Van Jason Hillard 5/20/25 Van Jason Hillard 5/20/25

Flight Time

Carl and Tara didn’t really start talking into each other until about thirty minutes into the actual flight. They were flying direct from Texarkana, Arkansas to Las Vegas, Nevada, where they were going to get married, despite their vast difference in age.

Carl was hunched over looking out the window to his left. He patted Tara on her knee, which made her jump a tiny bit, and said, “I’ve ridden on these puddle jumpers probably three hundred times and they still scare the you-know-what out of me.”

“See, I like them because it feels like you’re actually really flying,” said Tara, folding her flimsy Wired magazine and sliding it into the back of the seat in front of her. “Those gigantic jumbo jets feel, I don’t know, super stationary the whole time, except for when you’re taking off and landing.”

Carl turned and looked at her. “When the hell did you ride on a jumbo jet? You’re barely old enough to eat hard candy.”

“My dad took me to Lisbon for my sixteenth.”

“I bet he did,” said Carl. “When was that, last week?”

“You better hope not,” Tara said, elbowing him a harder than she intended.

“Last thing in the world I need,” Carl said. “Another free trip to the zoo.”

They held hands and their collective hand dangled awkwardly over the edge of the arm rest between them until Tara unclasped her hand and lifted the arm rest and then reclasped Carl’s hand and let their collective hand rest on his knee.

“Does this mess up your probation at all?” Tara asked him.

“It does if I get caught. But the only person who’d catch me is Danny, and I got Danny right here until I decide to let him out,” Carl said, patting the buttoned-up top left pocket of his rodeo shirt. Danny was Carl’s parole officer and also the boyfriend of Carl’s sister Gina, who was, in turn, was married to Tara’s father Gideon.

“You know you never did tell me what you got in trouble for,” Tara said.

“That’s what you call a deliberate omission of information, sugar booger,” Carl said, flipping their hands over and stroking her palm with his thumb, which looked at once long and stubby.

“Don’t call me sugar booger.”

“What’s wrong with sugar booger, sugar?”

“It reminds me of Dad. He calls cocaine booger sugar.”

“Your daddy has used every slang syllable for cocaine under the sun, moon, and stars at some point in his life. Back when we were doing our thing, we used to mostly call it Benny Blanco, from that Pacino movie with what’s-his-nuts in it as the cokehead lawyer who gets blasted at the end.”

They drifted into a little swath of silence. The midday clouds below and around the plane looked impoverished and ugly.

“What did you do?” Tara said.

“What did I do what?”

“What did you go to jail for?”

“Shit, I don’t know…” Carl said, fidgeting like a hamster now. “Okay, you want to know the truth? A bunch of boring-ass stuff that just kinda collected over the years. There was no like major offense or anything. A whole bunch of too much this or not enough that. Stupid stuff, really. Kind of embarrassing, to be honest with you. I wish I could just say, yeah, I robbed a bank, but then that’d just make me a liar, which I guess ain’t a crime, thank fucking God.”

Tara contemplated this. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

“Oh God,” Carl said, beginning to enjoy this. “Ten-way tie, really.”

“Just like a shitty horse race,” Tara said, smiling.

Carl loved Tara’s smile. It was the smile of someone who was twenty-one on the dot but already well aware of the bare-knuckle ruthlessness of life. Tara had asked Carl a dozen times over the two months that they had really come to know each what the favorite thing was that he liked about her, and he had lied every single time and said something other than her smile, for fear of introducing any self-awareness to it, which might mess it up somehow. He had said, her legs was his favorite thing about her, or her ass, or her boobies, or her eyes, or her hair, and he had even thrown out a few super specific things (the back of her neck, her upper lip, how her ankles segue into her calves real nicely, et cetera, et cetera), but it was her smile that at once made him feel like he had won the lotto, and it also instilled a fiery lust in him.

Tara said to him, “C’mon, Old Man, tell me one real bad thing that you did.”

Carl did not at all like it when Tara called him Old Man because, at the age of sixty-seven, he was indeed an old man.

“On Christmas Eve, 1984, I beat a guy to death with a golf club in a pool hall in western Massachusetts.”

“Bull-fuckin’-shit.”

“I am as serious as a brain tumor.”

“How did that happen?”

“Long story.”

“Long flight.”

“Not it’s not,” Carl said. “We’ll be on the ground before you can say Hocus Pocus Abracadabra.”

“Yeah, maybe if we crash.”

“Planes don’t crash at this altitude. Unless they’re zapped by lightning or another plane goes slammin’ into them.” Carl said, punching the palm of his hand for effect.

Tara very briefly thought of what it’d be like if another plane flew into them right now at this moment. Probably your brain would just go haywire and none of it would really register. It was horrifying to think about, that’s for sure. Her thoughts ambled elsewhere.

“You ever seen a UFO?” She asked Carl.

“I’ve been staring at the sky my whole damn life and I have not seen one flying object that I could not identify. Plane after plane after plane after satellite.”

“Bummer. Any ghosts or Bigfoot or anything?”

“Nope. I had a TV turn on by itself once and that is about it. How about you? Ever been ab-ducted?”

“Yeah, but not by aliens.”

Carl did not at all like it when their cartoonish conversations veered into the realm of seriousness, so he changed the subject.

“I really do like your hair. Bold burgundy.”

Tara had chopped off her hair two days ago and died it auburn, or, yeah, bold burgundy, according to the box.

“Oh, you like it now. Two days ago you said it was interesting.”

“Where I come from, interesting is a very positive adjective.”

“Where do you come from?”

“You really wanna know? One day many, many moons ago, way back in the 1953, my mother was out shopping for a new car, and she thought she really had to go to the bathroom…”

“Shut up. God, you’re such a cornball.”

“I’m serious! What do you think Carl is short for? Car Lot. On account of that’s where I came squirtin’ out. Car Lot Jenkins.”

Tara wished he had not reminded her of what will be her new last name sooner than later. She started chewing on her thumbnail.

“I’m just fucking with you, baby,” said Carl. “I was born on Barksdale Air Force base in Bossier City, Louisiana. Right side of the tracks, wrong side of the river.”

Tara leaned up in her seat and turned to face him and said, “Do you think I have a shitty memory or something? Do you think I’ve just got rocks and garbage and dead bugs up here?” she said, tapping her head.

Carl was taken aback by this question, but he kept his cool. “I think you make that ol’ boy Dumbo look like a shoebox full of pistachio shells, that’s what I think. You got a spooky good memory, baby. Freaks me out sometimes, to be honest. And I think that brain of yours is probably the most adroit critter in the galaxy.”

