It sticks out like an old bird cage. By out of step design or with the concrete bed sheet able to knock out the sky’s focus on a day you could take a walk through that’ll disappear into new tunnels or the sudden pit meant to dig up that way and across through this growing attitude of town remembering more than enough bottom of the bin pitches from the Butabi Brothers. Let in around ethereal plumbing siphoning out the primal heights and depth from within a cubic zirconia skyline for leaden minutes unspooling this leak in a spine of light to survey very dusty photography from a more ramshackle occasion out of the past and made immediate. A house of those same chemicals of homes you’ve woken up in that seem to stretch out and outgrow over bent iron pikes painted to rust in leopard spots you’ve helped the rain and sun pick at. A terrestrial sensation of what’s not the dream but the broadcast thrown and bouncing against unremarkable corners repeating invisible numbers to the image giving thirteen year old murderers on the run a lift to catch up and close in on the day daughters leave for boarding school while mothers stay in as stirring medieval synecdoches rounding out the routine ends of cold cycle grail myths accounting the stripped hours only noticed through thetical laundry from the one scene available enough to really spoil. To witness that graven privacy again through a skip traced landscape of unlocked rooms unquieting felt spectres always seen by children watching Jeanne Moreau trek from kitchen to nook years before the two you’ll find out she was married to William Friedkin as her audience won’t have to conclude to the comfortable trap down the lens but pause upon the bozo who must’ve had a better Final Fantasy t-shirt to wear for the Marguerite Duras retrospective.

Showing up in easy weather to be inside somewhere else for an off-the-mark weekend with dry pixelated snow brushing a right shoulder looking like I was only painting or just came up with the oldest way to white wall on my own while still being able to hit these marks too early repeating evenings I’ll somehow always stumble into. Acting out the ways these trips could take ten minutes naturally walking faster from Kensington Market or that stretch of Roncesvalles at the split of a hundred and a half year heave offside streetcar tracks right when the shade gains sea levels or against the moon tide stick figure silhouettes crossing Spadina. On train rides back performing another and worse Brief Encounter if it’ll only be me switching seats for these errands to and in the city before and after knowing that’s been the most legible allusion through a personable wilderness to still see myself at movies I’ll only get more confident in misremembering the exact titles of on the ticket. If Nathalie Granger could in any way be normally anticipated passed conditions (16mm that looks like betamax, at some point an 83 minute feature released on a two disc special edition dvd) or as the obvious punishment I would take to really impress someone I could draw if given black and green crayons for a cookie and nice lady child psychologist smile that’ll go gradually worried all around a waterphone as I’ll still feel that unseen glow following me out like it probably did during the second bout snowstorm after Lizzie Borden’s Re-Grouping accompanied by a pretty good Q and A filling in for a bad enough sounding alibi without having to make mention of all the others I’ll dummy up for out of some likeable guilt for my own calm whereabouts. Unable to say for sure how exactly I got off the escalator, why all the doors decided to open when I pushed, where any of these nights suddenly came up to me if elsewhere and earlier I’ll be reading those Monkey D. Luffy comics with the thick chances I’ll catch tears before they’re noticed.

Inseparable from the way I learned how to make coffee never to know if it should be tasting more or less like poison with this pour-over set-up you’ll only have to imagine wobbling towards a retired poker table (every place having planks you’ll really have to dig into for game piece cubbies) made by a guy in between beer runs with bus drivers who’d just idle across from his garage we’ll pretend having other passengers really thawing it out for my Grandmother he probably thought was more of a secret three generations going by as I'll keep being told about him as a faceless call sign in long afternoons carrying his stupid-heavy radio 45 player combo cabinet from there to there as we’d risk to hope from our spots this’ll be the morning the sucker finally shows up. In a dissolve that’s too romantic on what I’ve been doing with cartoons having to remember when this routine and the window would start imitating each other’s winter in panels away and under my hunched shoulders reading One Piece with a muffin I didn’t get to choose that week. The snow along an iris of glare as I’ll lift up my phone to hear Luffy yell through a published overcast sky. His sandals on frozen castle shingles holding a pirate flag growing along an etched breeze and these inked billows of smoke. The worst way to read this if you actually want to watch the smaller lines cluttering a once larger page (which will only get worse as a cramped hand gradually draws a lot more and smaller) that’ll somehow never feel as close than now when I’ll really be beside Tony Tony Chopper still living inside the rooms of his own heart knowing he might never find a friend right as these möebian arms pull across and aim down. “You have a friend right here!!! I’m your friend!!!” Shooting off the slowest weapon I could’ve found out back in the dreams I forgot I had this early for this material that never had to wait or even knew I would be here to treat it with this much patience when it’s been about to end for awhile and always within range of being spoiled by a soda can or a 10th anniversary death of a character t-shirt I’ll just meet if I’m not careful walking any which way outside.

