Long Stories Short

A student today, is revealed by chance glimpse of a photo in a notebook, as a friend of a friend who worships the devil across the sea - and this young girl she was born on the sixth of June, and is of an age of thirty-three this year and wants, on the nape of her neck, that unaji of erotic infamy, the numbers

666

tattooed in black ink, irrevocable. She loves skulls, like another girl I know, echoes of the Dia De Los Muertos. Cute, she says: skull-scrawled; skull-clad; skull-spangled.


INTERSTICES

I recall a drunken conversation with a co-worker the week before last; revealed by chance glimpse of twin tattoos on his forearms; black and red – I-ching hexagrams, something and Grace. Snake-Eyes and Storm-Shadow. And so we talked of chances, and creation, and flânerie: his stories of days spent wandering at the whim of a pair of dice and questions posed under influence. Schizing across the city; doing things that one doesn’t want to do, pushing into zones of extreme discomfort. And for what? he asked. And I recall that my father told these same stories, walked these same paths unwalked by any other fore or since, pebbles thrown into the same river. And I too, on acid, across the trackless urban hills, I-Ching in fist, PKD-inspired, following a rabbit down a hole to find/write/be written by my thesis.

IMAGES OF DICE

Dice roll around the edges of everything. When in university, years I spent, reading theories of determinism and free will, and I came to the conclusion that there is no freedom: that all flows from before. Spinozistic (in retrospect), I saw that God and Nature are coterminous. Platonic, that from inside we can know nothing but a distortion and that there is no outside, only the whole. Sartrean, that responsibility comes with such a revelation of human limitation. And from this Humility.

And from this The Avatar.

Dice from games I play. Systems of storytelling. Stories being everything; stories making the world go round.

I told a story the other day, shaking knucklebones in a skull, tossed them on a flat green stone.

Three sixes.