Excerpts from “When It Thrashes.”

 

The entirety of Freemasonville’s nexus and plexus of electricity is constantly cutting off and on. And internet outages are causing outrage online. Everything electric is ironically flaring and dying and surging.

The social performance of a modern writer is most concerned in the tailoring of the ambition of the private person so the public audible proof doesn’t repel what the polished musical prose instills in memory.

What does your drive best resemble?

Mine’s more than less an old moonshinerunner’s circuit. A jaunt I’m taking at triple digit velocities for undisclosed cash sums. Traveling by way of slashing through deep South Caroline country, cutting whole hours in half in multiple hundred mile bursts. The jag burning rubber only to decelerate before I’m over the line then overtaking sluggish ant lines of traffic behind logging trucks on crisp two lane roads bisecting National Forest territory populated by the thickest of thickset woods studded with mansions featuring cream colored columns and elaborate transom windows and haint blue doors defiantly dominating endless driveways of grit and the ivory dust of gray gravel underneath the alabaster splotched poker chip chunks of sun between cavernous Oak tree tunnels that my vantages’ velocity’ll carve into slurred chevrons - when I whip and race away from plantation to small town to waterline in sparse counties without one tiny bar of reliable cell phone reception.

Should you finally start your soul’s career correctly, your smart phone’ll feel ineffably different in your hands. Once you’re no longer waiting in line - and you’re on, and you’re in touch, and you’re in it, everything you’re looking at begins looking back at you: because you look different. You will know your standards, therefore where you stand. Your harder truths hurt less if you can hustle, know this and you hold a certain heft: that of all of which you had to give up to have a chance.

Bass rumble thunder thumps up the block.

Black matte Volkswagen Passat.

Murdered out.

Black tints.

Black rims.

Eight cylinders.

Dark plastic film laid over the rear license plate numbers.

Lowered, gamboling ground-dweller, a growling Rottweiler. Snarls like this thick wheel’d and big tire’d thing wants to hurt you from the only one place it cannot hurt you; if you can remain where you are; know you’re not unable to stand your ground, and stay unblemished.

You want to know how I thought I looked when I got here? Worth your time. Like when a journey up the Paramount Movies mountain jumps the list of your priorities - and you just go for it, for you and for me. A long novel says you’ll have to know how to work very hard. The novel’ll say, I’m here because this lovely universe expands only when you primarily make amazing major progress; as I provide a rebuild for the embouchure of your perspective. And if charismatic, the novel’ll also ask you, What happens when you forget to worry about your superstitions? Driving itself home, honing itself, and remembering that for now it wants you to remember its polyphonic and supreme kinds of music are forged only from how you take the text and set it aflow if you allow the motion, the novel says, You’ll know you also need never work again. Don’t slow down. I’m aiming, but, not aiming. Just drive slow.

I’m far less furiously self-condemning since I last left North Charleston. Tonight I’ll touch a terrific freedom when terrifying tones take apart my harmonies then brush my fingers back into balled fists. In the personal violence of directing my discipline, I lift off the reluctance to rage, and I unloose a lack of masquerade as I parcel out from onyx knuckle-sized divots in between my brows a prose wherein I can show you a time when there was one similar but never the same acid bright dream I loved to live again and again; a phantasmagoria where I stood not alone but isolated on high and out on a cliffside and I curl-hop chucked, hurled, gunned a set of four or five found lukewarm leftover cans of a Rainier Beer box over the heads of psychedelically saturated sand dune dwellers until they splashed into the Snake River. Cold clarity for every can. Every can wore a far-off and fleet and sparrow-like shadow on the mellow yellow dunes. To me they were each one, suddenly that of a spearhead, arrowhead, manmade meteorite. From above I made forceful suggestions, physical demands, on this thing traveling some one hundred yards. It was at least as lawless as one’s lost mind, before my friend, fired up by his own identically hallucinatory groundswell, waded out, and scudded, and doggie-paddled to precisely near where my buoyant intoxications resurfaced.

I say, “The most and even then more true entertainment for the writer wholly invested in the writing of writing - and not the life of the writer telling everyone they’re a writer writing. If you know what work this is then you know this thing is a personal violence. In our fiction we crave a truly devout personal discipline that only our work will see and feel and yield once our fiction reveals us to ourselves. The South features a special kind of personal violence. You learn to fight yourself correctly or you perish. This voice of discipline knows that no matter nor whatever your special discipline is when you find what you need is what you must find before you make your body hum. We’re hunting for vibrations. Unmatched. We want authority alive inside one tone of voice no less than nearly immaculate. More than undeniable. We need unforeseen versions of improved personal violence that establishes then encourages the enshrining of the conditions and quixotic qualities of a very specific and special mania required for endless personal growth.”

Ozzie says, “All of what you’re saying I’ve thought to myself about myself. Writing is a brilliantly convenient way to productively redirect what some might label a pathological relentlessness for proof of beauty.”

