Stop Clocking my LeftOvers.

So Matt & I are injecting a fair amount of R&R into out evening with a friend of ours & I was informed of a online debate turned debacle over whether or not it is classy/appropriate/yes, I am still holding on to it to take your left overs from a restaurant with you when you leave said eatery. What the fuck is happening here? A. Are we really so consumed with how others will view us as being successful in this life if we take left overs with us? B. Maybe your fucking hungry and thoroughly enjoyed your nosh and will to continue the affair at home. C, You are broke as balls and "yes, Hugo, I would love for you to bag this morsel up." D. You are so enthralled with how important you are, because everyone MUST be taking a gander at you to see if you are a trashy piece of shit that wants to eat the food they paid for in the first place. Are these really issues we need to take this in depth a look at? There was a blog, comment, discussion war going on about this very topic. Fuck Rwandan genital mutilation, fuck starving people in Somalia, are people judging me because I am taking food I enjoyed home with me? This desperately feels like the white trash you see waiting for the bus with a knock off Louis Vuitton bag. Why feature a knock off if you know the rest of the package is lacking and completely fictional? Perhaps in lieu of your recent move to Manhattan and daily appearance at Maxfish for the past 6 months you've all of a sudden formed what I like to call the "valley within the city syndrome." This occurs when throngs of young hopefuls, looking to wear all black, be consumed by technology and chance happenings and develop valley esque accents in record speed, all flock to the city, manage a few one night stands without crying and somehow think they have mastered "city life." These may be the very douche nozzles responsible for this behavior. Wake up loves, that 's not a toppled over cappuccino staining your sheets, feel me? Keep your eyes on that photographer's junk you want to bang to advance you at work and off my plate of vittles and the their fate at our shared trough. Gracias-XO

I had the Weirdest Dream..........

ALEX PRAGER

I m walking around with a fluffy white towel, the kind you steal or at best want to steal at posh hotels in an all white Forever 21 kind of store. They are all going about their business; the patrons, mostly young girls that fade to gray from the waist down. There is a massive bathtub in the middle of the store, and due to the nature of what I m wearing, I can only assume that I am looking to take a bath, but people keep attempting to sell me things so I retreat to the side of the store where the room shoplifters are usually taken to and begin to open the door, some puerto rican shop girl with too many teeth and a hippodrome sized mouth asks if I have heard of a designer that doesn't exist, I close the door quickly.
Inside is the same white large tub and as I bend down to turn the water on, the tub is filled with Christmas and Birthday presents, I begin to move them quickly from the tub and then I look over my shoulder and there is my real Mom; healthy, gorgeous, not addicted or infected; she is flanked to the right by 2 shorter people whom I don't & can't recognize. She begins to say something and I cut her off. She looks at me with my eyes and looks so surprised, as if playing into the perfect face I would expect her to have had she wanted to find me and have a conversation that never existed.
I turn and someone is inches from my face waking me up. Then I really wake up. Matt is making coffee and has picked Iggy up and placed him at the foot of the bed, I feel Kaya next to my back, snoring and humming and the sun permeates our room. I wonder if this visit is mine or hers. The last time she was in my dreams, she was lopping off swan heads nightly and plaguing me with visions only heroin could cure.
Iggy paws his way up to my face and yawns a landfill in my mouth, Kaya stretches and heads out of the covers as well; Matt asks if I want him to put some water on and I say yes. It's another morning, normal, working as usual in the way comfort can, and yet, it's something else....
Something else entirely.

