“You know because, fuck the world.”
From: Six Sheep
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 9:03 AM
To: Julia
Subject: Blow
I started writing a story about Austin but I just couldn’t continue it.
Let me describe how I feel right now. I feel like everything I see and touch is some kind of cold, seamless illusion. It feels like a Proust novel. It feels like the beginning of Swann’s Way.
Also, I think my forehead is bleeding, because I keep getting blood on my hand every time I touch my forehead. But I can’t tell where I am bleeding from.
I have this strange kind of yearning today. Like I need something from somebody. A spiritual hunger. Or maybe just hunger hunger.
Austin is a nut.
a big fat fucking cornball nut
From: Julia
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 12:06 PM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: RE: Blow
I had that yearning this morning, but it went away. Because I went to the top of the Carew Tower at lunch, by myself, listening to David Gray, and looked out over the city far far below me and at the butterfly that had somehow got caught in an updraft and was up there with me floating around all dizzy and dazed, and I thought how thinking about killing myself is kind of like masturbating in the privacy of my head, and then I looked around a little more and came back down and the yearning was all gone. But I felt a little dirtier.
What makes Austin a big fat fucking cornball nut?
From: Six Sheep
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 9:16 AM
To: Julia
Subject: RE: Blow
A production company (I think [deleted] but he won’t actually tell me which one) gave him 500,000 dollars to make a documentary. at least I think they did. I can’t tell what Austin is actually doing down there.
About six weeks ago he quit his job doing phone support so he could “do movies full time” and so far I think he has just gone into manic phase and lost all touch with reality.
Because you see, Austin is a manic-depressive and requires no less than three (3) medicines going full blast in his bloodstream in order to function normally.
On top of all this he has so much Adderall in his bloodstream that his blood has turned into that toxic shit that dissolves steel like it does in fuckin Alien.
Every time I talk to him now he just spouts a bunch of nutty shit like “when are you going to come down here and be my script consultant?” and “I drove 80 mph through a stoplight today while I was trying to get to a shoot” and “your girlfriend and my girlfriend should make a porn with lots of cake and frosting in it” and other random nonsense.
He hasn’t paid a single one of his bills since March and he’s on the verge of getting kicked out of his house and all he talks about is shit he wants to make movies of.
also, he’s in love with this girl in Delaware and she’s exactly 17 years old and he’s going to go there and fuck her which I’m certain is a federal crime. Furthermore . . . christ. What else can I say about him. he has an eight foot tall portrait of himself on a horse, in his house. Of himself. On a horse.
hold on second let me find the fucking picture.
From: Julia
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 12:20 PM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: RE: Blow
You know, I don’t believe you’ve ever said. Where exactly do you know this Austin from?
From: Six Sheep
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 9:27 AM
To: Julia
Subject: RE: Blow
I am not going to tell you how I know Austin. I am going to let his origins remain a mystery. It tickles me to think that I could somehow convince you that I’m not sure how I met him, that he has always been there, doing something nutty, and is not a real person at all but simply a psychotic delusion I’ve imagined. Like Fight Club or something.
Because honestly, he is my Tyler Durden. He is Brad Pitt to my Ed Norton. Here is the girl.
From: Julia
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 12:32 PM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: RE: Blow
Well. She is awfully cute. But she knows it. Obviously.
So Austin’s dangerous.
From: Six Sheep
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 9:34 AM
To: Julia
Subject: RE: Blow
He carries a crowbar with him where-ever he goes. The crowbar in that picture? He takes it everywhere. He takes it into grocery stores.
From: Julia
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 12:36 PM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: RE: Blow
Has he ever used it on anyone? Or thing?
From: Six Sheep
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 9:42 AM
To: Julia
Subject: RE: Blow
Let me tell you how he got it. He was driving 80 MPH through a side street, like he always does.
He drives one of those jacked up Celica convertibles. It probably pulls about 200 horse. It is brand new. I have no idea how he paid for it.
Anyway, he was driving down a side street and heard a BANG and slammed on his brakes. He looked around, and saw that nobody was discharging a weapon, so he resumed speeding. He gets home and gets out of his car and sees that there is a crowbar wedged in the frame of his car.
It was in the frame of the car. He had run over it and propelled it backwards from the front tire, point first, into the frame of the car below the door. It was hanging there like a loose tooth.
He had to take it to a guy with a cutting torch so they could cut the frame of the car, extract the crow bar, and then weld his car frame back together in that spot.
From: Julia
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 12:44 PM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: RE: Blow
Your friend Austin sounds exhausting.
Why do you refer to him as your spiritual advisor?
From: Six Sheep
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 9:45 AM
To: Julia
Subject: RE: Blow
Because he is my advisor on all spiritual matters
From: Julia
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 12:46 PM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: RE: Blow
Oh. Well. Silly me.