Tara smiled and settled back into her seat, loosely wondering what the word adroit meant. Carl did the same and discreetly sighed. A hokey duo of esoteric dings sounded from unseen speakers, probably indicating either you could move about the cabin or not move about the cabin.

“It’s weird…” Tara said to Carl. “Because of the glow, you look sort of pixilated right now.”

“I look pixilated?”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“Maybe I am pixilated. Maybe that’s all this is, just a big computer game or something.”

“Just as viable to think that than think whatever else, really.”

“Amen.”

Tara further contemplated all this and said, “What if we’re stuck in a video game that our, like, I don’t know, future relatives come up with, and the name of the game is Faith, and the whole game is just everyone running around trying to make each other lose faith or gain faith…”

“Faith in what exactly?”

“Faith in religion,” Tara said. “Faith in the Christian God, you know, faith in God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and all that.”

“Gotcha. Continue.”

“I mean, that’s it. I’m just saying, it’d be kinda weird if all this was a video game.”

“It’d be a goddamn nightmare is what it’d be,” Carl said, wrangling with the tiniest shard of a nascent existentialist crisis.

Tara noticed his mild but visible discomfort. She was about to open her mouth and change the subject, but Carl said, “Did I ever tell you that me and Gina have a half-sister named Hope and another one—from a totally different mother, of course—named Faith?”

Tara could tell when Carl was joking or being corny and when he was serious.

“Ain’t that some shit?” Carl said.

“Hope and Faith,” Tara said, pondering this. “Do they know each other well?”

“No clue. I haven’t seen either one since Super Bowl Thirty, whenever that was. 1996. Downtown Larry Brown was the MVP. God…Thinking about Diana Ross doing her little shimmy during halftime still gives me a little bit of a baton rouge, if you know what I mean.”

Tara knew what he meant. She leaned over him and looked out the widow and said, “How high do you think we are?”

“High enough to make a big-ass splat if we fall out of this sucker.”

“I’m serious, what are we, like, thirty thousand feet?”

“Probably about that, yeah. Thirty thousand feet.”

“How many miles is that?”

“I have no idea.”

Tara chinned at him and said, “Diana Ross, huh? You like hanging out in the spice rack, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“When was the last time you dated a girl the same color as you?”

“Baby, I glow in the dark. Nobody’s the same color as me.”

“When was the last time you dated a white girl?”

Carl tilted his head at her and said, “You ain’t white?”

“Nope.”

“That is what, in some social circles, they call a big fat bummer.”

“Oh, hush,” Tara said. “No fault of mine my ancestors weren’t squid people like yours.”

“No, I guess not. I was wondering where your tan lines ran off to. Guess that explains it.”

“Babette, you know, my actual mom, is from Trinidad by way of basically everywhere, and you know what Dad is.”

“What is Gideon? I’ve known that prick for forty years, and I know where he grew up and everything, but to be truthful, I don’t know basically nothing about where he’s from.”

“He was born in Curitiba, in Brazil, but his dad was allegedly German, but nobody really knows. I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

“Ah, not all panthers are pink,” Carl said, half cryptic, half joking. “You ever take one of them spit tests?”

“Nope.”

“Hell, you ought to. Be kinda neat just to see where you’re from.”

“I crawled out of a test tube in Bethesda, Maryland.”

“Yeah, you did,” Carl said, glancing over at the flight attendant’s legs as she glided down the aisle, head swiveling. “I actually took a spit test year before last.”

“Oh, yeah? And what it’d tell you?” Tara said, playing along.

“What I already knew.”

“And what’d you already know?”

“That I am one hundred percent Comanche.”

It took Tara a second to remember what a Comanche is and then she made a fake laughing sound.

“I’m serious, Kemosabe!” Carl said. “I go to pay the ol’ boy that gave me the test, and I ask him, straight-faced and all, just like this, I ask him, Dr. Clay—that was his name, Dr. Morris Clay—I said, Dr. Clay, you prefer cash or check or women or stolen horses?”

“God, shut uppp…”

“But, check this out, that ol’ boy threw it right back at me too. He goes, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Jenkins, but we only accept scalps and thundersticks,’ just like that. I’ll never forget.”

“Elle-oh-elle.”

“I mean, it is partially true. According to my saliva, I’m English, Irish, Scottish, Choctaw, Cree, with some Mediterranean stuff mixed in.”

“Typical American mutt.”

“Pretty much.” Carl said. “You got, what, four brothers and sisters? Gina had two, I think, before she met Gideon, and Gideon had, what, two also, correct?”

“I have six brothers and sisters, not counting the abortions.”

Carl wanted to maneuver away from this topic carefully and speedily but Tara beat him to it. “If there was one thing you could go back and change,” she said. “What would it be?”

“Probably proposing to you over a goddamn bowl of cold miso soup.”

“Aw, that’s sweet,” Tara said, kissing him on the cheek. “It wasn’t cold, though, it was room temperature.”

“Must’ve been a cold room,” Carl said. “I just wish it could’ve been something, I don’t know, more special. Something memorable, like the swordfish at that joint in Destin we went to that time.”

“I still can’t believe that motel.”

“You and me both,” said Carl, following it with a sleazy whistle. “Of the seven zillion bags-of-bones on this planet, I guarantee you I’m on the only one that ever had to declare bankruptcy because of period sex.”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“Looked like the last five minutes of Jaws in there.”

“Hey, that was your idea,” Tara said. “I warned you.”

“I know you did, baby. I’m just giving you a hard time,” Carl said, wincing at the memories of the smell of blood. “The thing that pissed off was that little passo-aggro poofer working the front desk. He was about one thank you sir from getting the snot bubbles whipped out of him.”

“And those Mexican dudes in the Porsche who thought we were drug dealers.”

“Those dudes were not Mexican, baby, they were Salvadoran. And that wasn’t a Porsche, that was a Nissan 370Z, which actually does kind of look like a 911. And we are drug dealers, baby. Or at least one of us is.”

Tara worked as a bottle girl on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at an overpriced club called Score, and she made additional dough selling a brand new designer drug called Quetzolethalcol, or Lethal, as it had been mercifully shortened to on the street. Lethal made you feel like a winged jellyfish for about six endless hours and then it dropped you into a sea of battery acid. The sheer brutality of its comedown was responsible for about once suburban suicide a week and, according to the few eager beaver scientists that were studying it, Lethal killed somewhere between one million to two million human brain cells per dosage. It was not a good drug, but it was cheap to make and you could sell it at a high price. Carl had worked seven different jobs in the last six months and had not had more than five thousand dollars in his bank account since 1988. It was his idea that Tara start peddling Lethal. “Your teeny bopper amigos will go nutso for it,” he had told her, over a bottle of Crown Apple, which he had requested Tara swipe from her place of work. “I’m just saying you might want to get yourself a bigger piggy bank.”

