Well, there is this

There is this, if you are interested.

Something about a limbic system

Over at amazon, one customer wrote the following about my strange book:

Okay, so say you're channel surfing, and you come across ... oh I don't know, The Reaper, and you think to yourself, not a bad premise--a bunch of kids, minimum wage employment, some cute girls, lots of supernatural elements ... but something's missing--what the hell's missing from this picture? And then it dawns on you; Bukowski! Bukowski is missing. If Buk could rise up from the dead and find employment as one of the writers for The Reaper, you'd have something pretty similar to Stygiophilia, a fast paced, tight-lined, no holds barred, brick to the head, macabre tale of one man's quest for absolution.

This is a great read. A quick read (98 pages), but a great one none the less. Nathan gets in and gets out, but still manages to slowly reveal a horrific back story that shapes everything the narrator (and the reader) experiences.

My only issue with the book is the layout, but that's just (I assume) a technical issue and easily overlooked once you get cruising along with the story line, which--from a writing standpoint--is liquid smooth.

You can read it for free here

You can buy it here

Old Fish

Down here the min­ing com­pa­nies built the towns. Every­one owed their liv­ing to the min­er­als com­ing from the belly of the earth. Even if they didn't swing a pick in the dark, they worked at one of the room­ing houses, shops, or saloons that the min­ers needed. As things will, the shaft min­ing dried up. The bosses brought in giant elec­tric shov­els for strip min­ing and most of the min­ers, no longer needed, left to find work on farms or in fac­to­ries. The big shov­els tore wounds in the earth. to get to the coal, nickel and Galena hid­den below. Those giant ruts stayed and even­tu­ally the sky filled them and they became lakes that would out­last the com­pa­nies respon­si­ble for them. Around here they call them strip pits. Some of the pits were fed by streams and with the rains came the fish. They grew in abun­dant vari­ety and every young man was expected to make his first catch in one of those pits. The giant shov­els, aban­doned, were left to rot where they stood; not unlike the min­ers that pre­dated them.

When I was five my dad took me on my first real fish­ing trip. He would have got­ten to it ear­lier, but he had spent most of my life on the road build­ing a pipeline to move nat­ural gas across the coun­try. We took his lit­tle flat bot­tomed row boat out to County Pit 23 and shoved off into the water. He rowed while I looked around at the oak and elm trees that lined the banks. I was try­ing to spot a sas­safras tree so we could dig up some root and make tea that night. My best mem­o­ries of my dad up to then were of boil­ing the root, strain­ing it then adding just enough sugar before we hud­dled together on the couch and watched what­ever mind­less thing the TV had to offer.

Dad found a good spot and handed me my rod. It was a trusty Zebco 33. His was fancier. We were after cat­fish and flat­heads so we used chicken liver as bait. Chicken liver is great for cat­fish. When it hits the water the blood spreads and swirls and the smell moves out like a sig­nal. Cat­fish are drawn like sharks from hun­dreds of yards away. Shad works well too, but you can never get the stink off your hands.
Dad popped the to
p on a can of Pabst and cast his line. Some­thing hit almost imme­di­ately. He strug­gled a bit, then pulled in a small cat. It was too lit­tle, so he tossed it back.

“Grow some more, lit­tle man,” he said to the fish as he let it slither back into the murk.
Two hours of that and dad had hooked three good sized cats. All I had man­aged to catch was a baby drum, which I badly wanted to keep.

“No, son,” the old man said, “we’ll come back and catch him when he’s all grown up.”
I asked for help rebait­ing my hook. Dad linked the liver over my hook then I cast into a shady spot near the bank and waited. Min­utes passed. I kept watch­ing the bank, want­ing some­thing to hap­pen. Then my line went tight. Some­thing big. I thought that I had the daddy of all cat­fish on the end of that line. The thing wanted to pull me into the water as badly as I wanted to pull it out.

Dad grabbed my arms and helped steady me while I fought. When the thing cleared the water I was ter­ri­fied. The thing looked like a leg­less croc­o­dile with fins. It was part mon­ster, part dinosaur and part fish and I knew that it wanted me. Its  dead eyes spoke of rep­til­ian hunger and pre­his­toric rage. This was that crea­tures’  planet and he wanted it back.

I took hold of the rough thing and tried to work the hook out of its razor jaw. My fin­gers went too deep and I felt the fire as the sharp teeth sipped through my flesh. Blood seemed to be every­where and dad moved so fast that the boat almost over­bal­anced. He tore the thing from my hands and cut the line with his pocket knife. The mon­ster slith­ered back into the murky water with tan­gles of my skin still hang­ing from its teeth.

I watched the gar until it van­ished into the mud and knew that I would never swim in that pit again.

First appeared in Fried Chicken and Coffee

This seems like theft

So, I discovered that apparently someone is giving away copies of Mr. Overby is Falling (that's one of my books). This site lists it as a free download.

No one got my permission for this. I think this is theft.

I'm a bit upset.

