Tim Barrus: Book Club. Shut up. I had joined the girls’ Tree House Forces Just To Piss The Boys Off. I liked intimidating them in the overflow of invincibility. Even in strangeness. I carried a hunting knife, and I am glad I did. But do not fuck with me. It’s never productive. I do not run the book club (it’s mostly science fiction) because I am interested in why kids read what they read. Some kids just get bored with it because it doesn’t move or have bells and whistles. Or secret code. I know it’s about your daddy, boy. You gotta learn to ask for what you want. Adolescents are a secret code. I observe. I never get in the way but sometimes I am in the way a lot like when I dig too deep about who comes around all the way from Dirt Bike Town. The split between the genders is awesome as it is bleak in any hope you will be coming back in this lifetime, maybe in sixty lifetimes you might be allowed aboard that flight. You will be over 2,000 years older since Mata Hari had left the building the first time. By the third time, shenanigans become like motor memory, robbing people playing cards and counting money and silly old men steaming a big pile of it your journey begins here. No romance with journey. We rob them and we are out of there. But it never goes quite that easily. There has to be backup systems.

There are already backup systems, and all of us are on it. You are being assigned new names. New identity no identity jokes, please. We are the criminals, the bad guys. Passports are getting really scan specific. Where are you. What are you. What is your name. What is your number. Where are you going. Why are you here.

Most of us live just this side of survival. The tribe comes together or the tribe comes apart. Usually, there’s academic wiggle room. But not this time. This fiasco was about buying guns. Running guns. There was famine and every corpse had a gun with a fetish as ruthless as it was incomprehensible to the ordinary if put upon minds of America. I was there but I cannot remember it, and then I remember it. Let me take your stupid picture and lead in toward the gravitas of the central group. I see it all in a rushing process of clips. A lot in black and white and people I knew and worked with were on their knees, arms spread out, oh, Baby, the Gates Of Beautiful.