That had been back in November. And now it was April and they were on their way to Vegas to get married. Tara’s ears popped. The plane was beginning to make its slo-mo descent. The captain got on the horn and started mumbling something about the arrival time and the outside temperature in Las Vegas.

Tara stretched and yawned real big so her ears would finish popping.

“The golf club you killed the guy with…”

“What about it?”

“What kind was it?”

“Like, what brand was it?”

“No, I mean, was it a 9-iron or a putter or what?”

“Oh. It was a 3-iron,” Carl said. “Only reason I ever knew it was a 3-iron because I had to memorize that crime report like it was the damn Canterbury Tales… Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Three strikes, he’s out. Just like MLB.”

“Interesting.”

“That it was.”

“My brother-in-law got killed with a bowling bowl in a batting cage in Cairo, Georgia.”

“Did he now?”

“Yep. It was pretty gnarly,” Tara said, nodding her head.

“I don’t doubt it,” said Carl, half-turning to face her. “Look, baby, you ever hear that expression, don’t bullshit a bullshitter? One of these days, I’m gonna sit you down and teach how to tell a proper lie.”

“How did I mess this one up?”

“Well, first of all, the six or seven people who live there don’t call it Kie-ro, they call it Kay-ro. And second of all, there’s an old antiquated Biscuitville County blue law that prohibits bowling bowls in batting cages.”

“I’m gonna barf all over you one day,” Tara said. “Just giving you a heads up.”

“I will most certainly deserve it.”

Tara leaned over him and looked out the window again. The ground way down beneath them was khaki colored.

“I wish it was nighttime,” she said. “America looks so fucking stupid from way up here at night. Stupid towns, stupid cities.”

“Spastic asterisks, every one of them,” said Carl.

“Ten-lane roads to everywhere and nowhere.”

“Zillions of lamps and lights, illuminating precisely nada.”

“Everybody in their car or on their phone or both.”

“Total detachment, AKA the American Dream.”

Tara kissed Carl. It was an arid, directionless kiss with travel breath and smacking sounds.

“Let’s go fight some battles together,” she said.

Carl grunted in accord. They settled into their seats and each of their minds drifted into the pseudo-consciousness that rules supreme at high altitudes.

Van Jason Hillard 5/3/25 Van Jason Hillard 5/3/25

The Flatwoods Monster Mash

Braxton County, WV, summer of 2022

I launched my girlfriend’s little Audi across the plush, hilly interior of West Virginia until finally mooring it in front of the Flatwoods Monster Museum in the living breathing Jim Jarmusch film of a town that is Sutton in Braxton County.

I walked in the museum and was immediately flanked by a good-natured cat and an affable gentleman, whom I recognized to be the owner of the establishment. We yapped about everything under the sun and moon and stars until my belly started growling so loudly that it was mistaken for a passing mud dragon (—the creepy hills of Braxton County are not for threadbare imaginations). I asked the man where I should have lunch and he directed me to a Flatwoods Monster-themed joint about six miles north of us that had homemade ice cream and burgers as big as box turtles.

I drove up to The Spot, as it is called, a self-proclaimed restaurant/dairy bar, and upon entering was ambushed by a wiry fellow with the indiscriminate zeal of a car salesman.

“Aye, man, great to see you again!” he yelped, as he walked past me and began opening the door with his back.

I looked at him like he was covered in grape jelly, so he said, “I didn’t just see you in here yesterday?”

“No, sir, you did not. I just peeled into town like fifteen minutes ago on the dot.”

“Damn… You sure?”

Was I sure? Yeah, I was sure, and told him as much.

“Well, then you got a double to end all doubles,” he said. “I’m tellin’ ya, man, same fruity little hat and everything!”

This encounter would not be my last with someone who had come across my doppelganger, who, it appeared, was a good twenty to thirty steps ahead of me.

Two hours later, on a sidewalk up in Morgantown, a guy with a meaty face and neon green fatigues came up to me and said, “You from the Isle of Mayo or what, brother? Don’t you know you gotta tip around here?”

“What are you yammering about?”

He ground his teeth audibly and said, “You gotta tip, man. Gratuity, you know? Twenty percent! Or fifteen percent at the very least! Or, you know, ten percent if you’re a total fucking shithead.”

I was certain I had never seen this man before, but he had clearly seen me. “You’re telling me I ate at your establishment, you were my waiter or whatever, I paid for my food, and I didn’t leave you a tip?”

“Yeah, that’s about the size of it. Dick.”

I took a big loud breath. My doppelganger was apparently trying to out-asshole me. “I think I know what’s going on here,” I said to the man, gravely. “I regret to inform you, sir, that you have been stiffed by my doppelganger.”

The man huffed and started to walk away.

“Yo, what did I eat?” I hollered at him. “At your restaurant, what did I have?”

“This a pop quiz?”

I pulled out a five spot and handed it to him. “That’s exactly what it is. And if you ace it, I’ll give you another one of these.” The prospect of cold cash tidied him up.

“You had a tuna melt with a basket of curly fries.”

Well, shit. My doppelganger had done his research. I gave the guy another five.

“Did I use a lot of ketchup?”

“You used half a whole thing of Heinz and pretty much a damn rainforest’s worth of napkins.”

I gave the man one more five and asked him where I had lunch, et cetera, et cetera… My doppelganger had apparently dined at O’Flannel’s Bubbles and Grubbery a couple of loose hours ago. Hmm… Where would I be right now had I eaten a whole tuna melt and a bunch of curly fries two hours ago? Probably rising from a wayward power nap, halfway under the covers in the cheapest hotel in town. But I was staying in the cheapest hotel in town, so...

I stopped by a gas station and got an eighteen pack of Coors Banquet beer in cans and went back to the hotel and poured half of the beer in the bathroom sink. I walked down the hallway to the ice machine and used the empty beer box as an ice pail and came back and poured the ice on top of the beers in the sink.

I heard my doppelganger laugh—my own laugh—before I saw him sitting in a chair over on the opposite side of the room from the bathroom.

“That’s wild, man,” he said. “I did the same exact shit, except I got bottles of Bud.”