A Short Story by H.H.S. "Ya'll listen till I m through...." Johnny Cash

Number 11
By Hollis Harper Skaling

As she extended her leg out long in front of her the wooden chair creaked and she resolved to allow the chair to support her, more so than they ever had. She feigned interest as the smoke swirled blue from her mouth, the window making shapes masking as revelations through the neon light flashing on and off; she had never felt this content. A quarter inch of ash formed on her filter less go to and she tapped the ash onto the growing dark pool on the floorboards next to her. Various reasons society would give for such an act ran through her mind and for the first time in a long time, she was sure that she didn’t care.
She thought back to the first time in the dank apartment that had housed the unspeakable; the haunted had taken their business elsewhere due to the malevolent force that was this inhuman taking the shape of human. It was a schizophrenic barbaric quality that one would be shocked to discover emanating from a woman. The tragic and frail fragments of the woman’s declining insanity were obvious and apparent to everyone but her; this fallacious symbol of atrophied compassion was not what she had bargained for in a Mother. She shifted in the chair thinking about the closets, the drugs, the fucking she was made to watch by this broken whore who had so freely given her chances at innocence away on countless occasions.
She crossed her legs to avoid the impending pool moving toward her right foot and took a deep inhale, the kind you take in the girl’s bathroom when you want to impress and wondered it odd that she had not a shed a tear since this began. They would say that it was premeditated, and they would be right, but not in the formal sense of the word. She had fantasized about this day her whole life and never really thought she would have the gumption to make good on that dream, but that’s all changed now. She dropped the cigarette into the pool of poison next to her and it paused in the thick red redemption as it resolved to finally topple over and go out, sizzling just a bit. As she fished in her jean’s pocket for another smoke out of the pack she thought about the john that had saved her life. A sallow, obese, wonky white trashcan of a hic named Hank. Who would’ve thought her Mother would even be able to ward off the eternal nod long enough to even pull a gun out on her? She recalled watching her Mother and Hank have sex; the nonexistent presence of her Mother that she would later utilize in her own distorted sexual encounters, the rough, pathetic groans of the white, slippery whale of what was passing for a man moving up and down at the pace of an unseasoned lover and praying, although he had never listened before, for her to possess the ability to simply disappear. This little girl just wanted to go away in whatever form that came in; death, magic, the law…..anything.
As Hank had plowed away on her Mother, her Mother had kept one eye out making sure she watched and that her eyes were not closed. In the space of seconds, her Mother had caught her not watching and unbeknownst to Hank, she reached over to the nightstand and pulled out a 9 millimeter and had taken aim. “You open your eyes, NOW” her Mother had said in a thick and dangerous southern accent. She had shook her head and squeezed them shut even tighter, but when she had heard the cocking of the gun, she opened them. Color had drained from her face and a warm steady stream had ran down her leg and onto the floor; she cried but made no sound. Hank had finally taken note of what was happening and in the calmest voice possible had said to her Mother, “Aw, honey you don’t wanna do that now, that’s just a baby. Set that down darlin’, atta girl, let’s get back to this here…” She had quietly snuck out of the room after that and went to the closet she lived in and cried as her pink elephant her Dad had bought her in England consoled her.
She took another deep inhale and blew a couple of smoke rings; she lifted her right foot and placed it on the head next to the creaky wooden chair. She rolled her foot on the head as to see the face clearly. As she gazed down at her Mother, she didn’t see anything; not even a vessel that had brought her into this world. Just an empty shell of used skin, genitals that had been abused in too many forms to name and a broken defective casket that had never served her in the most basis of needs. She would have this disease forever now because of her Mother, this cureless killer that would gradually attack her immune system and destroy the life that she had once prior thought to be mendable in the face of absence; absence from this rotting mound in front of her now. Her Mother had known that she had the virus and had main lined her with the needle anyway; she had just found out a week ago. One week was all that was left to accomplish what she should have years ago. It was quite possibly the only gift her Mother had given her; the gift of freedom. Within this one act, she now indulged every bad feeling, every numb section, and every rageful knife that had cut into the humanity of her shattered being.
She leaned back in the chair and surveyed the room for open spots where she had not applied sufficient plastic wrap and found none, pleased; she inhaled and let out every unspoken hurt with the smoke along with the holy grail of sentiments, relief. Though they would view her possibly no different than her Mother, she had taken careful steps not to affect anyone that would discover this gruesome scene, she was a monster. She stood up, stretched and walked over to the front door of the room, opened it and placed an envelope on the front before she closed it again. She walked over to her Mother and zipped up the plastic body bag and took a seat on the chair. She carefully put the cigarette out in a water bottle and pulled out a wax bag and a set of works. She had been in recovery for years, but felt a hair below giddy about the prospect of doing this thing now. As she proceeded with the steps one took to ascend into junk heaven, she was certain of the clarity of her decision and pushed the plunger in; releasing fireworks of strychnine and heroin. As she fell off the bridge, she knew that in this case, two lives were better than none.