My overwhelming hatred of this present arrangement is too severe and entirely unfair. It’s not healthy. It’s hopelessly accurate. I’m feeling the unlimited possibilities of my behavior, until my blissful digital editor texts me a baseball social media boxscore, “Listen, man - here’s the scoop, the drop, the score: there’s never anything in any lockbox you couldn’t already find tucked inside your pocket. The pocket. Just drop inside it. Drop into the pocket. Do you see it? You have what all you need, and you have already had what you wanted: no one guarding the tiny white flapping door. That one shield’s only a fixed white flag for you - for a reason. What’s the feel? Unsolvable riddles drawn up from the uncatchable popularity rhythms of the too deeply stacked in standard-bearing tones of all those constantly groaning to you that they’d rather your better intuitions’ whispers be forever too totally dammed? Just know the truth: if you’re ghostwriting on Ty France’s behalf? The Baseball Gods approve. The Professional Hitter hits for power but also hits for average. Always grinning. Too good for the game. He chats up opposing players at first base. They smile at him. Yet baseball’s socially approved man has been drilled, pegged, walloped, clobbered, stung by more inside corner fastballs than anyone since the start of last season. He was a top two AL first baseman All-Star fan voting finalist. He lost to you know who. Then when AL players had a chance to vote for him to be a bench player? Somehow they left him in the lurch. Every pundit, columnist, fan in the Mariners Universe exclaimed, ‘What weren’t you watching?’ Is this because Mariners baseball games often don't conclude until two in the morning on the East coast? Doesn’t it seem deliberate? Smile in his face - crush him when he’s not watching. But why? I thought they liked him. We could all tell how much a well-deserved All-Star selection would’ve meant to France because the man’s numbers were always there to prove his talent was the matter of mastery of craft. France cares equally about his own and the larger game. Seems the Baseball Gods have intervened at the eleventh hour because Ty France, Professional Hitter, is the last and final AL All-Star. Don’t abuse your power just because it works.”

My writing lives inside its own cravings. Cravings I share with it. And most cravings are for a far more consistently well structured discipline than anything my literal long strides can bring me - because I’ll walk everywhere; I won’t write about anything: whatever I work with when I write has to move me first. Before my writing becomes a better version of itself - it’ll often patiently intone one primary stolid emotional bedrock: in matters of motion and rhythm and style, it is best, and you’ll sound better, when you don’t hide yourself in your writing, when you sound like you spent all your time wanting to until then you do write in the one way in which you’ve wished you might, could, should walk; and walk tall; because you should only want to walk and write when your body language, your body of work, says aloud, in unison, “Watch me.”

Ozzie acts like he thinks I know he’s not totally there yet, not on my level, and not now here with me, not comfortably dropped into the snug pocket of the colors of his confidence. And I sense he’s close to it in his own eyes - far closer to earning his own emerging stripes.

We’ve rolled into a Charleston that is at the heart of but is locally not aware of the more true and full and real and newer and total Southeastern Atlantic coastline-encompassing larger Charleston range put forth by Charleston Charlemagne. Tonight’s vibration is unique - and its own; as it is every night. Here I’ll require hyperactive high spirits - a source of spiritual heat with no legs, no plans, no stakes. Charleston is not an easy city to see through, because the slow cooking steam of the unimpeachably easy-going tempo remains unendurably high-pressured, while slowly muttering, “Aren’t y’all enjoying us? Just look how gentle we are to all y’all. Yes, it’s my pleasure.” After long suffering the code of conduct that when threatened reverts to an upstanding but enforceable nonchalance, the unseen eyes of foresight’ve shown me the Charleston neon I desire isn’t easily cornered - nor will I capture the neon then come away with it totally, fully unscathed; because after catching onto one impossible chance to contain any Charleston neon, a neon like none other, one learns of the next complication, the more challenging obstacle, how best to contain and show it without showing it to anyone. I have to have one hand on my temperament, one hand on my tempo; and I must touch without touching the hot bothered monkey knotted city’s pulse in my own if I’m to say what someone else should be doing.

Ozzie’s consistently looking to me for directions. Eventually Ozzie will trust me. And I want that too. But he shouldn’t trust me now, not all the way - and really he shouldn’t trust me anywhere close to as much as he does; and he’d be best served if his level of trust in me were closer to no trust at all; just for right now; because Ozzie needs to know without performing his knowing, that he cannot say he believes in me while I know that he can, if pressed for one second, make the case, that, clearly, arguably, all his faithful distrustfullness is rational; it means survival.

Ozzie cannot know I cannot warn him, nor will I generally ever prepare any other person’s participation in any action, until actions I plan for anyone in my presence can - by the outside influence under my influence - be completely and perfectly mistaken as the outside influence’s very own living experience of what’s happening. They must not know I know I believe I’m the only one hard at work whenever I bewitch the way they’re watching this particular life unfold. So I don’t mention to Ozzie I know the exact moment everything here’ll go totally haywire; because Ozzie needs to know he must first look to and believe in himself exactly when everything here gets far too out of hand way too fast - before he thinks to look to me to solve his problems. For this skill, he must develop a clairvoyance. He has to learn to read through these life lines, see his strides ten steps ahead, must run the right route when a pattern offers him options as it is opening up. He must know chaos has had him set in its sights. It sits in his name and it twists within his voice.

I can see where Ozzie’s eyes will look when the unimaginable’ll become unbidden. He should know where to look without allowing what he’s watching to know he’s looking. And in this vein, I want him to feel more than see I’ve come to Charleston equipped with a quality in my voice, a charge in my name, a voltage in my aura; I’ve a monstrous virile rage set to wash through then overcome and race out onto the waves and sounds and vibrations of my subjective South Carolina because my uncontrollable strange truth is when I take full form, shape, style, in downtown Charleston, I become insidious; a nameless density; a mind joined to an all-knowing nocturne prepared to do nothing but disrespect what plays fairly in the sunlight.