Poor Old Ezra

We keep Ezra Pound in a cage and charge the suckers in the crowd five bucks a head to file silently past and watch with slack jaws and milky eyes as the old man squats, naked, bestial and recites endlessly from the Cantos .

Toback leans in close to me, his shoulders descending from his neck as if a lead weight were hanging on them, sighs without remorse and says: "You take too much." I let my hand slide down the cool of metal that describes the bars that hold the old beast sternly in place. Somewhere, just beyond my understanding, I ache.

Occasionally someone will try to speak to the old poet and he will growl. The noise, guttural and raw rises from his throat and the crowd pauses. They wonder if this is the beginning of some new poem. Perhaps a sonnet. Perhaps a foray into postmodernism. They've never read Moby Dick.

Pound squints his eyes at them. They are eyes filled with dark light and bad intentions. Those eyes speak of things best not considered. They speak of ovens and showers and badly skewed rhymes.

A small boy, his hair askew, breaks from his mothers grasp, runs to the cage and shoots his tiny ballad fist between the bars. Ezra Pound stops and move toward the child. At first it seems that he will attack. But then, and with much portent, Pound gives the boy his annotated copy of The Wasteland and a few worn crayons.


and this 

A free Book

My novel Stygiophilia is now on line, free - feel free to read it. Or don't. Whatever.

here it is

If My Name Was Liam I Would Fake an Exotic Accent to Get Laid

I discovered a walrus living in my freezer. I beat it to death with my ex-girlfriend's femur (I don't know why the femur was still in my apartment, you'd think she would have taken it with her when she left), then I took the walrus out to a nice restaurant, but I made it pay the bill.

When you are sleeping I will evolve into a bird, then devolve into a reptile. When you wake up you will be upset by my lidless eyes staring down at you.

The scent of Bubble Yum makes me horny.

I love you so much that I want to use a rusty box cutter to slice you open from your cunt to your chin, then hollow your body out and build a pillow fort inside you. I will be a king inside your body. When I get tired of the fort I will fill the cavity with whisky and swim around in it. First I will have to learn to swim.

Fuck you! I look good in this hat.

I wish I was a dog because then no one would be really mad when I piss on their carpet.

Your eyes make me want to dismantle the stars and suffocate the moon. No one really needs those things anyway.

The thing about the Walrus was a lie. I paid the bill (but I made him get the tip).

A Primer on Finding God in the Details

This, is my favorite of all the poems I wrote in the years 2005 - 2013

A Primer on Finding God in the Details

I camp in the tree outside your window and shave with broken glass so that you wont hear the ants eating their way out through my skin. I want to apologize to my blood. It isn't the blood's fault that it keeps me alive. In fact, if my blood had any choice in the matter I am certain that it would flee my body and go live in a Golden Retriever on a farm somewhere. Through the window I watch you undress. Your body is too small for your size and I want to gut you, hollow you out and live inside your hollowed out body. Someday I will give up on this. For now I will watch you sleep and think about dismantling your eyes.

Listen to Elliot Smith and think about how stars die alone in the vacuum of space. They must get terribly sad . Imagine their pleas to no one and find that you are well on your way to believing in nothing. Western literature has primed you for nihilism. Mort de Credit . You strip naked and walk along a wire made of walrus entrails and use an umbrella to balance. Below you is a flaming lake of dying stars.

I decamp from your tree and move to Tupelo where the news tells of a Rhinoceros escaped from the zoo terrifying the poorer residents of the town's outskirts communities where they live in mud huts and shotgun shacks. To feel clean, even, straight, I shave my head and get a tattoo that says "There is No Magic" across my forearm. The tattoo artist has a lisp and almost misspells my ink. I want to gut him and hollow him out and live inside his body drinking cheap whisky all day. Instead I look for a job sweeping up after eyeless men in a bar downtown. It is my job to maintain the dank. It's a decorating choice.

You will find yourself looking out your window, naked and not hollowed out, searching your tree for my shape, which is your shape with more meat, and wishing that I was still there. Fuck you, though. I've moved on.

I collect snakes and carnival glass and green stamps and dream of a day when I will be able to forget your broken, bruised, small frame. On the street a man with squid tentacles in place of his face asks me for a dollar to buy a drink and I give him the razor blades from my pocket. Every night, alone in my apartment drinking Four Roses I call the Eff Bee Eye and confess to being the Zodiac killer. This despite the fact that Zodiac started killing four years before I was born and despite the fact that I have never seen San Francisco. They want to believe me.

Everyone needs something to believe in. Even dying stars must think of something greater than themselves as they collapse into singularity. They can take solace in knowing that their mass will curve space-time and draw a colloquy of matter to its end. The crows understand this instinctively.

I deserve a little more.

I am trash, but even trash needs to be wanted or loved. We discard it to the politic worm and the men who will siphon methane to power factories that make the machineries of death. Like the stars, your used cup from Starbucks deserves the belief that it serves a higher purpose. Maybe enough Starbucks cups could warp space-time and pull us all into oblivion.

Maybe we would mistake all those discarded cups for God.