Part of the habits I knew I got better at when I decided to read one then threes strips of Walt Kelly’s Pogo a day until those Sundays with George Herriman’s Krazy Kat watching when the brick gag settled in parallel with other start of the century movements as the one pandemic had to make a rainbow into another. Letting the light stare into my bedroom so the first thing I focus on waking up is a bear that doesn’t have a name yet whose fur changes with the uncertain weekend colours (in congress with what were more distinct seasons) say to Albert The Alligator “You’re the nimmest nimconpoof I ever saw in a lifetime of sawin’.” Immediate in the way I start to hear it. More important when it was a little more than just a little bit embarrassing if Jake Tapper and Neil Gaiman thought it was so brave to even hold with the one hand. For better or worse this influence when I would be the one struggling to figure out who was really being especial if the one blockhead is really confident enough to say “We are blessed that Walt Kelly inhabited his skin for as long as he did, no doubt dying a comfortable man [at 60 and missing a leg from severe diabetic complications] — all the while making the right people uncomfortable” while the other dingus is going on about “in these uncertain times Pogo feels necessary, feels relevant, feels ever-more-right” when Walt Kelly will have Howland Owl stuck in cement because Miz Beaver thought it was cake mix in more dailies than what Pogo will do to Joe McCarthy twice and fellas like Jake Tapper and Neil Gaiman with any hindsight would absolutely never when they can just grab at that prairie rodent expression that sounds in their skin with better ease knowing for sure no one is out there now to hold a pencil that well to mimic their gopheric profiles so handsomely. More than a minor work if me and at least twelve other people are enduring in Edith Wharton tones The Master of Stories recapping another dinner he had without mentioning the food (I always picture just the most boring salad you could ever have or just bread) in an introduction written again between airports fancifully “mourning” Carol Kelly (too old for him but he’ll spark up when he finds out who her dad was) where he had to find a way to link her death to him magically looking through “the first book in the series you are holding now...coming to it now in a new way, from beginning day by day, experiencing the daily pace of a newspaper strip. And then Carolyn got sick. And then she died” without actual jail time for this confession maybe believing deep in the place where another person’s heart would be like everything else he did for publishing counted towards community service (where instead they give you the cheque for it) as he’ll then just repeat the Porky Pine quote Mark Evanier already said and steal my bit before I had it.

Really being a salesman when he was once that multiplier able to lower a lot of standards effectively as my Absolute Sandman volumes now and then salt every surface as they’ll eventually have to leave my house from out a window. Comics you’ll never have to remember as being comics when you’re born at the wrong time to be ready to have all those defacto best adult picture books shucked onto your shelf as graphic novels either uplifting a juvenile form or finally unlocking the Booker Prize promise of cave people drawings (insulting everyone) through the genuine breakthrough of really boring bookmark layouts and captions that’ll go all the way down (like how you’ll see cave drawings overly describe the concept of deer) to really personify the depths of this “storytelling” you’re always told about within this wondrous realm that’ll look enough like it’s in mid flush right before this massive clog. Introducing the kids to G.K. Chesterton as if Kevin didn’t have enough problems at school when even he’s unsure if Walt Kelly is here in these seventy five issues of the least combative opportunities forcing the artist’s hands to make duller expressions more plain for the sake of an early on-set NPR listener and Norman Mailer. Forgoing beautiful punches or the most agreeable ballet to resolve conflicts through “well I know you are but what am I?” and “well I’m that times infinity” nerdcore rap battles between a thinly veiled Robert Smith and unsubtle David Bowie cut up from various magazines almost out of context to really show off these magnificent word balloons. Maybe a justified concession if it ever tried to look more like the Dave McKean covers or actually wanted that Simon Larbalestier quality living in a basement that’ll be the whole world (what I imagined it was when I was a kid watching the Prisoners of Gravity special on it) when it’ll be a readymade late artifact sure to be the one British comic mute on Thatcher or Reagan (as Pat Mills is still going) and the actual fabrics of an aesthetic to look a lot older by 1996 than now. Never to have a genuine caloric tranquility like Robina Rose’s Nightshift or Derek Jarman’s The Last of England when it obviously yearns for any higher comparison outside its own community. Never having to worry about technique getting in the way of what exactly when the least talented collaborator who took most of the money let alone credit on his own ended up getting away to whimsically write about white-walling into gargoyles in view of his own murals hanging out in all the bookstore bathrooms readying for those dreams you can only buy opening this book all the little too friendly strangers who ended up either citizen arrested or suicide-by-crocodile’d agreed all the way down was totally fine and maybe even a little bit too normal to christen Non Disclosure Enchantments: Short Fictions and Other Nocturnes.