“You must’ve got the last of the Bud because there wasn’t none left.”

“No, you just didn’t look hard enough, per usual.”

I opened two cans of Coors and then seeing that he’d brought one of his Bud bottles with him, I nestled one of the cans back in the ice.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and held up my beer and said cheers to my doppelganger.

“I kinda wanna smoke,” I said. “Can you smoke in here? Homeboy at the counter apparently learned how to speak English from watching Mr. Bean.”

“Yeah, I asked him earlier and he nodded no which I think means yes in his country.”

“I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“You and me both,” my doppelganger said, unbuttoning his black Banana Republic blazer. He lit an American Spirit and offered me one. “Man, ain’t it weird that we could boof each other and it’d only be considered masturbation?”

“Gross,” I said, squeezing three syllables out of the word.

My doppelganger eyed me suspiciously. “How’s it gross?”

“You just look like me. You’re not me.”

My doppelganger flashed me with a smug smile that I did not at all care for and said, “You went into my mouth and fetched every one of them damn words, didn’t you?”

“The last thing on this planet or any other I’m gonna do is Hulu ‘n’ chill with my goddamn doppelganger,” I said, crossing my legs like a schoolgirl.

“Hulu ‘n’ chill is what—dry-humpin’ an empty pizza box?”

“Yeah, maybe.” I couldn’t figure out if I wanted to stand up and kick my doppelganger in the face or just walk out of the room.

So I threw my half-empty can of Coors at him…

It whizzed by his head and thunked into the wall. “What the heck?” he said, bug-eyed with confusion.

“Sorry,” I said, stupidly holding my hand over my heart. “I’m sorry.” I walked over to the blinds and opened them. A couple of methheads were shakily standing too close to the Audi for comfort. I knocked on the window and they skulked off, gums smacking up and down like Muppets.

“Thou art forgiven,” my doppelganger said.

“So what is your deal, man,” I asked my doppelganger. “Why are you following me around?”

“From the looks of it, I’d say you’re following me around.”

He had a point. I decided to change the subject. “You heard any good jokes lately? I’m all dried up.”

“Hmm… What did Buddha say to the hot dog vendor?”

“Make me one with everything.” I had told this joke maybe a thousand times.

We sat there drinking beer and telling jokes and swapping anecdotes until the sun started peeking through the blinds. It was a wholesomely narcissistic way to spend a Saturday evening. Eventually my doppelganger wandered back to his room and probably spanked his monkey into oblivion and I passed out watching Predator 2, a woefully underrated flick which fully displays the perils of being a Los Angeles police detective.

A month later my girlfriend and I went back to Braxton County for the Braxxie Bazaar. Cryptidistas twerked with the Braxxie mannequin that greets you upon entering the Flatwoods Monster Museum, cryptid-centric films were shown in a theater as old as Noah’s teddy bear, and sullen paranormal researchers daydreamt about devices that could read debit card chips… Charismatic uncoolness as far as the eye can see—and the nose can smell. A coterie of kooksters and dreamers. Swell company, for sure… There was talk of a haunted house. My girlfriend and I, soundly loaded by that point, opted to go back to our little time capsule of a motel and get even more loaded… She passed out immediately upon entering the room, so I sat on the little porch drinking beer and watching the shadows play freeze tag with each other. Sutton, West Virginia is a dark place. Even the moon steers clear of this spooky little corner of the planet.

An extended-cab Ford F-150 pulled into the gravel parking lot and out of it stepped a huge hillbilly and two banged-up lookin’ dishwater blondes.

“You here for the Donkey and Mule Show?” one of the women asked me, as her two companions staggered into their motel room and shut the door.

“Not that I know of,” I said, stifling a beer burp. “Is that a real thing or some sort of innuendo?”

She lit a cigarette and momentarily checked out. That word innuendo, I could tell, was terra incognita for her.

“Hell yeah, it’s a real thing! Premo donkeys and mules are bussed in from every neck of this God-fearin’ hemisphere!”

“And, what, you look at them or you buy them or…?”

“Oh, you can do pretty much anything you want with ‘em! Look at ‘em, buy ‘em, swap ‘em, paint their portraits—whatever your little heart desires!”

I pondered all this and said, “Why no horses?”

The woman let out an awful sound, kind of a cough/sneeze but rendered in hideous octaves, and then she started tweaking like a pygmy wren. It was clear that I should not have mentioned horses.

I went back inside, leaving her there to tremble in whatever regrettable yesteryear in which she was now mired.

Van Jason Hillard 4/24/25 Van Jason Hillard 4/24/25

Madrid, late December '24

*Bernabeu Stadium*
As a longtime fan of 12th place and sinking Tottenham Hotspur, God only knows what kind of hideous juju I’m offloading here

*Edificio Mirador* (adventures in postmodern living)

What’s in that Grinch costume, tall kid or short adult?

They’re barely old enough to eat hardy candy, and yet they were inhaling tequila shots like Pac-Man wafers

The poltergeists here accept Cashapp, Venmo, Zelle, and Paypal

I like my coffee like I like my women: heavily accessorized

Yeah, gran via of people shoppin’ their brains out

Van Jason Hillard 3/10/25 Van Jason Hillard 3/10/25

Casa Carvajal, Somosaguas, Madrid, Spain, (Dec., '24)

I'd stereotype myself as someone who'd oink up a Hulu series called Brutalism Bros. (Don't look it up, it does not exist—yet.)

Hypothetical episode 1: our boy shotguns a whole washbasin of Tinto de Verano and visits Casa Carvajal: a slab kollossus of sharp symmetry and brutalist boner fodder whose eponymous creator (Javier Carvajal Ferrer) designed and constructed for he, himself, and him.

If you'd like to putter around in this house for about 2 hours, dial up Carlos Saura's domestic creepo-drama La Madriguera (1969).

Van Jason Hillard 3/10/25 Van Jason Hillard 3/10/25

Torres Blancas, Madrid, Spain (Dec., '24)

Massive anachronistic structures are as common as field mice on the European continent.

Not many people know this, and I'm definitely not supposed to say anything, but Madrid's Torres Blancas, designed/constructed by Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza in 1961, was built entirely out of paper mache.

Van Jason Hillard 3/10/25 Van Jason Hillard 3/10/25

Geeky Blinders

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; dogs with “people names” like Wilson, Robert, Chance, or Melissa live a mindblowing 4-6 years longer than dogs with “doggie names” like names Hubcap, Orzo, Woofie, or Meatball.