The great Southern Gods of this divinely protected North American port city are guided by the immortal forces of Forever Rushing Onward and Flowing Forward. These forces cannot stop. These forces must continue. These forces do not respect nor believe in friction. And one must faithfully go not only along but headlong with the enforced program’s momentum and run at speed with the turning and changing and ripping tide of ins and outs and remain apace these tumultuous energetic transitions and never for one moment disagree with what’s said by the shape of things to come like there’s no choice and no chance to slow down one’s many transformations no matter the quality of one’s preparation beforehand: because you must become the black floodwaters of all things to come before you start to get going.

In this emotional jabberwocky you’ll find what you’re made of, and you will see revealed, Psychic Onslaughts. You will suffer from unrelenting Paranoid Avalanches. You will never not respect the Riptide of Emotional Hurricanes. Your head will hurt. Your breathing will shallow and deepen when you least expect it. Your name will not be your name anymore.

You will know you know you don’t know where you’re standing.

Encountering any and all South Caroline paranormal activity means one shall have divulged for their imagination and consciousness yet another cumulatively unchecked - aggravated by those erroneously not observing tradition, ritual, and custom; for years and decades and centuries or more, entirely and - near perfectly personified force of life from not too far but still outside what one has already accepted about life; and this paranormal activity will always be formed of the emotional motion of an attention-seeking desire embodying and emphatically and dramatically performing part of or all of their message for all y’all - in a far too comfortably dismantled rip in the fabric between not coequal but provably coexistent realms of reality; because the force of the spirit performing doesn’t wish nor care to know that we know their energetic infiltration of our vision and our lives is only ever a specific version of their singularly stylish narcissism; narcissism so potent it survives the death of the physical body that then, in turn, in truth, shows one and all that in this life of yours, your perception describes for you the unlimited menace required for mastering one’s emotional range; until one finds and flows with and rolls onward in an awareness they’re following a not non-existent light, but an impossible end to a true darkness, until the same impossible internal light of the spirit comes alive in one’s life: this odd thing has always been about so much more than mind over matter.

Upper King Street gags on the gloss of the garbled gargling glitter of lights that litter its bottlenecked streets until the chock full sheen’d windows of bulging waterlogged heat resemble lowfi thermal images in some never crystallizing murk of too many sources of too many voices saying too many things just to say things. Slowly some of these sayings begin to ring and sustain, and then they sing out through the four centuries old tight canyons of street-facing stone buildings protecting the flasks and flagons and flaskets of arrogance that allow for the flipping of cigarette butts and lighter sparks to devolve then transform into big watches and just-shaved bare legs and bronze shoulders.

The nightlife here gives any visitor the notion that it’s all about you; you’ve known that all this was and is never not always all rampantly reproduced in every part of your mind as a fly scintillant splinterization - a never not attractive flashiness. Like the luminosity of this spectacle knows it must bring people together in order to exist. And the white powder of this electrical power of this specific one type of nightlife is for hours slathered on the upside down mirrored ceilings of itself before you know where your feet fall. In windows we pass, I see Ozzie getting mad he’s working on a story, and not now lost to the crowded carousing. He seems somber. I sense he’s deeply suspicious too. He believes he’s auditioning for part of my personal respect, my professional vouchsafe.

I say, “Remember where we parked Silver?”

Ozzie says, “We parked Silver two dense ancient urban blocks west of Upper King.”

I say, “Silver is slotted in an illusion, and a gray area: a non tow-away zone; and she’s two feet from an antique but not really original red iron oxidization gunk-coated fire hydrant.”

Ozzie says, “Our curb spot is not metered. It raises pangs and I feel recurring alarums. What I have to know is my unnecessary double checking and excruciating self-excoriating; this kind of the mind should never be shared aloud unless life-threatening danger’s being dispensed.”

Donks. Carolina squatted trucks. Lifted trucks. Low-rider trucks. Motorcycles. Motorcycles with chrome front wheel rims bigger than Mini Cooper windshields. Huge exotic imports revving. Godzilla is here too. German coupes. Glistening never muddied Jeeps. Hummers. A Plymouth Prowler. G-Wagons. A Dodge Viper. More golf carts rolling, gliding, flying round here than are ever seen at ninety eight percent of local golf courses. Flocks of bar flies. College of Charleston. The Citadel. Medical University of South Carolina. University of South Carolina. Clemson. Tourists. The Savannah College of Art and Design. Navy. Air Force. Marines. Tour guides. Local celebrities. Local swingers. And the mixing in of the late twenties, early thirties, and too-monied-to-not-feel-like-they’re-at-least-for-tonight-so-very-good-looking-crowd out here in numbers big enough to suspend belief, for instance, that, I’m a father or mother to someone young within the next decade.

A greater Southern lie is not evil incarnated, but rather the better announced annunciation’s affirmation of a more than sly wit. Most liars are annoyed with how bored they are once they know the truth. In the South, you should only lie when you’re sure you’ll complement their expectations of what they believe’ll become their actual life experience.

My trust in a more true deceit comes from a place of knowing what all and one wishes to become after first accepting that the outside influence in my life is a reflection of my personal momentum. I’ll give you one good example of something monotonous but ludicrous. The jawbreaking bayou bengal was the name of a color changing pipe. Jawbreaking like Jawbreakers; symbolizing transition; the slow, dark, cold, more personal growth made visceral; made from too much caution tape shredded to construct a confetti the grungy color of a tall crane over a second city’s skyline - as a way to build this life long line by line’s universe - abruptly underscored by its own fangs.