All part of an act even if he was only an upside down drip when he’s able to walk around without a constantly broken nose and never to be found bobbing under the waves of an empty Piggly Wiggly lobster tank because he saw such wonderments. Spuds Mackenzie for introverts with a former president speaking fee to somehow fund the way to still write like a fourteen year old with homework across four mansions able to convince a lot of self-proclaimed bozos still mythologizing high school that what he solely accomplished in comics without drawing (plagiarizing Goodnight Moon for the “last” Batman story where I guess Batman started sleeping in front of a steamroller) was somehow more literary valuable than what George Herriman was doing every fucking day. At this tail end of something honestly violent and experimental in once cheaper art when if he was ever near the neck I’m sure would’ve covered his by making sure to visibly sign both Vietnam petitions if he was the won out William B. Williams at parties smiling whenever Harlan Ellison would retell the time he was sitting on a couch in a tiny apartment overhearing how a certain cult was just a wonderful germ the writer materially responsible for Neil Gaiman like a plaque on a theatre seat just had the perchance to dream of as a way to make a cruder fortune if someone ever wanted to be known less as an actual writer if “He lay on the sofa downstairs, covered by a crumpled blanket, and masturbated into his underpants, his hot seed spurting across his stomach”, “I masturbated into it, and kneaded my milky seed into the grey shapeless mess”, “Simon masturbated a great deal”, “That was the last time he masturbated”, and “He wore thin scarlet underpants” was what they were actually writing. Where this pitch for escapism they can easily peddle to give away has to circle around their own incurable property. The act of reading their suggestion of what you should wear as the short wave ban chill of advertising comes closer to suggest literature as only apparel or this cleanly marketable affectation (easy to buy and really easy to throw out) of weird ideas woven in pretty boring sentences that look up at a sky that can only be violet when it’s not exactly blue. Coming towards the conclusion when you’re their passenger that colonialism (”England has history, while America has geography” should’ve won him a trip down The Grand Canyon a long time ago if he then went on to marry an annoying ukulele woman from Boston) had some good ideas but could’ve been a lot more inclusive if we can still use a lower effort Victorian fetishism (already untrue if we have toilets) for the “books” we can only think of as emblematic goods judged by their own gravity and loved for the sake of owning them. Shifting the practice of criticism both inherit and studied to feelings that either tug west or east from them when they were always invited to cross the line to haunt where ever they could while watching generations of better artists fade just enough so he could be the one to eventually flip authorship upon their rediscovery. Given the benefit of the doubt being a really nice guy as he’ll come in closer to better hear how it was really Judith Krantz or some other fuck no one remembers that was ruining the culture while he was making sure to do the rounds and say “hi” to everyone at the gala. When that’s what he sends in for an anthology about gargoyles. When he gives off the impression from somewhere that he was always such a fantastical world-builder when he wastes that many pages wondering why an adult Christian convert would make a fictional girl go to hell for wearing lipstick and boots (a common idea more in his own fiction than C.S. Lewis he won’t ask himself at any point between now and when Russell Brand baptizes him tomorrow in matching diapers). When someone allows him to be that first impression over the actual material for a new omnibus volume run of Elric of Melniboné stories with enough pat noticing about Michael Moorcock to still pass a grade as an introduction so he can glibly describe sexual assault at an all boys boarding school to reaffirm where all this valued “olden” culture comes from and goes into (as his stand-in makes sure to go No Homo) and what he can only abide in keeping up without warning the sap who had a D&D game this weekend who saw that cover of the coolest white guy and thought about maybe enjoying this book the way the murals keep fucking telling him. Not having to really think too hard about what The Devil is going to look like if he’s this Eighth Wonder of The World and another baby who won’t go away as all I can really figure out with Jake Tapper is he can only seem nominally less vile whether or not he owns a single digit numbered Mould Map 3 that should be mine in comparison to this Mongoose wearing human arms able to say “Handmade Christmas cards are things of beauty; monuments to inspired creativity” while churning in those secret condiments without ever knowing what the breeze a fist makes feels like when it’ll touch down to crack apart a blink.