A Matter of Survival

This first appeared in Word Riot

A Matter of Survival

by

Nathan Tyree

The first time you kill you tell yourself that it's only a matter of survival. You say, softly so no one will hear, it was him or me. I had no choice, you say. You look at the dead man's eyes (if you ever get that close) and try not to imagine the light that should be there. You try to think about the sand in your boots and how it is abrading your sole. You try to focus on the itch at the back of your neck. Any small annoyance will suffice. Anything will do as long as you don't have to imagine the dead man smiling at his wife.

Your buddies have no idea. They will slap you on the back and tell you how you have saved all of them; tell you that you're some great fighting machine. All the while you're trying to convince yourself that it was only a matter of survival.

The second one is easier. You can grit your teeth and, with a little concentration, block out the dead man's children who want to weep and tear their clothes in your head. It was him or me, boys, you'll say loudly enough for the others to hear this time.

By the fourth or fifth you can't even see their faces any more. By the seventh the dreams and night sweats have vanished. By the tenth you no longer imagine the light that should be in your eyes. You tell jokes and talk about women. Your buddies laugh and marvel that you are born again hard. None of them suspect that there is something rotting inside of you.

After the war, when you rotate back to the world, you start to miss it. You can't sleep in your bed any more. It's too soft and the room is too quiet. Sometimes you catch yourself measuring the distance and the elevation between you and a stranger, calculating how much to lead for the wind. It's then that you can feel the rifle in your hands.

You don''t open up in the 7-11 with an Uzi. You don't kill your best friend''s wife. You wouldn't do that even if you had a best friend. Maybe you drink a little more than you used to. And maybe, once in a while, you catch yourself with the cold end of your .45 against your temple. Even so, you think that mostly you've adjusted well. You only wish that they would have warned you.

All through basic they drilled it in hard: you could die over there. What they never really made you understand was, you could kill too.

I am the harbinger

September 24 is my birthday. I am very glad to learn that this year will be the last birthday, not only for me, but for everyone! MwaaaaHaaaaHaaaaa!

Approximately 15 recent Hollywood movies about the sudden destruction of the Earth have shown a digital clock, calendar or newspaper showing Sept. 24, 2015, as the day when the world ends. The “Simpsons” on television showed the sudden destruction of the world with Sept. 24, 2015, shown on a digital clock. The television comedy “Third Rock from the Sun” showed the alien who was the college professor lecturing to his college class, asking, "So what if the earth will be suddenly vaporized without warning on Sept. 24, 2015? The television commercial for the upcoming "Heroes" show this fall, ends the commercial by saying something big is coming and then immediately shows the date Sept. 24, 2015. Recent music videos and music productions on stage also portray the sudden destruction of the Earth.

On May 13, 2014, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius stated more than once during a news conference that we had only 500 days until climate chaos, to which our own Secretary of State John Kerry, who stood beside him, kept shaking his head “yes.” This 500-day period of peace before climate chaos ends Sept. 24, 2015.

Link


Ed Brayton demolishes it here. Don't listen to Ed, though. I am bringing about the end. For my birthday this year I want a pony, and a batman action figure, and a cake, and an apocalypse... 


In other news, How to launch a baby into space

Approximately 15 recent Hollywood movies about the sudden destruction of the Earth have shown a digital clock, calendar or newspaper showing Sept. 24, 2015, as the day when the world ends. The “Simpsons” on television showed the sudden destruction of the world with Sept. 24, 2015, shown on a digital clock. The television comedy “Third Rock from the Sun” showed the alien who was the college professor lecturing to his college class, asking, “So what if the earth will be suddenly vaporized without warning on Sept. 24, 2015? The television commercial for the upcoming “Heroes” show this fall, ends the commercial by saying something big is coming and then immediately shows the date Sept. 24, 2015. Recent music videos and music productions on stage also portray the sudden destruction of the Earth. - See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2015/09/05/michigan-man-pens-staggeringly-stupid-column-on-the-lhc/#sthash.DCEFnd81.dpuf

Approximately 15 recent Hollywood movies about the sudden destruction of the Earth have shown a digital clock, calendar or newspaper showing Sept. 24, 2015, as the day when the world ends. The “Simpsons” on television showed the sudden destruction of the world with Sept. 24, 2015, shown on a digital clock. The television comedy “Third Rock from the Sun” showed the alien who was the college professor lecturing to his college class, asking, “So what if the earth will be suddenly vaporized without warning on Sept. 24, 2015? The television commercial for the upcoming “Heroes” show this fall, ends the commercial by saying something big is coming and then immediately shows the date Sept. 24, 2015. Recent music videos and music productions on stage also portray the sudden destruction of the Earth. - See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2015/09/05/michigan-man-pens-staggeringly-stupid-column-on-the-lhc/#sthash.DCEFnd81.dpuf

Mr Overby

Mr. Overby is Falling, my novella that should likely be forgotten, is sort of being adapted for film. A short film based on sections of the book is underway in Los Angeles as we speak. I will give more information when it is available.