What gives you the edge? The perfect blade in your hand? The way you walk? Could it be both and then more than you thought to imagine? What’s a writer’s winningness other than what feels great? Is this winning? What is winning? There’s almost always a good reason to use whatever word you want. My embouchure thanks you.

So all y’all better take the right train of thought, tonight, and tomorrow, no matter the desolations of my preliminary devilsome locomotions; and let me be abundantly forthcoming and sincere: the universe of the novel wishes for nothing more than if you’ll please maximize your ability to give you to you.

And take your time with it - or it’s woebegone.

I got over my fear of being too tired to intensely concentrate. The Church of the NFL I write for is where No Fiction is Lying. In the work of a more novel novel, we must hunt a different kind of glow - like we’ve only ever craved a different kind of alternative buzz. This is radical love.

What sound does a neon sign make?

What’s worth your time is timelessnesses: it’s what you have if and when you make time make your moments far more than momentary.

Ozzie says, “I’m amazed.”

I say, “Why? I told you I knew we’d find him here. This is a man that has to make a scene.”

Ozzie says, “But look at this shit - I didn’t anticipate I’d spot our target bouncing in a red backed booth beside a bay window. He’s his own billboard for his bad temper and bad manners: his shamelessness.”

I say, “Brazen, brash, ballsy. Great linebacker.”

Ozzie says, “Belligerent demon destroyer of worlds in your head.”

I say, “Hits you: makes you forget where you put your blackouts.”

I elbow Ozzie, check his reflexes, Having fun? He brushes off his shoulder. We study the foot traffic - then we stare again, virtually straight up, where on high, holding forth, on the top level of a triple-decker bar called Talk of the Top of the Town is none other than Cortez Cabellero.

Cortez Cabellero runs a four point three forty. And in the NFL draft this past April, he was selected fifth overall by the Detroit Lions.

Cortez Cabellero is a made man - but we’re watching him snort lines of cocaine off some girl’s caramel colored coffee bean freckled tits.

Cortez Cabellero fears nothing.

I say, “Holy hell.”

Ozzie says, “This motherfucker’s asking for it.”

Paying five times the cover charge, we cut the line outside the door. And inside I can hardly hear my own voice. Still - I try to say to Ozzie as much as I say to the rest of the room, “Why does climbing a flight of stairs before my first drink never ever once feel like hard work?”

Ozzie says, “The anticipation of pleasure is often better than the pleasure sought.”

We summit three full flights of stairs then Ozzie asks me what he’s supposed to tell people he’s here for, should they ask him, and I don’t want to tell him what by now he should know he needs to know.

I say, “Tell them to go along with the program. Like yourself.”

All hesitation abandoned, we zag through the crowd. We slide into Cortez Cabellero’s one-sided conversation by thanking him for covering the total cost of the several Long Island Iced Teas that my friend and I here tremendously enjoyed. My window reflection winks at me: my interior ADHD monologue thinks I’ve played a good attention-getter; a thing that ingratiates without alarming; sly, right, correct; until Ozzie cloddishly collapses into, “Why would a stranger go out of their way to make you look good if everyone already knows you look better than everyone else because of what you were before you walked in here?”

Cortez Cabellero sits at the base of his brain stem with a bright blade. Annoyed, he says, “Alright. What’s this?” He clips his language, oddly; everyone I know with brain trauma chops and screws their words. There is a brutal secret in the severity of the slight under-annunciation. Everyone here sufficiently stunned, silenced, I have no choice and no option to slow play this thing anymore. So I jump into my scheme.

And I tell Cabellero his Clemson senior season’s game film was by far my favorite highlight package from all the available NFL Draft coverage resources I used. Used? Used for what? Used for the endless days during the back-to-back weeks when I was writing and breaking down for my loyal readers how Cabellero so often and so much better and more efficiently than other players at his position in the NFL draft, would spot then sabotage halfback draws on run-pass-options behind the line of scrimmage. How did he do it? What I saw was a gifted set of eyes. You and I know that sports are about so much more than a simple game with a final result. And many great athletes, like writers, possess superb observational skills. You noticed the entire season, without letting on you knew what you knew the whole time, that the tell that gives the play away was nothing the quarterback ever did - but rather the odd angle of almost every starting ACC right guard’s right foot when it got set up too perfectly perpendicular to the line of scrimmage. It was a foot ready to use as an instant and lateral leverage point. A no-wasted-motion kind of unidirectional first push into a big step in one direction only - until the nearby tight end finishes setting the edge where the slot receiver stops the corner back for what the offense hopes will bounce the inbound defensive end and nose tackle and blitzing linebacker too far outside the entire defensive rush - so the defense on that side of the field all winds up way too far back behind the entire play; as the running back squirrels and squirts and squiggles up the field from first behind the right side block near the right hip of the center - before he, Cabellero, sees all this happening before it happens and delays his blitzing one half second more: so he blows the entire play up for a tackle for a loss. Right guards cheating, half-stepping on lines’ll have the better linebacker destroy everything they’ve tried gaining by taking half one first step too early. Right guards’ll never know progress with Cabellero on the field - because he sees everything.

Ozzie says, “Jesus Fucking Christ.”

I say, “I had to figure out at least one reason why you were so fucking good last year. We know speed kills. But you were much faster than anybody in the rest of your draft class. I had to figure out why you should and would go from broke to multi-millionaire overnight.”