For better or worse this influence. Another needless activity that’ll turn out practical. A comic strip from the 50’s lending me some expired inspiration in the Frank Castle scheme of unknowing where I really appear first if evidence is this scattered and found again in these swamp critters speaking in loosely tied verse on the Creedence Clearwater Revival California Bayou trail enunciating the stupid ways were always held within a second act. A habit I could make inarguable that early. In conflict with what I felt must be karmically mechanical. A synonym for a piano I could go towards and play. What I could unwisely invite in as my thoughts written down end up more like these unending sweaters in that style with my voice upon that Dorothy Parker curse of always having to talk like this when I’ll be so fucking quiet. Honour-bound with other out of step and rarer company I could hope one morning to be as funny as even while held back in these years embodying a shout reading Pogo at a rhythm when the leap years sync. What also happened with Krazy Kat give or take a day ahead or behind. What I could do with Chainsaw Man and Hunter X Hunter and One Piece and Dandadan out of the want to have a calmer breakfast ok with the hug I’ll get eventually in a safe at the bottom of the ocean if I can also note that ironic romanticism in Nouvelle Vague further along in the seventies I’ll keep seeing work from in a way that might as well be precise pebble taps window to window or steps on wood tile at 3am around those deeply affected sweaters in summer sharing jitters at the swap meets waiting for that one interesting conversation they’ll live too long and well to never have regarding Mank when they’ll now and maybe forever be fretting about the guy in a Goku t-shirt who has more than one and others showing up again for La Navire Night.

Caught in the week of really waking up to watch Luffy beat the shit out of this Crocodile Dipshit in pages really settling an argument in masonry. Even under glass never cleaner than a brick. Work really coming down to the improvised poetics of immovable impact. The most minor of accidents. What Roronoa Zoro barely remembers hearing about swords unable to cut going through steel. On bus rides back I can remember listening in to Hitchcock and Truffaut talk about the turn of the other century art school lesson of the line not actually found in nature. Not really sure if those are the precise inherent vices of rendition here if I’m supposed to be playing dumb tapping on the tank of my phone instead of a charred and chewed library copy to notice how these scratches make this intangible paper seem to glow for drawings that feel this calorically legible and ready. Turning in a collage of various pressures as the effort steers lightly and harshly over those given deserts and sandstone blocks piled and falling from the sky in punches. Of things in miniature elongating to attacks that might as well have addresses when I’ll start to recognize what’s been stamped and celebrated in these diaries I still keep for the sake of what I want to accomplish, still mark down, and repeat as this year’s edition follows me out to lunch to one of the five burgers places and one of twelve coffee shops. Performing that one late Autumn in a too close to call Spring not sure if this’ll ever have the same power when all I might be doing well is watching these cartoon fists with matching crossed out tattoos grow out easy from a pencil to bloom into this tremendous sign of solidarity that never fucking wavered when so much else had. Not even getting a little murmur to convince myself what’ll melt by the time I’m walking down too early for another round of .......Non: A Marguerite Duras La Musica War to experience art I guess. These slower skies without the sun incurring a romance up in these old resistance hotlines tangled above the acidic leaves and unkempt parks that touch new roads without engines as all this machinery funnelling images back into stanzas allows and fades anything else into the imaginary hum wanted most when reading. Actors and crew gathered in a cottage barricaded by equipment from the other film they’re never here to make. In foggy silhouettes for unpredictable bodies as we all wait patiently for an authentic fantasy. Chaste tactics said through whispers in speakers that siren small words as they brush by the actresses (Bulle Ogier, Dominque Sanda), actor (Mathieu Carriére), and the dress hung to fly across the horizon of the wall as it shimmers in little waves too close to the camera. Punctuated out for these calm baroque rap skits by Duras unable to find love in unabsolvable banks and squat office cubes reflexing the horizon of Athens before picturing this bare window looking out at what a sick woman still harvests. Loved without the want of ocular proof as her geography tightens and breath dances along these wires swaying in the abyss we’ve thought of and made to still reach out to some guy she sometimes puts on a funny voice for just to hear him on that other end (what’s not in the summary about this “art film” when it appears at MOMA, Richard Brody just making sure to mention phone sex for his front row pervert clientele). To allow herself to still know the unrecordable expression of authentic proximity. Still attend the avoided rendezvouses. Reside in the ellipsis of affections warmly composed with someone else even in stray thoughts on windless days among these parks and vanished marble eyes that’ll ignore the bedroom of an artist in absence as she performs in minerals for another crowd staring at what she gave out accepting this lovely risk within her waning life as Dominque Auvray (the editor of this film and other great ones) gets up on the mic as the credits roll and asks “Who did this?...Who translated this? This 4Kay THESE these are very DEAD images. You can’t be serious no. Dreadful.”

