we choose. 'We won that round' is all that matters, even if it's the most Pyrrhic of Pyrrhic victories; even if the hustings and polling stations are reduced to a wasteland of fear and paranoia...
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Retrocausality And You

When I gaze into the gypsy's crystal ball, I see my past, not my future. And no tall, dark stranger appears, just someone short and bald instead. And it is me. What's my old self doing trapped inside this occult sphere?  I'm at the The Gare de Lyon, September 2012, ordering a ticket in phrasebook French, and neither the ticket nor my terrible accent will get me very far. The weather in Paris is even cloudier than the crystal ball, so I've decided to head south. Monte Carlo or bust, or something like that. And there I am in the scrying glass, plodding around the platform with a load of luggage. The gypsy had a face like Moses on magic mushrooms when I first crossed her palm with silver. But reacting to this non-event in her crystal ball she seems as bored as Pharaoh's dyspeptic aunt trimming her own toenails. There's no mystery, no drama, not much of anything happening at all, except me on the train, trying to force my oversized suitcase into an overhead bin. I c...
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What Can You Hear

It's becoming increasingly clear that the Music of the Spheres was composed for the banjo; that angels play bongo drums instead of harps; that the sound of heavenly choirs is just the chintzy ringtone from an anonymous burner phone. I've always thought Orpheus was tone-deaf. It's just that ancient melodies were so plinkety-plonkety discordant that nobody back then ever suspected the truth. Virgil can say what he likes, but this is clearly the real reason why Eurydice returned to the underworld: she preferred the relative peace and quiet of Hades to her husband's endless cacophony.  Frankly, we'd all be better off sitting in silence than listening to the caterwaul of the world. There's always the song of the wind; the natural rhythm of the rain; the symphonic sweep of the sunrise and sunset's great aria; even an October day's mellow concerto for tuba and trombone.  Well, we could enjoy those consolations if the wind's song wasn't stifled by the so...
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What Would Keats Think?

The first of October's leaves fall in a flurry of gold, forming a carpet of crisp Krugerrands; a pumpkin-lined path lit by a low sun leading towards Hallowe'en. Well, at least that's what the leaves do in an unemployed poet's mind. The putrefying truth is very different. Actually, their fall is more like the slow drip of dirty brown water from a rusty tap into a broken sink, its drain long since blocked by a shapeless mass of slimy human hair and soap scum. But we lyricists must keep the Autumnal myth alive in this so-called 'Spooky Season' of frauds and hollow fruitlessness. Alas, Johnny Appleseed now orders online from the comfort of his climate-controlled condominium. 'Made in China, our new indoor apple orchard provides enough apples to bake fifteen ersatz apple pies or ferment fifty gallons of apple cider vinegar. Your choice, it's a free country after all.' Johnny chooses to do the pies. Unfortunately only one is Instagram worthy so the rest go...
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The Milky Way

'Imagine you're an astronaut experiencing significant gravitational force during blast-off,' I told myself while almost horizontal in the dentist's chair, my poor face exhibiting a ridiculous rictus grin. 'Per ardua ad astra,' as they say in sky pilot circles. Being called from the waiting room certainly felt like exiting Earth's atmosphere; and entering this surgical room a good approximation of climbing into some NASA rocket's capsule.  Now, after the novocaine, I'm drifting in outer space between hitherto unknown nebulas and hazy stars. That overhead lamp has become double moons, quickly eclipsed by a Martian warlord wearing mint-green scrubs, who approaches with his science-fiction tools of tooth and gum torture.  But I am Captain Fez, trained to withstand any pain in the known Universe, even a root canal like the one that made Flash Gordon cry.  Meanwhile, in another stratosphere, strands of silvery dental floss are sucked into a Black Hole that...
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