Cabellero doesn’t speak - but he wants to tell me to fuck off and die, I’m sure. He thought no one knew how he did what he does. Now that he knows I’ve noticed how he notices what he notices to make his natural four three forty yard dash speed seem twice or three times as fast when closing down space and dropping opponent ball carriers, he knows full well that nearly all if not every single opposing coaching staff member on every NFL team has seen what I’ve written about. Yet they would never reveal they know how he knows what he knows; he’d only notice what he’s doing isn’t working like it worked before until he either became demoralized, destitute and relegated to the practice squad - or an excellent example of evolution. One’s successful revisions to win and to steal back the momentum of any major, secret, sacred advantage must be silent enough to have their ends and edges necessarily stealth their next desperate need for their next extra edge, while the current edge hustles to maintain itself, ignoring the notion that for hard work to work it needs forthcoming endlessness in order to survive.

I say, “Did you tell these lovely ladies you were the best linebacker in the country because you couldn't be fooled? Did they already know?”

Ozzie tells me later that before this question, each girl in Cabellero’s battery had radiated a perfect silhouette of richly colored confidence. Each one in a dress of one color - that when conjoined with the others had made one entire rainbow of erotic options. Watching me ramble on, they’d more near than entirely gone the living level of a cartoonish and ghostly white, ivory, porcelain; and the opposite form from their first wild, impasto, polychrome editions of great bodies of conversion; like the details in a recent New Yorker piece he’d read on Roman statue colors: although the statues’ shapely articulations once featured garish, wild, outlandish shades and tones and paints, we thought that when we first found them in ruins entirely whitewashed and alabaster’d, we were safe to believe, that based on this first exposure, that when we found what we found, that this was the only way it once always was - austere, bland, marble stone. If the mindlessness silencing spoken potions of the heavy metal jargon, slang, rhetoric, of professional football’s unspoken language is exposed then consistently proven the same kind of wild color we found on these Roman statues we’ve since had to reevaluate because we learned of their makers’ sophistications, then we’ll stop pretending professional football is as dumb as a family vocation of vocal fry’d television just because it is nationally popular throughout the same medium. One doesn’t say every letter is the same just because it’s delivered through USPS - different things say different things. And we’ll know the dominant chroma of their great conversation has surceased; when competitive jabberwockies are not misunderstood by the larger layperson audience. In time, people without a background knowledge of the football strategy sounds coming from anyone’s mouth will stop saying, What in the living hell are you talking about? Ozzie’s observations of this moment do not occur to me because I’m locked in on how Cabellero responds to what I’m describing in order to counter what he counters with, so I can somehow win his trust before I abuse what advantage I’ve gained to write in life what I need on the page - I cannot make out the locations of the colors of these feminine threads. I have one assignment. I have to get this made man out of the situation he’s made up. Ozzie’ll tell me later that if I had had eyes in the back of my head during my tangent, I’d’ve seen these enticing polychromatic elegances take one small step backwards every other half run-on-sentence I’d hurled at Cabellero, until all were just beyond the realm of orbiting his red booth’s outer bands of overhead lighting’s shadow.

I say, “Their first great hustle is finished.”

Longwindedly reminded that what he does for a living is what countless others also do for a living, I see Cabellero’s awaiting some self-made sign he’s returned to a non-nocturne personality. It’s a feeling: he knows I want to completely capitalize on his knowing he’s been reminded of the rules of competitively simulated non-lethal killing’s requirements for all conduct off the field.

I say, “Every honeypot’s been overturned - and it is mellifluous.”

Once his cheeks turn rosy pink, I begin feeling the unmistakable heat of a seven-faced collective blush boiling so rash and voluptuously that it signals to life outside his mind all long games’ve abruptly ended.

Cabellero sees how these colors have stolen his personality; line-for-line mimicked him so well, they’ve become his very own living, breathing, flirting mirrored surface.

He hates it.

Hates me.

Hates what I’ve brought into the constant waterfalling amber lumens on top of his auburn hands on top of the rich red table. The colorful dresses have almost completely faded into the night beyond Cabellero’s space.

I say, “Jasper, Marshall and Tolliver will kill all your darlings because you thought you could think you’ve killed all your darlings.”

Cabellero snaps. He demands they return to his red booth at their greatest strutting velocity, calling them back to his fringes, his edges, his lines, like he’s changing defensive assignments in the coverage scheme to reconfigure the bulk of the current play at the line of scrimmage because they’re not going to pass the ball to the right, because one wide receiver’s left the slot and run leftward in motion and circled behind the center; and Cabellero cannot stop gritting his teeth; because he knows I’m right; and in doing what I’ve done, I’ve committed to running off the women he’d been enormously enjoying - because he thinks tonight he didn’t have to work for what he’d already worked for on the field.

I say, “We’ve both fundamentally different perspectives of how one gets what’s earned here. You’ve won half or more of one night playing the perks of your version of your simplest face and name recognition. At Clemson, you knew the names of all defensive coverage details’d mean very new and different things based on how you’d played them in the last week. Every opponent adjusting to your adjustments. In the NFL? It’s just that much fucking faster. We know your tendencies too well. We know you better than your digital image. College football’s name, image and likeness deals are vastly different and better for Southern players. You’ve got to ask, What do you really look like in money bigger than you can imagine? Who has your back? Is a better future’s greatest threat how unbelievably attractive human history becomes when it is the dominant and preferred destination once a proverbial holding up a mirror is proffered as one’s common remedy and considerably heartfelt antidote? Tell me why the police helicopters in my old neighborhood only ever ran up Rivers and Dorchester. This is where the action was.”

