Friday, December 5th, 3:26am "Little Cowboy"

There’s a dominatrix in my kitchen, a beautiful painted blonde who lights a pale cigarette as she feigns ignorance of my existence. Her glitter-speckled blue mascara and corpse red lips appear to me like great tribal markings, the earned battle emblems of a seasoned warrior. I realize then that maybe that was the allure of these women to some people, the bestial animal nature of it all. To be driven beneath the will of a creature motivated purely by hatred and anger, to act as a sacrificial lamb to the grinning gods of forgotten civilizations.  I’m in the liquor cabinet, pulling down a bottle of expensive bourbon to mix with the half-empty glass of cheap from-concentrate orange juice sitting on the counter. In a simpler time I might’ve been a bit more intrigued by my current company, but these were not simple times. Outside the world is dying, the unwashed masses standing at the shores of liberty and crying out to be saved. I had tried once, but these days I wasn’t even sure it was worth the effort.

Most people might've found the presence of a paid sex worker beside their coffee table to be at least a bit disconcerting. I accepted it for what it was. My roommate slash landlord Paul was the middle-aged district manager for a chain of successful office supply stores, making enough money to sustain his addiction to paid S&M sessions and his multiple subscriptions to several popular Korean MMORPGs. I was tasked with the ocassional leveling of his characters, as well as running boss raids when he was too busy to accompany his guild himself. This I did in return for a free place to live and all the liquor I could drink. With such an arrangement; I was hardly in a position to ask questions.

“So what’s the safe word?” I ask. The blonde looks up over the smoke leaking from the corners of her mouth with a disdainful glare.

“The what?”

“The safeword?...” I swirl the mixture in my glass with a finger before taking a bitter sip. “They still do that sort of thing right? A little code word so you know when to stop beating the shit out of a guy?” She pauses before answering, making me wonder if my knowledge of the BDSM scene was out of date. It was a brave new age after all, and for all I know safewords had been long ago replaced by a complicated proprietary system of hand signals and low toned groans. Upstairs my landlord Paul screams as the blonde’s partner, a statuesque black Amazonian, takes her turn laying fresh red welts into his lily-white middle-aged skin. There’s a precise rhythm to it that my trained musician’s ear can appreciate, the spaced cracking of a whip interspersed with Paul’s muffled protests and the occasional degrading epithet.

“Little cowboy.”  

“Really?” I’m grinning I realize as I recline lazily against the marble-topped kitchen island. “That’s a fun one huh?”

“I guess.”

“That must be half the fun right? Coming up with some weird phrase like that, something completely nonsensical. And then to see if you can hit somebody hard enough to get them to say it.” She’s obviously disgusted with me but I’m too lost in my schoolboy fantasy to care, imagining how the childhood bullies would hit you until you said “uncle.” Mike Sanders is face down in the dirt coated playground of my mind, begging me with tears in his eyes to stop kicking him in the ribs. Telling me how sorry he is for all those Indian burns and screaming “Little Cowboy” at the top of his lungs.

My fantasy ends as from the upstairs comes a tremendous crashing, the sound of a great many universes colliding and forming entirely new continuities. Both me and the blonde tip our eyes towards the source of the commotion, our interest rewarded only by one lonely middle-aged man screaming a nonsensical phrase quite possibly worthy of literary study.

“Little Cowboy!” I hear from upstairs, repeated again in rapid succession alongside a series of expletives. "Little Cowboy! Little Cowboy! Little Cowboy!" the battlecry for a brave new world of cuckolded men and hopeless dreamers. The blonde looks at me with a disgruntled shake of her head before going to assist upstairs, and I briefly flash to an alternate timeline where she and I are lovers. High school sweethearts grown tired and listless, dead end jobs and a trailer home parked at the edge of oblivion. But back in my own universe I leave with little remorse, a sad smile lingering in the air as I empty into the hallway and spill out into the world.

Cold, alone and alive. I’m not sure which bothers me the most.

Tuesday, December 2nd, 6:58am "Self Titled Debut"

It’s late as I make my way out to the old factory district, gazing longingly up at the thick smokestacks that once filled the skies with thick black American pollution. Seeing the endless red horizon in the distance, I wonder how many of the former environmentalists miss the days when all we had to worry about were carbon emissions. I’ve been coming out here for longer than I care to remember, from a time back before the war started and a bunch of kids playing with matches lit the sky on fire. I don’t really remember what happened after that, too busy watching as my own world shattered into candy-colored shards of glass, me cutting my hand open and losing my favorite jacket in the process of trying to pick them up. For all I know we were all already dead, ghosts pantomiming the dull and meaningless actions of the once living world. But seemingly this was not the case, human apathy had simply triumphed once again, and as long as blood still coursed through our veins that was enough – provided the television was still working. The American dream is long dead, replaced instead by a hundred different reality shows which each claimed the act giving ugly people makeovers or giving ugly people money or god forbid giving ugly people houses to raise their ugly children in was somehow proof to the contrary. I’ve climbed to the top of one of the old grey brick behemoths, below my feet lying rows of machinery with purposes as forgotten as the people who once operated them. I look at my sickly limbs, my new world gaunt and unkempt hair – and realize I was more a part of the problem than I cared to admit.