“She actually liked a lot of...bullshit....stories.”

For some reason rushing to catch the train I’ll miss anyway going around the church where they beat up Johnny Five against a flock of Blue Jays jerseys really carrying those two feelings. What happens when I’m not here and what ended up being really funny against the nights I can’t remember as this’ll remind me of those last two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Sharing this idea of film production emanating realism out of our own extraterrestrial objects. An accelerant in animation even a butler school dropout would render poetic if it’s Porky Pig. Seen again as an adult during what might as well had been the pandemic when it was the summer before and the summer I’ll think was the same one I started going through that Chantal Akerman eclipse box set I don’t remember buying and wasn’t a gift which was actually the summer before that. Unable to really give a good reason yet besides sharing a birthday with both Akerman and Shinji Ikari when I’m suddenly ahead and remember during the actual pandemic watching Godard’s Hail Mary (with Anne-Marie Miéville’s Book of Mary) summoning the idea that Hideaki Anno must’ve seen this if I’m also spotting shots from Kare Kano. His work having similar textual acoustics. His cuts relying on those same held-in pops. The architecture of his references appearing in idle traffic so you could nebulously wait for the way he’d nod for a question about Baxter, Vera Baxter Jeeves won’t ask and Anno’ll still shrug answering when I can see how that first ending of Evangelion miraculously could repeat the same way a car crashed once.

Unmade like Le Navire Night as manufactured experience (more direct on television) resets too soon at dress rehearsal when both shiver towards the most distinct way failure could show up earlier. Shadows painted on hallways towards classrooms as gymnasiums become theatres. Lights brought out from a back room staring down a mixture of auburn investing so much in a future tense of joy as it lives in the harsher grove of a school in the late afternoon pushed back far enough into an incongruous Transylvanian geometry (even if it went ok). Auditions for your own image genuinely noting how well you participate as everyone you know from here hopefully flicker as encouraging cameras for what goes on or just ends when identity starts providing an agnostic tension. Escaped from those hours we can’t fix as the elasticity of personal realism wears down in the flights noticed through our art-making if we’re sequentially lucky enough instead of stumbling onto the middles that only allow avoidable remakes or brisky recaps of what we don’t feel as intimate or worth sharing. Telling yourself in these gestures towards what you obviously want to still be doing when you spend nights out watching Jeanne Moreau rerun an untraceable day we’ve already crossed as impassible satellites. Waking up to read what a kid will learn to find themselves in as the hero stares out to say what they won’t always hear at such an enduring volume neither tarnished nor afraid when he’s always going to be this gumshoe dirty and durable. Finally old enough now to really groan when they finally reprint The Goat Singers of Alpha Centauri with that really shitty cover and foreword by Neil Gaiman mostly chronicling his sentimental journey away from New Zealand during covid lockdowns because he was always a meathead or playing it back in a distinct year again to notice Misato Katsuragi was always the protagonist if you’re suddenly relaxing on that fault of what Evangelion really was as this easy cliché was absent that time around. This separate enduring adolescent empire (like everything if it’s only recognizable) actually giving space to turning-thirty year old women (and like Duras paired up as a sandwich with a dink in the middle) still worried of the same expiring phantom limb sacraments even after the world floods out of what it meteorically took to “be a dad.” Both versions of an evening seeing Misato endure the glacial collapse of an atonal summer from the very start able to play off the interpersonal necropolitics of an established Tsuburaya strain of Catholicism¹ enough while destined to still age out of the big festival finale transmigrating the signage of an Easter Virgil as this agreed upon image of fan service. Ocular proof for eyes that only author between transactions who’ll never end up falling out of an experience worth telling. Animated to encourage the durability of another world with the same pieces to rebound an unreal trope of passage holding out this idea of this other older actress with blue hair as she’s drawn in material from a selfless juvenile legend among the unabsolvable machinery of likeable bullshit stories. Living to wonder if this kid is exactly that mythic at that inconsistent scale through another out of shape skin if she’s aware of all the times he’s been really stupid. To only be these entrapped parallels as rushing hands tie unreal lines and set dress without scenes to suddenly provoke these darker images as uncharitable intentions. Who she can be in little teases as anything else entirely fair but more obscene than just serving a clandestine toy commercial or as another object rubbing along an unreality collects on a stained night stand of what else these long retired children won’t be able to still see out of these opposing afternoons happening in these arcs of a distraction with another person². All of a sudden guilty if the world can mend itself from these same Grangerian numbers to only be a cicada screamed transmission resembling what television looks like coming out of the cords or these landscapes thought of more than really seen by this enumerated audience as I’ll have to hear a probable podcaster escaped from headphones and sheltering in place at The End of Evangelion screening I managed to catch say to a date-date or follow-along “so this is pretty stand alone?”