Ozzie’ll tell me later it seems I live in a universe where sometimes you’ll find you’re so ferociously in love with how you’re doing what you’re doing - you do not notice you’re forgetting how often you need to rest to remain good at what you’re doing. Cabellero cannot get one word in edgewise. Conversations require balance - lest they become screeds. He’s not in the mood to get yelled at - yet if I’d tried praise-showering Cabellero from an NFL Front Office specific rhetoric style guide that he and other new stars are too well trained by now to not not know; identify; and respond and react to; like when someone immersed in one conversation hears their name said in another conversation far across the room at a party; a unique language used because this is what everyone knows everyone’ll always respond to; Cabellero would want to reject the hype, the volts, the watts of my glowing speech.

Cabellero says, “I don’t want to hear you praise me for what I’m the best at, man. I’m not into any silly shit like that coming from you.”

I say, “Valuable talent is something you create in realizing what you are. At the next level, every talented athlete commits their bodies to a trust fall every time they step on the field. The NFL player in today’s game is playing games like a gladiatorial death will result on one side or the other. The act repeated makes the player the product of a rehearsal - he is theater, and he is an actor in a war game of kinetic charisma. The athlete takes this trust fall for the professional organization, knowing the NFL’s body of work is the result of a script. Playing college football - you had to perform the professionalism of the professional for four years before some professional organization took a major chance on you. At Clemson, you were an artist - more Southern thespian than anything else. Any Southern actor in this much humidity is an animatronic skiff.”

Ozzie catches my slight allusion to skiff, suggesting, to Cabellero, many of us have seen from his window the near cigarette boatload of cocaine he’s ingested before witnesses for the better part of the last several hours - and thereby flaunting to all Upper King Street what he thinks he’ll get away with; so Ozzie steps forward to make some forceful point - but he’s abruptly caught between one primary colored dress set in motion, cleavage right at his eye-level; and then Ozzie says, “The rare commodity wants what it wants and is good at what it does, because when it wants what it wants it goes out of its way to get what it wants.”

A shrill, “What the fuck does that mean, asshole?!” precedes Ozzie getting shellacked from his blindside by another dress of the same primary color. The red of redemption extends beyond what the NFL does on the field. My entire bewildering play is broken but somehow not totally blown up. Ozzie stumbles crabways, panicking. And he and the flowing recalescent soul in the red dress who’d maybe just sat here for Cabellero’s ice turns all blood-lusting queen and shoves Ozzie again as he jostles for footing and they turn and they shout and they fall the whole short way down two landing-connected consecutive flights of stairs. The staff dressed in jet black - and way too sober for this time of night - intervenes. With no sense of humor whatsoever, and all acting as though they’re sure all of Cabellero’s evening’s spending’s entirely complete, they try grabbing the biggest guy in the room. And for once it isn’t me. I’m not the problem, I just provoked it. Everything seems to happen in the shadows. Everything happens when no one’s watching. Through the chaos constructed by my getting under Cabellero’s skin, we don’t exactly kidnap the man, but we steal his thunder from his night - as everything comes tumbling, gamboling, crashing down all three levels of the Talk of the Top of the Town. Outside, I find Ozzie, remarkably unscathed, unblemished, unfazed. You good, man? He’s fine. But that girl. The girl is unconscious. And she looks, holy fucking hell, most likely paralyzed by the fall down the stairs. Cabellero chucks a bouncer through a gigantic glass window. Stepping over the bloodied man, over the atomized rubble, onto the sidewalk, he glares at me like, I’m next, until he’s distracted, redirected - because two half seconds later Ozzie gets hit by an Uber Black Cadillac Escalade. Ozzie rolls out of the four ton blow. He limp-runs back at the broken blue headlamp beams and screams at the driver and draws every single eye. And I make sure no one sees what I’m doing when I’m doing what I have to do - because you have to make sure no one sees you coming when you blitz your target. And I do exactly what I came to do. And no one notices a thing when I strike the soft spot - then smother the shriek with my off hand. I casually lay the felled casualty in between two parked cars. Backpedaling into a crouch on the curbstone, I re-sheath a slim foot long stiletto. A ruby Chanticleer emblem studded handle sticks out over the edge of the leather ankle holster I hide underneath a dark denim cuff. Locomoting up the block toward the source of the clamor, I shove the Uber Black driver into the door of his Escalade like he’s at fault. Everyone believes my confidence, including the man who knows better, when, “For this man’s trouble!” I demand five hundred dollars; Ozzie grabs it; he, “gets,” it; we walk; the aciculate stiletto edges still covered in the real and true Cabellero’s blood, I tell Ozzie how Cabellero doesn’t have the requisite jabberwocky investment nor the legs right now to pursue any sort of open-field tackles - so I need you to get the fuck on with it with me, and I need you to help me lug him down the block in less than two minutes, where we can ditch him in front of some unoccupied emergency vehicle painted neon orange.

At once, Ozzie stops, “Thinking so goddam much,” and he helps me get something done: we drop off the feckless hulk; and I say to Ozzie that this is a major sportswriting moment of growth completed - and then we’re off. Two blocks north and west. In Silver, northward toward a new blazing sun we’ll race all night toward another sizzling and predictably unpredictable morning in Freemasonville; we both know there’s a deadline, really just my deadline, so I’m not really done for the night, but Ozzie knows that we’re done for the night. IYKYK.