Gulf of Tentacle Hentai.

I regret to inform you that the people who go see a movie and get anything less than this were those kids that wore diapers until they were like 6.

Guess who came about one burned-out neuron away from spending one hundred twenty American dollars to see Riverdance 30: the New Generation tonight?

Seen here: the clouds your mother warned you about. I seem to be flying over Fury Road or the last ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark or both.

100,000 BHMs (Big Hairy Monsters) are crunched by American automobiles every single year.

Pikes Peak, CO.

My theory is that Planet Earth has not made contact with extraterrestrial civilizations because it does not see likes, it only sees pings and superlikes.

Describe this look using only pizza topping emojis.

Van Jason Hillard 3/10/25 Van Jason Hillard 3/10/25

La Défense, Paris, France (Oct., '24)

I'd stereotype myself as someone who goes to Paris and just hangs out in La Défense the whole time.

Van Jason Hillard 12/31/24 Van Jason Hillard 12/31/24

Boulogne-sur-Mer (Oct., '24)

The vibrations of the semi-lost city of Boulogne-sur-Mer (see: ex-hoverport) generally emanate from one of two clumps: Corbusierian marzipan or Orc-adjacent Middle-Earth.

Van Jason Hillard 10/31/24 Van Jason Hillard 10/31/24

WHAT’S UP UNDER BUNNYMAN BRIDGE?—an excerpt from INDRID COLD IS DEAD

Fairfax County, Virginia

I can’t fully explain this, but there is one name that is substantially less trustworthy than all the others and that name is Clay. If you are named Clay and you want to approach me for discussion, I will need six laminated forms of identification, three recent drool-free paystubs, and a notarized letter from the county sheriff. This distrust of people named Clay was based on loose evidence I had acquired throughout my life. A stolen Atari game here, a pellet in the back of the neck there. I have yet to meet a Clay that didn’t have prison yard eyes or smell like a vintage Burger King.

The mayor of the little Virginia hamlet that Bunnyman allegedly sets up shop is named Clay Klaysome. Not so much a big red flag, as much as it was a big red circus tent.

“Do I believe in Bunnyman…” the mayor said, contemplating my inquiry. We were sitting across from each other at the only eating establishment within thirty square miles that had glass on its windows. My recorder purred beneath him. “My quick answer is, yes, I’d like to say that I do believe in him.”

Yeah, no duh. I had zero doubt that Klaysome wanted to believe in Bunnyman since Bunnyman singlehandedly accounted for half of the town’s tourism, as every cryptidhead in the contiguous states had stopped off here at some point or another to jabberjaw with the natives. There was no other reason to sink this deep into Fairfax County unless you were in the business of making huckleberry jelly or participating in an egg-tossing contest.

“You see, it’s complicated,” Klaysome said, nervously fingering the little US flag pin on the collar of his baby-shit blue blazer. “I think Bunnyman—or, you know, something like him—used to exist back in the early ‘70s when he was popping up all over the damn place all the time, you know, chewing on stray cats and freaking people out and such… But I think whatever the heck it was either kicked the bucket or picked up and moved elsewhere.” Klaysome took a big pull from his sweet tea and started nodding his head like a Rain Man outtake. “But the legend of Bunnyman still exists, that’s for damn sure, and that’s the only part that really matters—to me, at least.”

I asked him if any weird happenings had transpired since that last Bunnyman sighting.

“Nope, not really,” he said, his body language now in three different time zones. “I mean, it’s an unusual little town anyway so Bunnyman would really have to go out of his way to get any sort of legitimate attention. Every now and then somebody will come across a partially gnawed-on squirrel or a deer that looks like it got Dig-Dugged to death, but we attribute most of that stuff to either wild dogs or maybe some bored-as-shit cult or perhaps even some form of intelligent life from beyond the stars.”

The waitress whizzed over. I ordered a Rockabilly burger—whatever that was—and a side of onion rings. Klaysome ordered a gross of fresh carrots, a side of diced turnips, and a whole head of wet lettuce.

I decided to cut to the chase…

“It’s you, eh?”

“Come again?”

“You’re the Bunnyman,” I said, optimistically.

Klaysome’s face turned as red as a bug bite… My sixth sense went haywire… I heard the taser before I felt it and then I tasted the blood on my lip before I felt the whack on my face. Splayed out on the floor of the restaurant, I considered my options: remain flat on my back or roll over on my belly. Above me was a group of dudes who looked like they just saw The Blues Brothers for the first time. Before I could make some quip about being here for the harmonica audition, somebody’s loafers started playing footsies with my ribcage. I curled up and started whimpering like a newborn puppy.

“Get this fraud out of here,” I heard Klaysome say. “Take him down to the you-know-where and do you-know-what with him.”

Next thing I know I’m nestled between the chunky-style contingent of the Klaysome’s henchmen in the back of a dark sedan. Two dudes up front and one on each side of me. All of them were more or less wearing the same ill-fitting dark suit and the same dollar store fedora and the same gas station sunglasses.

“Driver, I’d like to go to the Waffle House,” I said.

Silence.

In front of me was a cup of little individually wrapped Certs.

“For real, though, I’ll give you five stars and a twenty-percent tip if you whip in a 7-11 or any place I can buy some gauze, some BC powder, and maybe a time machine and an Uzi.”

One of them hushed me. My low-grade sense of peril gave way to anger and indignation. I weighed the odds of jabbing my elbow squarely into the side of the head of the one to my right and then successfully making my escape out the door. The one to my left looked like he had the wingspan of an albatross. The odds were not good…

—So I reared back and kicked the one driving on the back of his head as hard as I could and then elbowed the guy next to me in the head. His sunglasses made a crunch sound and he yelped like a winged dingo. So far so good. And then that damned taser again. Apparently, the guy in the passenger seat had been keeping it discreetly trained on me the whole time. Bzzt!... I melted in my seat. They didn’t seem angry about my little outburst. Someone even turned on the radio. Pink Floyd’s Have a Cigar.

“You know, most people—present company included for many years—think that this is Roger Waters singing,” I said, out of one side of my mouth.

“It is Roger Waters singing,” said the one that I elbowed in the head.

“Walk towards the light, brother,” I told him. “It sounds like Roger Waters, but it is not Roger Waters. It’s this folk singer named Roy Harper.”

“That’s actually true,” said the big one to my left “Roger Waters got all sorts of hung up on the vocal line, and David Gilmour didn’t want anything to do with it, so they nabbed this bloke who was recording down the hall… Harper, yeah. Roy Harper.” I looked at him. His suit was dark blue. The one to my right was wearing dark brown. The one in the passenger seat who had tased me was wearing gun-metal grey. The one driving was wearing the closest to black, but it was still a charcoal.