From: Six Sheep
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 9:53 AM
To: Julia
Subject: RE: Blow
lol, it’s because we sit and talk on aim in the exact same way that 12-year-old girls did on the phone in the 80s. We just sit and talk for HOURS. this is what we talk about:
1) our girlfriends
2) girls that aren’t our girlfriends that we want to lay
3) A_____
4) stupid creative projects that we will never do, ever
5) tits
6) beer
7) food
8) masturbation
9) homemade porn
10) Republicans and why they suck
These same ten things over and over. Then occasionally he goes off and fucks a teenager. I figure I can pretty much tell him anything that I’m thinking and he won’t disapprove of it. and that’s true. I just blurt out these horrible things, sometimes I am whining to him for hours. and he just smiles and nods.
_________________________________________
From: Julia
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 8:06 AM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: RE: Blow
Sixy, how is your day.
From: Six Sheep
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 12:48 PM
To: Julia
Subject: RE:
Man, I dunno. I’m trying to make this disk array work. I thought it was the disk, but now it looks like it’s the disk controller. I don’t know what to do about that. I feel like just fudging the controller to make it look like it’s fixed.
This guy waited like, two weeks for his replacement part, and it’s the wrong part.
I dunno if he cares however.
I woke up this morning and looked at my house. It is like a guerrilla war in there. The other day I was looking for a data cable. It’s the data cable that goes from my computer to my GPS unit. You need it in order to put topographical maps in the unit. This comes in awfully handy when you are on a trail in the middle of nowhere and you want to know where there is a place to get naked and swim. So, this data cable. I have two of them. One is broken. The other is working. I found the broken one in about thirty seconds. I searched for the working one but of course I could not find it.
So I spent about an hour trying to cut the broken cord apart and somehow manually splice it to my GPS but of course that didn’t work. So then I took my house apart looking for the cord. Which I have, I have this cord. I looked in everything I own in the world, which takes exactly an hour to do, and I did not find the cord. But I left all my possessions thrown out everywhere all over my apartment.
The next day I went to REI store and shoplifted the cord. You know, because fuck the world.
Two days ago a guy in New Jersey sent me $25 for a sound card. Yesterday I told him via email that I mailed him the card. The card is in a Amazon.com box in my car, with no address or stamp on it.
My car is making this sound like a zombie. It moans. What is making the moaning is the air filter box. When you turn the car on it makes this whining noise like the intake isn’t getting any air or it doesn’t like the air it’s getting or elsewise something grossly inappro is happening in the air intake path area. It was stalling my car and making it so that it chugged like a tugboat in a 1920’s cartoon.
Being that I have no money I tore the air filter box apart and put it back together again, as men often do with devices they know nothing about.
It now works slightly better and only chugs right after you start it.
I have approximately three lumps on my head. One happened when I ran into a door frame yesterday. I ran into the door frame because Alice was throwing her toothpaste at me for reasons I can’t remember. I think she was naked and I was trying to bite her ass.
The other two bumps, I think happened Sunday night, when I got drunk and thought it might be cool to climb on the roof of my apartment building.
My Egyptian neighbor downstairs hates me. He hates me. Mostly because I am always dropping large boxes on the floor on my apartment at 1 in the morning. But also because when I’m drunk, I go out on the deck and try to climb on the roof of the building, and it drives him nuts.
There are other reasons, also.
He’s very Muslim. When they moved in, the first thing they did after they put their possessions in the house was to put the mats down and pray. and I walked down the steps in my flip flops and hairy face and walked past them facing their porch kneeling on their little prayer mats and touching the floor: the man, his wife, and the boy. in an empty apartment in America with large boxes from Office Depot all around them.
and today I drove to work listening to the high schooler AM station and they were playing “fields of gold” by sting and all of a sudden I had a memory of slow dancing with Shelby a homecoming dance in high school and I looked around at the Cascades way off in the distance and I realized I’m a long way from Ohio.
Okay well his machine is rebuilding the array, whatever that means. I think maybe the “fail” on the array might’ve just been because this dell P.O.S. poweredge server doesn’t have the slightest clue that its controller is fuxxor. maybe the controller isn’t even fuxxor. Maybe after the rebuild it will be just fine.
and I will go home and eat some jolly ranchers and tell Austin what to say to the 17 year old and I will try to figure out how not to spend my last 58 dollars.
“thinking about killing myself is kind of like masturbating in the privacy of my head” is the most disturbing thing you’ve ever said to me
From: Julia
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 4:00 PM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: RE:
I’m glad I know you. Today is a day in which, I need to know Six Sheep, in my life.
From: Six Sheep
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 2:10 PM
To: Julia
Subject: RE:
I have this rice cooker.
It’s a fantastic rice cooker. It’s one of those devices that are out there that are so fuckup-proof that a maladroit tortoise with spinal cord injuries could successfully operate it. You can put sixteen plus cups of rice in there and whatever fuck-all amount of water and Mazola you feel like dumping in there and hit the button, and thirty minutes later you will have a small universe of fluffy rice. You don’t have to measure shit. It never fucks up a batch of rice. The pot on the inside of it, where the magic happens, is covered with a eighty millimeter layer of the best non-stick coating I have ever seen. You could funnel road tar into it using a traffic cone and then pop out a perfectly round mold of the inside of the bucket after the tar hardened.