In Silver, at the wheel, beyond Summerville, I say, “I stabbed Cabellero below the spine, where I was trained to strike. Guarantee he’s out for at least one full season. Every single year at least one top ten NFL Draft pick misses his first regular season. Injuries everywhere. People don’t wonder why this happens to such promising talent. They expect it. On some level they’re amazed more athletes aren’t injured.”

Ozzie knows this violence is far more true and real than some jabberwocky exercise. He’s rattled. He’s bruised. He’s much stronger.

I say, “I’ve got to get going on my piece. Will you transcribe for me - or unless you want to drive while I write my first Cabellero draft?”

Ozzie says, “I’ll drive.”

We trade places in the vehicle while it’s moving. My fingers spasm. I quote from the best of my memory while Ozzie pilots Silver north as I interview my colder self for the facts of what I can remember.

Ozzie says, “Hey, man. I don’t know if you saw me get run over.”

I say, “I’m not trying to be a jackass but I can’t hear you talk until we’re back - then we’ll draw up, run through, reconfigure and improve our next play. If you broke something, say something now. Otherwise.”

Ozzie doesn’t apologize, he nods ahead over the dashboard into the splash of our Ford brand headlights. Silver is sonorous, swooning. Our lanes are free of all traffic aside from huge trucks. Hammer out the rest of my stuff’s first run until my eyes fade. Smoke again. The purple curls through orange and yields a mystic moss. It makes my mind put the whole entirety of the text away. I need to let my ADHD loose, run free, watch the road. I’ll look at the piece with better, fresher eyes - when I see myself walk and sit down in front of my windows: a different, You, in my very next room, where the dry, cracked, desiccated drudgery of the phrase, My Office, has vanished. Since my last visit I’ve made more of my life outside of my dwellings by committing to one long night’s worth of hard work. I know what kind of Freemasonville I’m walking into this round; a universe, a town, a thing where I’ve made these neon signs come aglow, abloom, ablaze - taunting, declaring, JACK LIVES HERE.

Ozzie sleeps on the hard bench outside my office.

The amount of work I’ve had to do to begin this new chapter is staggering just for the amount of bullshit I had to unwind before I saw so clearly from some angles, and from other vantages, between extra large and handheld watering holes, we all claim: we vibe well; we spot phosphorescent signs no one else can see in full detail and color unless they admit they have to look at you differently: JACK LIVES HERE.

A greater Southern lie is the theft of a greater Southern novel.

And if you know, you know what I mean when I declare JACK LIVES HERE? Then you see what I’m really saying: you can’t do anything faster than as fast as you know you can do it right. The new black Southern novel must secede from the union of novels right now nowhere close to what I know we need in our greater fiction.

Maurice texts me, “Pressure is a platform. A platform is a stage.”

The adrenaline of something special: this is the Big Book in Black for the phantasmal fiction we forge in order for fifth dimensional lives to lift from impersonalized underworlds into what you’ve wanted all along. Commandments, guidelines, covenants. Things you know you should be telling yourself now in order to live the only one way you want. Trust me: this is how all y’all get fly. It’s the mastered craft of showing your style in taking away your senses from the world you’ve inhabited together - so everyone cannot avoid seeing you’ve intensified the elastic of the emotional trapeze work of how you know more senses completely since what’s made of all of them in you is compressed into an altered and alternative perceptual altar of your common, “Now.” IYKYK why the modern attack sentence argues its dipsomania-inducing mysticism must remain astonishingly popular - because it is anonymous. What do you see in your knowing you know nothing? A blackout? The euphoria? The consequences? A greater novel should know it shows you all itself through reflecting its construction. Grace Knox is a revival of self-belief when people feel she survives because she’s never anyone’s enemy. If we know a good, truer form of sincerity is hard to come by - it shouldn’t just always be so goddam easy to pick up on and to read, that would be lying. And that wouldn’t be true fiction. Many tried inventing a New Journalism near when my mentors published their first paranoid novels to great acclaim. A New Fiction is that I’ve invented my emotional interior design by inscribing inside of its minutiae my forever honest deceit to show you the reason why I am this one way; to show you why I’m infinitely interested in the endlessness of the too complicated myth I tell myself so I may soon feel like a newer better black electra Lucifer on your white page’d perception while perched on your one shoulder to sing this one aria: every modern novel in modern fiction composed in modern too warm welcoming prose isn’t actually bad at all; it is wrong.

Grace Knox texts me, “Wallball with Llewellyn Armarillo.” I want to say what I know she would never want me to say to her, “I’m learning what you bring out of me is a vision: Grace Knox isn’t dark, mean, nor cold; she is only too sincerely far too colorfully contrasted by warmth.” All I text back is, “What’s that?” to look around. Here the South’s drunk on their own theatrical traumapainkilling heroin. They don’t take kindly to new Yankee bullydome. Don’t want it, don’t need it, don’t hear your reticence as kindness. They won’t tell you they won’t read your research if they don’t like how you sound when you talk about it. Describe what you feel? They desperately require this rebirth’d era. The South doesn’t want dark sunfall. They crave empurpled nights arisen. Mia texts me, “The thrill of the used book buy you know’s a steal’s both buoyant and euphoric. Color covered and black and white’s brightened in every tedious granulation’s shift.” The one beauty is the wrong thing and the other more right for me and morally correct beauty is the other one I talk to on the side of my sense of reality. And so my better work is to work on the correctable elements of these connections in these writers as I staggeringly become one of their neuxsons under lambent starfire. Our best bright barbs of revolutionary spiritual carnage derive from digging in your heels to survive the madness of your more inborn demonic spiritual attacks; not flinching; all as all y’all too nonchalantly watch Palmetto trunk shards - stacked over so many decades of growth that they now look like nothing more than eleven dozen shoulder chips enfolded - stop cannonballs. Grace texts me, “Am I saved as Heather in your phone yet? Am I her? Did I steal her phone? Who is she? Silver bullets smelted until they’re steel wheels of fortune? You found a new way to kill the game. This is trust. Reincarnation. Wartime. Vengeance.”