“If you guys are supposed to be Men in Black, you gotta at least cover the fundamentals,” I said.

Silence all around. The real story of the Men in Black, I knew, was a real whirlybird of a case. Some accounts might have been CIA or FBI or the USAF, sure, sure, but many encounters seemed to suggest an otherworldly or perhaps supernatural agency. Folks who encounter these Men in Black talk of threats of bodily harm, glowing eyes, putty-like skin, robotic voices and unnatural movements, the smell of sulfur, and displays of sorcery that would make David Copperfield cream his britches. International Flying Saucer Bureau founder and proto-UFO nut Albert Bender, a sort of Lovecraftian Walter Mitty, had one of the first documented high profile MIB encounters way back in the ‘50s and it was not a feelgood experience. It culminated (Bender claimed) with a free trip to the interior of Antarctica and back, just to prove their point. (Their point had simply been this: shaddup about flying saucers or else, mister.)

The dudes I was being kidnapped by were no way at all affiliated with the real Men in Black. They sure as hell wanted me to think they were, but, yeah, they didn’t smell like sulfur, they smelled like a pish-posh of Armani Emporium, Funyuns, and ill-conceived scare tactics.

I eyed a potential soft spot with them, so I jettisoned my Gen X gruff, picked out a cuter tone, and said, “Hey, who do y’all think would win in a fight between Frito and Lay?”

No answer. They pulled the car over. We all got out and they walked me over to this bridge—Bunnyman Bridge, I recognized it to be.

The story of the pseudo-cryptid and proto-nimby known as Bunnyman is not a happy one. Imagine this: it’s 1970 on the dot and you are a teenager in a parked car on the side of a desolate road in Fairfax County, Virginia. You and your hunny bunny are sitting there, smooching, doing what teenagers typically used to do in parked cars, when, all of a sudden, a young gentleman dressed in a white suit with long bunny ears runs out from some nearby bushes and shouts, “You’re on private property and I have your tag number!” and then throws a hatchet through the right front car window. The hatchet hits neither you nor your companion but you are both pretty shaken up so you peel out and go notify the local authorities. You give the hatchet to the police, which they still have in their possession to this day.

Fast forward two weeks… You are a private security guard for a construction company and there is a “rabbit” standing on the front porch of a new, but unoccupied house. The “rabbit” is wielding an axe and whacking away at a roof support. You approach him and he says to you, “All you people trespass around here… If you don’t get out of here, I’m going to bust you on the head.” Roger that, thumper. Gimme a second, I’ll be right back. You go back to your car to retrieve your handgun, but the “rabbit” bounds off into the woods. You tell the police the rabbit was about 5-feet-8, 160 pounds, and appeared to be in his early 20s.

Who was Bunnyman and what was he up to? For better or worse, it is probable that the sun will fall into the sea before anyone on this kooky plane of existence knows.

Without touching me, the four Men in Charcoal, as I henceforth derisively referred to them as, sort of corralled me into the tunnel beneath the bridge. One of them pulled out an old timey remote control and pointed it at the wall and clicked out “Shave and a haircut” on a it. A secret door whirred open.

“After you,” said one who had tased me. I walked through the door and one of them gave a me big schoolyard push in the back. The door slid closed behind me and the lights came on. I was now alone in a fusty room with no sign of nothing, except for the electric light bulb above my head. I pulled out my cellphone, which was at thirty seven percent and had no wireless signal. Presumably, they had deposited me here to rot to death, and I don’t really blame them.

“Well, shit,” I said to myself. Then I cupped my hand and said through the door, “Gentlemen, I have a request.”

“We ain’t no cover band,” said one of them.

“If you open up this door, I will allow you to take me to the nearest ATM where I shall pull out one hundred-forty-six dollars and eighty-seven cents, which the four of you can then divvy up however best you see fit.”

As I stood there and began to think about what a hopelessly long shot this was, I heard one of them say, “What’s four into a hundred forty-six?” to which one of them replied, “Thirty-six dollars,” to which another said, “Hey, that is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT more dinero than what I got in my wallet right now.” This kind of optimistic bandying went on for a long minute. Finally the door slid open and we all went for a joyride to the nearest ATM and I paid the boys thirty-five bucks each (leaving a few dollars in my account, so I didn’t seep into the endless glade of shit putty that is overdraft) and they all started whooping like they’d won both showcases on The Price is Right… I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing, but that’s sort of the status quo in my line of work. They gave me a ride back to my car, which was parked by the restaurant they had scooped me up in and then I high-tailed it back to the District.

Van Jason Hillard 9/23/24 Van Jason Hillard 9/23/24

Schrodinger's September

I call this look "Five Dollar Milkshake".

The back rooms of Dave & Buster's are full of unsuspected depth.
#Fortfest #ArundelMills

Air hockey, this ain't.
#Fortfest #ArundelMills

The tuba player always goes down with the ship.
#NavyMemorial

This should prevent further late night chewings-out by Siri, Alexa, et al.
#Klingon

I'm just here to use the Coke machine.
#NationalGalleryofArt

Street food roulette.
#kwekkwek #deepfriedwatermelon

Woe be this skyline if CVS and Walgreen's ever break their armistice.
#rossyln

Julieta Venegas gives me them Bjorky tingles.
#wolftrapamptitheatre #julietavenegas

Everything but the Louisiana license plate.
#theWharf #OldTownAlexandria #Jaws

Bernard of *Muriel, or the Time of Return*.

Basically Fellini in Wolfords.
#Fellini #Nine #KennedyCenter

Van Jason Hillard 9/12/24 Van Jason Hillard 9/12/24

Florida

My name is Lunch. I am the captain of the M.S.S. Honest Abe LXXVII. The ship was commissioned by my company, Mealtime Incorporated. I have two crewmates, Mr. Breakfast and Miss Dinner. We are still waiting for the sea. We are still waiting for our ship to become a ship instead of a Jeep without wheels.

There’s this theory called the Cultural Thermostat Theory. I forget who developed it—maybe me?—but it claims that UFOs are a product of the world’s collective unconscious; that they are catalysts for a desire for change and most frequently sighted when the people of the world are burning to oust the hegemony of the current collective mindset—that rigid, dualistic, and boring creature that now seeps through most of our interactions—and bring in something new, or rather something prehistorically old. I thought this theory was crap. Yet I did see enough possibility in it to want to appropriate some its fundamentals and use them to patch together a theory of my own. So now the three of us have been sitting here for years, collectively desiring this rust-covered 1980 Jeep Renegade to change into a ship.

