has this ever happened to any of you? i met a great group of new friends a while ago, and we've been hanging out regularly. they seemed so nice and eager to make me feel comfortable within their peer group, but then something changed. do you ever meet people that seem to have the same interests as yourself, but then they all go and do something totally sick-like, i don't know, uh, maybe they make their own puppy and kitten sausages-and that makes you call into question some other things that you had had in common, like an appreciation for capra films, or getting sno-cones at the stand on canal and rendon, or making children drink turpentine? i mean, does my association with them reflect on me personally?

Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?

since i gave you the last installment, i thought i'd pass this one on so you don't have to go through james' neglected page. you are welcome.

skyler jo,
as i sat there under the overpass, and happily melted under the watch of your giddy, lazy-eyed countenance, i tried to imagine the way we would have become. i waltzed down the aisles of the buttermuck-floored theater of my psyche just as the projector started rolling our feature. and there i grew mildly queasy as i envisioned our lonely, weather-beaten, upper-lower hovel. a scrappy, uneven lawn-in parts grotesquely overgrown, in other parts arid and scarred-surrounded the desperate structure where i returned home after another nine hours in faithless economic bondage. maybe it's that i can't remember our childrens' real names, or maybe it's that the names they've acquired socially are spitley, flunky, dobbins, fatty, codge, and peckerwood, but it seems that there is a distance between us that will never be crossed. and feeding their interests as well as their maws has become all the worse since you left your dancing career in lieu of the cesarian section which turned out to be a veritable bane against the crumpled, sweaty bills that once sustained us so much more comfortably. so now i must concede a surrender to us, because a never-ending horde of stranger children, joyless wife, bill collectors, bail bondsmen, land developers, crackheads, pissed-off cops, telemarketers, circus freaks, and your unrestrainable cousin delmar -who wouldn't let his torch for you drop any more than he would stop threatening my life and the lives of our heinous brood every single day of this pornographically pathetic excuse for each reveiller-is beating at our door. and now it's holes in the brain. yes, holes in the brain for daddy.

i'm sorry,
delmer