Not even on a different side of the lake to cross over to this Narnia where ladies must really like Genocyber and the fellas must’ve heeded the informercial warnings their entire lives that these weren’t their Grandpa’s cartoons while still being very academically aware of how the official Emmanuelle timeline divots. Maybe here for the second ending you actually have to see with the rest of the series as it’ll float along nicely before a weekend I didn’t have to book off to attend more Duras films facing the natural anxiety there might be a beach ball awaiting me to be this extra tonight spotting the camera for a bad enough sounding Night Gallery episode where I have to believe this was once the quarterback or the point-guard who woke up yesterday as the dud fumbling their mystery date (with a lady suddenly beautiful with the glasses on) as he’ll feel bad for the first time figuring out this was the cartoon that dink was always talkin’ about before he threw him down the shaft where they swirl the strawberries at the ice cream factory. Under auburn again when I’ll remember this one opens with Shinji looking at how white the wall is on his hands over a comatose Asuka (after murdering the alien boy who immediately fell in love with him and after she basically went completely inward) right as it’ll happen after the Sega Logo. At the opposite of where I’ll be in another movie when I realize who would actually really like this right when she must be thinking the same thing watching the wrong cut of Caligula if I’m supposed to trust the bylaws of this open-faced sandwich Shambhala as we’ll both reset from each other’s guesses for what we’ll still let happen on Thursdays when I’ll be the one sunken away from all these more temporary and rarer places out of some fear I can’t help but trust even in the sullen company of these guys wearing glasses without the lenses performing an accident a little too well as the local tourists. A real whiff of who I’d hate to be for someone else as that’ll be the assumption I might not be able to really fight watching these death threats blink across the screen. Here for work out of the dilapidated presence of someone who kept getting signs that he shouldn’t be here. An unassailable experience this industriously perfect as it can’t help but collapse form to articulate a nightmare manufacturing Heaven into the most tepid fuel. An imaginable comfort. A riskful hope. Art inseparable from such an awful feeling to amber for a much worse audience of immediate experts closer to all these theatres when it seems like they can only paraphrase each other’s personalities or The Simpsons sharing their Toronto like a stone tape that started from a demon really needing nose bleed medication. Only able to really lament available parking lots. Only able to eulogize Kevin Smith in the chat of his birthday party live-streams. Only audibly useful and yielded authority in another fucking podcast to render the most helpless years of my life as somehow Arthurian as they envision themselves still as the wee lads or Little Lord Fauntleri yearning for that very direct moment they could really go the distance to disappoint a woman who doesn’t just have to be bisexual I guess as that’ll be somehow more emulable than god forbid reading a comic book if View Askew (Dogma was Kevin Smith’s version of Sandman and Preacher but you’re really the expert here) actually meant anything to them the way they’d tell it as some Dubliners outtake. Worse omnivores than what you’d find out camping picturing those bears stretching out the same jean jackets or ennui uniform while driving the ballet than always having to survive the mental gymnastics of Dustin Hoffman in Star Wars. Now in the company of an indiscernible champ fretting his own cloistered nuances already unsure about what he’ll have for lunch tomorrow humming along the urge to finally dive inside Beetle Bailey to find himself while bumped up in the schedule of the mostly no-show tournament saga having to face off all these dudes out the door or in line for the washroom he should be more cordial with if he can tell anyone of them’ll take the ironic amount over asking for these Absolute Sandman editions they’ll carry all at once down the stairs and under the moon of a pulleyed piano. For whatever reason to be this persistent in unasked arrangements with himself. Any which way steadfast and maybe meant to always be an especial stranger cursed to appear the furthest up the mountain from looking just like Eddie Deezen.

-Sasha Makarewicz