Mr. Breakfast was the oldest of us. We were all three but he was the oldest three-year-old (by a slim number of days). None of us were really three. We were all actually about twelve times that, but here in this timeless place where so much metal had come to die, we had decided to be three—hopefully with every bit of that age’s benighted confidence. The way we saw it, confidence had more physical sway when it was unaware of its limitations. Ask a cheetah why he thinks he can run so fast. (Don’t expect a reasonable answer.) Ask a three-year-old when his jeep’s going to become a ship. (He’ll tell you “any day now.”)

Our habitat was once a junkyard—a twenty-acre yard of junk, to be exact. Now it is simply the place we live and the only thing we really know. Because of the pollution in the air, the early twilight clings to the sky all day here. Our world is crepuscular, barren, and woefully unhealthy. It is also very quiet and very peaceful.

Mr. Breakfast was cooking dinner. Rotisserie toothcat again. Toothcats were neither cats nor did they have teeth. They were instead a sort of hairless rodent with a mouth full of what I swear looks like some curious form of baleen. They actually tasted pretty good. I could never figure out what they subsisted on, though. Miss Dinner proposed they ate rubber or maybe the contents of our latrine (which did seem to be a quite popular place at night). Breakfast says they eat each other.

My crewmates were beginning to argue with each other more and more often these days. Breakfast had become increasingly insistent on denying Miss Dinner permission onboard our ship.

“It’s bad luck. Any scientist knows that,” said Breakfast.

“Misogynist opinion noted,” said Dinner. “Sex turned off!”

“Don’t give me that, bitch. You haven’t boinked me in—what, Lunch—months?”

“Longer than months, right? Years…So lots and lots of months.” Breakfast and Dinner were not quite married, not quite divorced.

“Two years and eighty-seven months!” said Dinner. “And no less than two thousand days.”

“It’s of no matter as I have zero intention of embracing compromise with either of you on the subject. Miss Dinner, I encourage you to acclimate to the fact that you are not coming aboard our ship…Besides your duties are needed elsewhere. We need you stay here and be in charge of land operations. Maybe make us a flag.”

“I’ll make you flag. On the ship!”

“You will not make us a flag on the ship because you will not be on our ship. Immensely bad luck. The absolute worst luck. Albatross in a skirt, that’s all you are.” He then turned to me and said, “You know how fast we’ll get torpedoed if she’s on our ship?”

“Relax, man,” I said. “Women aren’t bad luck on ships. It’s two-dollar bills you’re thinking of. There’s a two-dollar bill behind every single nautical nightmare in all the Seven Seas—”

“Eight Seas.”

“—Eight Seas…Two-dollar bills are dreadful luck, man. Even the mention of them is of ill benefit. Women on the other hand are superior luck. And statistics view them favorably. Ships that contain women are far less frequently torpedoed than ships that contain zero women.”

Breakfast, grumbling, retracted one of his arms into his jumpsuit, then using the other arm he removed his goggles and began to buff them with the arm-less sleeve.

“Scientists are not going to like your opinion,” he said at last.

Miss Dinner, whose moniker was derived, along with mine and Breakfast’s, from her original duty, had excused herself from cooking dinner again because she was “uniquely tired.” Miss Dinner was often “uniquely tired”. In fact, she was always “uniquely tired” and with little success I had once tried to explain to that she was, in fact, simply habitually lazy. Mr. Breakfast had petitioned to have her name changed from Miss Dinner to Miss Blow-job but was able to attain only one signature (his own) instead of the minimum requirement of three. On several occasions, all of them in the loose hours of the casual pre-dawn, Breakfast had offered up questions of Dinner’s worth as a living person. Once, while drunk on sleep-deprivation, he’d even lobbied an inquiry about what I thought Dinner would taste like. He has subsequently, and with much repetition, dismissed this occasion, only to thereby attach more relevance to it than he probably intended. I’d be lying to myself if I said that I hadn’t become aware of the increased amount of lip-licking Breakfast partook in while in prolonged company of Miss Dinner.

The hills of metal and rubber that surrounded us were not the post-apocalyptic monochrome that one might imagine. Quite the opposite, really. Breakfast and I had long ago painted much of our periphery the color of the essence of the tropics. With wide smiles and sincere abandon, we had splattered our hills and valleys of debris with varied hues of orange and pink and yellow and green to constantly remind us of our destination: the land of Citrus.

Originally we desired to find Citrus because of our scurvy. Now it was the only thing we could say we were doing without hesitation. What are we doing in this place? We’re waiting for our ship to become a proper ship so we can go find Citrus.

Citrus: it wasn’t that the three of us had forgotten what Citrus was, it was that we’d forgotten was Citrus was not. We did know that it wasn’t here. Nothing in the place could be considered Citrus. We did know that oranges and grapefruits were types of Citrus, and then we figured that lemons and limes were also types of Citrus, and then, after some time, we decided that strawberries, apples, avocados, trees, plants, flowers, and some insects could be considered Citrus. Now we believed that everything not found here was Citrus.

Although our faith and desire for the Honest Abe LXXVII to stop rusting and start floating was impeccable, I did admit I was confronted with much skepticism and difficulty when I initially announced my plan to Breakfast and Dinner those years ago. They had countered with plans of their own: Breakfast had wanted to walk away from this place, while Dinner had proposed using one of the CB radios to get in touch with someone who could rescue us. Only after considerable time did they display any conviction in my agenda. And only then did we christen our ship with a name. We had originally simply called it the Honest Abe but quickly changed it to the Honest Abe II out of concern that some seafaring president-enthusiast had already beaten us to that name (the last thing you want to deal with at sea is a copyright infringement). And then out of worry of there already being a second Honest Abe, we changed it the Honest Abe III. And then out of worry of their already being a third Honest Abe, we changed it to the Honest Abe IV. And then out of worry of their already being a fourth Honest Abe….

Miss Dinner was in her car. Her car was also her house. It was actually neither. She was sitting in the back of it stroking a toothcat. Her toothcat. In a remarkable display of apostleship one day, the thing had begun to follow her around, seemingly dry of any reason other than some form of fondness for her. At first, she was baffled. And then at bit afraid after the little fellow (I say “fellow” here loosely since toothcats display no visible form of genitalia) had continued to shadow her for much of the day, stopping only occasionally to peer up at her with its expressive eyes and then tilt its head before resuming the chase. Dinner finally dropped her inhibitions, picked up the thing and cradled it, prompting it to purr and halfway close its eyes, clearly contented by Dinner’s acceptance of it. A collar was out of the question, so Breakfast and I painted the little bastard pink and named him (with the tiniest degrees of animosity and/or foresight) Snack Attack.