One must honor every individual letter of their spontaneous inspiration. Yet, where the hell did that come from? “How often are powerful artists attacked with the siren song of a great artless financial opportunity?” Fuck. All the time - constantly. Temptation outwits all good sense the farther one or any artist moves away from their ironically unserious money-making idylls. The artist traveling down ever deeper into their uniquely interpersonally lacerating standards of what rare and true beauty demands,  the stronger the encroaching temptation to sell one’s soul’s product - quite possibly, woefully, very far short of what it’s really worth - will become and grow and persuade.

Grace Knox texts me, “I’ve never felt more comfortable calling myself crazy. Is it that? That could be a lot of it. Could be none of it, nothing to do with it.”

But the artist sure of their tried and true personal discipline within their art and form should most often nearly always disrespect to disregard all thoughtful byproducts sprung from all outside minds far too openly only cash-prudent; for their pseudo-creations will prove they prevail upon you to propound and protect their highbrow’d hustling for their material status gains alone. Any devilsome locomotion is only the best fool’s gold of the more than vain divination. However, all that being said, your preferred personal Robin Hood-ing’ll always feature far less collateral damage if it’s correctly described. If you can remember your blindspot is rigged against your certain defeat? When it thrashes, when it’s triggered, when it’s more than menacing, totally threatening, openly intolerant of you and yours completely, the personal shape of editing your personality’s experience inside of your fiction is then not the cutting but the dodging of the black magical manifestation’s blowback.

What do you know you’re not noticing right now?

You appear most insane to the world when you lionize your word.

My equilibrium’ll tell me it begins with - for you, man? - here is way too much. All at once. According to some in popular psychology, this thing is often the telltale, classic, trademark sign of a narcissistic sociopath. I wouldn't openly admit to that if I were one. Or maybe I’d somehow try to win all your confidence for, in me, by pretending to admit to an awareness of my defects. I should confess I desire to share confidential stories I believe invaluable toward alleviating my spiritual malnourishment, and severe mental afflictions - stemming from the skunkworks of my consistent and clear, though sight unseen, illogically recombined emotional deformities. I’m not the first tall tale telling evil bastard to ask, “If I swear off better sense, logic, predecessors and then disassociate from lettered predispositions, literary prejudices, and literal pride, can I ask myself on the page with no clue what I might come up with; as if I am my other mind or what I have held captive: this hijacked jabberwocky - Does a novelist lose a novel when its tone is impolite, because it is imprecisely not apace true conversational expectations?”

What if I rely on my power to shock instead of my power to build coherence from honest admission I rely on an ism of psychotic deceit?

My belief, I’d argue, if I’d answer myself unfiltered, is, (insert breathless comma splice right here), not always, but not never.

Have you forgotten the question? I have defects: do they matter?

Yes. And not at all. In some ways I crave the pivotal simple sentence. As I roll out the elastic, tasseled, anti-rapscallion all-are-welcome tone of voice, please note you should now know all of my novel’s mannerisms are an evoked and ennobled etiquette elaboration.

Yesterday morning I found an effeminately cursive-lettered handwritten note on my desk. It said, “You’re the Vlad The Impaler of attention vampires.”

We disrupt all indirect disrespect from seven invisible neon signs.

Church of the NFL; (I’m) Not Fucking Lying; it’s coming alive. This is what it is ever since I asked, unafraid, Was That What That Was?

((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((BLOSSOM))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

If in your estimation you finally think you see everything as it is - and everything looks like the sky? Stop trying to define vertigo - you don’t know and have never known how to identify aerospace. What’s more, you clearly can’t see what you’re saying when you argue too well how your one-with-everything means nothing. Your everything is kind of nothing and you’ve lost the peculiar ability to know where you should fear to tread, ever more clownishly out of your element with every step. All’s why you must now aim, without aiming; drive slow, slower, cruise. Personal redemption is never not sinister, tricky, memoirian, Luciferian.

Who am I for The Institution but a better shapeshifting energy? A great novel can be taught. Yet a great writer must be shown in practice: I’m what can become of you if you become more like me. So then I ask, Am I the preordained inkwell’s black magic miracle? The silver beam in the sterling space reserved? And then if I’m asking myself what’s more, what’s coming soon, and what have I done for them lately, I must show I’m especially good for the convoluted love this body of inspirited fictional scripture leaves wide open, and downwind opportunity. To do well and thrive I have to and must write well from exactly where they stand, and sit, and think, and dig in their heels, even if I’m much farther afield hunting recombinant letters I’ll only assemble inside their vibrating validations. I’ve learned they’ll hint, and they’ll profess, and they’ll tell me from behind the invisibly visceral decorum of parallel anecdotal imagoes - that they wish I soon become what they’ve wanted me to become in a splendid classic fashion they’ve not anticipated.