Billet d’Amour
Tapped by the founders of the Untied States to write the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson was infinitely better on paper than as a public speaker. Although never satiated with what one might say, or could say, he came closest when his pen touched vellum, and it was here, finally, in a fully untrammeled love letter that he was able to say what had been forever locked up in his heart to his lover-slave and best friend, Sally Hemings, who he admonished to burn the letter as Society must never know the unwieldy truth.
DEATH WITHOUT RHYME
(What if your whole “life” was contained within the space of a pair of parenthesis brackets? Everything you could have, would have, should have been, locked in the ice of that profoundly finite bit of off-white paper? And that was it. It. Nothing more, no memories, no dreams, no love. And out of all that infinite waste, you were handed a shovel. A dull shovel with no edge. And told by The Creator, The Higher Being, da Man, okay, that even though you are dust, pitiful, regrettable, awful and forgettable shit, you shall be allowed to dig, that, screw it, you might still have a voice, a strong voice, a formidable voice, but only if, and so long as, you use that voice, every last bit of that voice, to beat in the brains of your lost brothers and sisters to a bloody pulp if only to get them to just think about not soaking themselves in drugs, tell me you wouldn’t pick up that shovel and start whacking. Sure, it would be so damn easy to just roll over and not even try to dig, because the ground’s sheer impenetrable rock and the shovel sucks and you suck and everything sucks, but despite all that’s happened, betrayal, death, the loss of everyone and everything, someone actually believes you can do it, so aren’t you at least going to give it a shot? Hello?
Entropy
Tad Johnson is losing his marbles, but it gets worse. He’s wrongly accused of killing his wife which somehow snowballs into several cops falling by the wayside and a huge media circus trying to ensnare him as he, with the help of a new friend, slips through the cracks for as long as he can, all the time embattled by The Entropy that slowly murders his mind.
GEORGE, MAN, WAS A PLANT
Humble, absent-minded Doctor Kinoklevsky, after travailing as a scientific researcher for twenty-odd years, is suddenly ex-communicated from the institute he works for because they fear he may actually find a cure for The Plague which would negate all future funding. Rather than despair, he soon realizes he’s free to get to the crux of the matter in the privacy of his own apartment/lab. His focus becomes not just any plants, but the rugged weeds in the barren lot behind his tenement building because of their ability to survive anything without any help from any one or any thing. The problem is his crotchety old landlord forbids him from caring for the plants for no discernible reason, and so George must work under the cover of night and still the landlord and the landlord’s wife are on to him which wouldn’t be quite so bad except for the fact that he owes them months and months of back rent. The plants are all intelligent, especially a certain Dracaena (Dracy for short) and they truly want to help George find the cure and help his pal, Alexander Clock, who lives in the building and who is very sick indeed with the Plague.
DEATH WITHOUT RHYME
(What if your whole “life” was contained within the space of a pair of parenthesis brackets? Everything you could have, would have, should have been, locked in the ice of that profoundly finite bit of off-white paper? And that was it. It. Nothing more, no memories, no dreams, no love. And out of all that infinite waste, you were handed a shovel. A dull shovel with no edge. And told by The Creator, The Higher Being, da Man, okay, that even though you are dust, pitiful, regrettable, awful and forgettable shit, you shall be allowed to dig, that, screw it, you might still have a voice, a strong voice, a formidable voice, but only if, and so long as, you use that voice, every last bit of that voice, to beat in the brains of your lost brothers and sisters to a bloody pulp if only to get them to just think about not soaking themselves in drugs, tell me you wouldn’t pick up that shovel and start whacking. Sure, it would be so damn easy to just roll over and not even try to dig, because the ground’s sheer impenetrable rock and the shovel sucks and you suck and everything sucks, but despite all that’s happened, betrayal, death, the loss of everyone and everything, someone actually believes you can do it, so aren’t you at least going to give it a shot? Hello?
Entropy
Tad Johnson is losing his marbles, but it gets worse. He’s wrongly accused of killing his wife which somehow snowballs into several cops falling by the wayside and a huge media circus trying to ensnare him as he, with the help of a new friend, slips through the cracks for as long as he can, all the time embattled by The Entropy that slowly murders his mind.
GEORGE, MAN, WAS A PLANT
Humble, absent-minded Doctor Kinoklevsky, after travailing as a scientific researcher for twenty-odd years, is suddenly ex-communicated from the institute he works for because they fear he may actually find a cure for The Plague which would negate all future funding. Rather than despair, he soon realizes he’s free to get to the crux of the matter in the privacy of his own apartment/lab. His focus becomes not just any plants, but the rugged weeds in the barren lot behind his tenement building because of their ability to survive anything without any help from any one or any thing. The problem is his crotchety old landlord forbids him from caring for the plants for no discernible reason, and so George must work under the cover of night and still the landlord and the landlord’s wife are on to him which wouldn’t be quite so bad except for the fact that he owes them months and months of back rent. The plants are all intelligent, especially a certain Dracaena (Dracy for short) and they truly want to help George find the cure and help his pal, Alexander Clock, who lives in the building and who is very sick indeed with the Plague.
GEORGE, MAN, WAS A PLANT
Humble, absent-minded Doctor Kinoklevsky, after travailing as a scientific researcher for twenty-odd years, is suddenly ex-communicated from the institute he works for because they fear he may actually find a cure for The Plague which would negate all future funding. Rather than despair, he soon realizes he’s free to get to the crux of the matter in the privacy of his own apartment/lab. His focus becomes not just any plants, but the rugged weeds in the barren lot behind his tenement building because of their ability to survive anything without any help from any one or any thing. The problem is his crotchety old landlord forbids him from caring for the plants for no discernible reason, and so George must work under the cover of night and still the landlord and the landlord’s wife are on to him which wouldn’t be quite so bad except for the fact that he owes them months and months of back rent. The plants are all intelligent, especially a certain Dracaena (Dracy for short) and they truly want to help George find the cure and help his pal, Alexander Clock, who lives in the building and who is very sick indeed with the Plague.