I often buy a small bag of rice and cook up the whole thing and eat out of the rice cooker for a week. After a day or two the rice dries up and forms balls and you can roll it into a ball and put K.C. Masterpiece and butter on it and it’s quite tasty.
There is an excellent, excellent documentary film called Hearts & Minds. It was released in 1974 and won the Oscar for best documentary. It’s directed by a fellow named Peter Davis, who was nobody but some CBS reporter that covered the Vietnam war, and then decided to make a film out of Vietnam. The first time you watch the film, everything seems to be out of order. There are images of Americans at picnics smashed together with toothless Vietnamese screaming and full bore running down the road, carrying luggage with clothes hanging out of it, while American soldiers stand idly alongside toting a rifle and staring. It cuts from two corporals painting a helicopter and wearing uniforms that have the word KILL painted with paint on their backs, to an Air Force captain in Omaha talking to a room full of third grade children about war. A woman’s husband is being buried in Vietnam and she tries to jump into the grave with him. There is a great reel of three American soldiers in a small bare room with rags over the windows rolling around naked on cots with Vietnamese whores. The next scene is an old Vietnamese man getting his head blown off by a GI’s sidearm. He lays there in the street and spurts blood out of his brain case for three minutes. It goes pump, pump, pump and spurts out in a gently slowing rhythm. The camera just rolls and rolls and everybody seems pretty nonplussed by the fact that there is a dead, innocent human on the ground that will never think or feel or have another experience again, and instead will become a pile of soot.
I sometimes turn this film on and turn it off and it’s a great film because you can just watch it in any order you like and it still makes sense. It is like an exhibit in a museum, where you push buttons and different parts of the exhibit light up, and a voice tells you what is happening in that part of the exhibit.
This job is much like that. You push a button and a small part of the machine turns on and does something. Then you push another button and a new piece of the machine is illuminated, and starts working. The other part shuts off. Hi ho, hi ho.
Anyway, Sunday night when I was drunk I felt like eating some rice, so I went to the rice cooker and opened up the lid and put my hand in there. But what greeted me was not happy, fluffy rice that sticks to my fingers and tastes like paste, only sweeter. Instead I put my hand into this pile of wet mush, that was much like cat barf after it’s been down there a while and gotten all cold. I had closed the lid on the rice cooker instead of letting it air out, and it had condensed and gotten soggy and shitty in there.
Disgusted by this, I took the rice cooker pot to the porch and I flung the rice out into the trees behind my apartment. Instead of traveling in an arc from the pot to the trees, however, it decided to go flying in every nutty direction and landed all over the place. All over my porch, all over the egyptian’s porch, all over the small yard of the apartment two stories down from me, everywhere. It was like a shotgun blast of white puke.
I felt bad about this, but determining there was not a lot I could do about it in my current state of mind, I just went back inside and locked the door.
I was holding the rice cooker pot in my hands and I sat down at my computer machine. My computer machine now has two monitors, fyi. On one monitor, General Westmoreland was sitting and talking in that gravelly Army Uberlord voice about how he was never given enough, that it wasn’t his fault that the war had gone totally wrong, it was the fault of the politicians trying to run a war for television, instead of winning. The other monitor was Austin going on and on about the teenage girl. During the Vietnam war the United States dropped more ordinance on North Vietnam than every air force in the world did on every country that was bombed during all of World War 2. The VC lost ten percent of the population of the country. On the screen it cut away to a toothless Vietnamese man saying as long as there is rice in the fields, we are going to fight the Americans. and if the Americans bomb the fields, we will plow them and fight again. go back and tell Nixon that we will fight and that he will never win this war.
There is this passage written by Milan Kundera in which he succinctly explains, in about 500 words, why it is necessary for us to have God. He says the first time a man took a shit in the forest and knew what he had done with his own body, he needed to invent God. He needed to know purity and strength because his own body is a vehicle for corruption and weakness. There had to be a sanity and justice that was bright enough to blot out the madness and stink in his own mind. Just at that moment, with that platinum-plated empty rice pot there in my hands and my small hairy dick poking out from between my legs, I knew exactly what he meant.
From: Julia
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 5:22 PM
To: Six Sheep
Subject: RE:
Do you know:
The girl who sits next to me can tell when I get your emails. Because I have this certain laugh that I laff when I read your emails. And
I was just reading an email from you. And she said, “Six?”
And I realized I was doing the laff.
From: Six Sheep
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 2:25 PM
To: Julia
Subject: RE:
Oh fuck yes. The drive auto-recovered and completely unfucked itself. I can fix things. I was right. It was the drive, it wasn’t the controller at all.
I was right Julia!
I am a slob and lecher and a thief and I litter and shoplift and I can’t find my shoes in the morning and I’m wasting my talents by not writing but goddammit I can fix computers.
Six Sheep 