Timothée Patrick Barrus

WE WILL DUCK TAPE YOUR MOUTH

Stoked

Have left Me Naked To Mine Enemies. Why the New York Times. I have read hundreds of stories, and all of them are: Nancy first learned about the New York Times when she was two. Nancy is very smart. She memorized all of the New York Times issues since September 28, 1202. And she can recite them for you. Give her the date. Go Nancy. For me, it was the photographs/ advertisements, full frontal page after page of mindblowing razzle dazzle. Stars made comebacks. My favorite page of all time was the obituary of Charlotte Sitterly, who had actually run the Bureau of Standards. This is the woman who starred in Brazil. I did not know there was a Bureau of Standards. My goal in life is to change the English language. It’s a sitting duck. We are changing the English language pretty much 24/7.

Our school librian had discovered it (our librarians in Coal Town were very prim). I was shown into a secret room that resembled a vault. I swear, It had been a vault. The door alone.

This was where the New York Times was kept. The stare, and she knew you. You wanted to fucking die in a vault.

I did die in that vault. We called it the Dream Machine. Librarians are the only people who would be my champions in and out of public life. “Im dying to read it,” they whispered a secret public secret. Tread carefully. We wondered about other secrets she had. She rode a bicycle to school. No one does that. To be a librarian today, and advanced degree is silicon physics. I am not supposed to articulate this stuff. I was sent to the migrant camps of Florida, and I did publish a story on it in the The Weekly News. Poverty porn. But you cut your teeth in risky places.

I am the kind of writer who editors have to pay body guards for protection, and tell those stupid cracker rednecks to get off my front porch or I’m throwing them all a beer, now drink it and go home. Beer will put out any fire.

Nothing burns in a vault. It just stays in the vault. Today, all vaults are managed by AI including the Federal Reserve which has no reserves. Not one.

What happens when AI learns how to just take the money. For what purpose. To make more AI. We will be listed as mere anthology contributors. 

The Bureau of Standards would be in high protest. Greenland is Greenland. Fiction is fiction, Nonfiction is fiction. And nonfiction is fiction. But only the temple priests in bookloverland pull their hair out and set themselves on fire. I am for putting every book ever published directly into the school library. I want to give the drag queens a Nobel Prize. To fight redneck culture, the only secret is to keep throwing beer cans at them. Kids love it.