take that

Salutations from the barren lands of ancient Babylon. I'm currently engaged in an intimate staring contest with the vacuous reaches of a desert horizon taunting me with a past of biblical proportions, a present of frightening logic and a future of impossibly beautiful dreams. The parched wind whispers to my cheek its dying wish, but she's too faint to make it out... I remember her best in rushes of exhilaration as she washed over my electrified skin burning through the pre-historic ruins of Monument Valley at seventy-five m.p.h. on golden wing; like a child stepping up to the plate and staring down his major-league hero, the moments racing past in flashes of terrifying ecstasy.

Last night I was strolling through an eerily familiar landscape, obscured by a heavy blanket of sleep, with someone who I think was my mother. We came suddenly upon a rattle snake that had no rattle. I swiftly raised the shot-gun that miraculously appeared in my hand as I took the serpent in my sights and pulled the trigger. The first scatter-shot peppered it and the second was concentrated into its delicate skull. It reared back by force of the blast, hissing demonically and then whipping itself forward and sinking its fangs into itself, as if in spite. As I leaned down to inspect the heap of swelling sin it began to bloat and it flared its gut to reveal its belly covered in hair like that of a cow's. The woman who was accompanying me asked if I planed to gut and clean it at that time, but I was so stricken with fear and disgust that I replied, "No, I'll do it tomorrow." We started back in the same direction we had just come and had walked about twenty-five feet when I turned around to observe the scene. In the place of the snake was standing the grotesque figure of a man...pale as bone. He stood there as if in a trance, shaking his head in disbelief of what must have been a painful mutation. He looked at me and said very matter-of-factly, "Well, I guess I'll see you tomorrow, then."