Snack Attack, it had been confirmed, was a cannibal. He was also, like his comrades, an excellent swimmer. He would not, however, fetch or display the slightest interest in obeying commands. I had developed a theory about names (which, ironically, I did not have a name for). I was convinced that names have the ability to sway how a person (or toothcat) looked and acted. I recalled the Brads and Chads and Brians of yesteryear and their natural prowess in the world of sport. I also remembered all those Ralphs with their crooked smiles and their softcore unkemptness, each of them always two weeks deep in need of a haircut. I’d never met a Jack that didn’t possess that combo-trait of simple coolness and amiability, nor had I a met a Lisa that wasn’t a slut. And one hundred percent of the Bridgets I had met in my life look like they slept on their face. Miss Dinner, however, would find nothing about my theory convincing when, weeks later, and due to a sudden and mutual faim terrible, Breakfast and I allowed her little friend to embrace the full potential of his fateful moniker.

I’ve noticed a change in the past few days. Not the ship, there was nothing new there, but with the ground around it: It had grown darker. Maybe damper. It was difficult to say because everywhere around this place was already damp. I brought this new development to Breakfast.

“It’s happening. Slower than we thought, eh?” Breakfast said.

“That’s the way it goes with seas.”

“But the ship—it’s changing or no?”

“Well, the sea comes first and then we get the ship. There’s an order to this. Unsaid rules and regulations and such.”

“Ah…” said Breakfast. “So, the sea grows and grows until it’s a legitimate sea and then we sail.”

“That’s the plan.”

“Without the woman.”

I turned to face him; an air of gravity debuted. “We are not leaving Dinner here.”

“If that bitch boards our ship, I’m staying.”

“C’mon, that’d be terrible. Who would I play Frisbee with? Dinner? She’s incapable of proper technique, Frisbee and otherwise.”

“Moot point, friend,” Breakfast said, solemnly. “I fear that Frisbee has merged with the infinite.”

“Why, what happened?”

“I ate it.”

Startling news, that, but only obliquely. “That’s weird. I was thinking I ate the Frisbee. I guess I just dreamt I ate the Frisbee.”

We sat in our collective state of muse for some time before Breakfast said, “We’ll decide on what to do with Dinner when the time is appropriate.”

“I’ll yield to that statement.”

“I’ll yield to my hunger,” said Breakfast, optimistically. “Let’s eat!”

Years have gone by. I’m not sure how many but I know it’s been a lot. Miss Dinner is gone. She disappeared way back. I’ve forgotten what she looked like. And I’ve forgotten what she tasted like. Breakfast has changed, too. I know this much: he’s a totally different guy. I’ve also changed. Physically, mentally, I’m all new. Of course it was a gradual thing. Nobody can just change themselves spontaneously. They may look changed or things may change around them but they’re the same. But I’ve changed a lot through the years. I’m a reduced version of my former self. I occupy so little space I’m hardly there. And my thoughts don’t follow each around anymore. They’re like a band of rogues in an old western movie: distrustful, menacing; always looking over their shoulders.

Breakfast asked me something recently. He asked me either who we were or what we were. The sign language we use now is tricky. Pronouns don’t work so well with it. I responded that we’re Breakfast and Lunch (we have good, easy, kind of fancy signals for those words: our timeless and irrefutable monikers). Then he showed me all his terrible teeth in some kind of smile and asked me where we were.

After much deliberation I have an answer. I captured and interrogated every word in my head until I found one that wasn’t affiliated with Citrus. The word I found strictly summons images of a paved expanse, enriched only with heaps of vinyl siding, shards of particleboard, and tombstones made of ersatz granite. Yes, I finally have an answer for Breakfast—and I’ll whisper it into his rotted ear.

Van Jason Hillard 9/9/24 Van Jason Hillard 9/9/24

The Kid Named Labrador

The kid named Labrador did not change my life. The events that surround his introduction to my life did, sure, but the actual kid didn’t have much to do with it. What I mean is any kid with any kind of name could have produced the same results. At least I like to think that’s the case. As it is, “the kid named Labrador” has become a kind of code phrase or euphemism for this new chapter in my life. The chapter I would otherwise dub “the minimum-security prison years.”

Labrador was a boy. I could just as easily say “the boy named Labrador,” but that’s too peaceful and too specific. Boys do boyish things. They have boyish smiles and boyish hair. The connotations the word “kid” brings about are much more appropriate. “Kid” denotes a raucous, menacing motion that zips around two or three feet above the ground. Kids are more prone to flurry, to playing the roles of harbingers of irritation. Boys don’t try our patience, kids do. Labrador tried my patience, alright. He called me a “shitface” and bit the hell out of my leg. Then he sprayed me with a water hose and popped all my balloons.

My balloons—yes, I’ll explain: I’m a clown. Or I was a clown. I was a new clown, an amateur clown. A professional clown probably wouldn’t have reacted the same way I did. A professional clown might not have thrown Labrador—Oshkosh B’gosh overalls and all—into a swimming pool. The deep end, no doubt. I was spared the embarrassment of having to perform mouth-to-mouth on this little fucker, though, because, as you might expect, a kid with a name like Labrador could swim like a goddamn Polynesian. Labrador shot like a hooked mako over to the ladder and climbed up out of the pool with nimble aggression. He casually picked up his towel, dried off his little play cell phone, stripped to his undies and draped his overalls on the fence to dry—

—and then started up with the wailing. He wailed for his mom. Too bad for me his dad that got there first. The black eye’s all better, but the insult still lingers: Labrador’s dad called me a “fucking clown.”

What an unlikely situation I’m in here for, but let me tell you what lead to that day at the pool. It all started with an epiphany…

An epiphany, I now know, can sometimes be a real rotten thing. Thanks to epiphanies, those supposed lightning storms of glorious genius, bursting through the rigidity and mediocrity of our day-to-day, brandishing what-the-heck-ever in the name of fortuitous, glamorous insight—yes, thanks to one of those bastards, I found myself at the age of thirty-five enrolled in clown school.

Who am I? I’m a clown. That was the result of my epiphany, or, if you get down to it, my moment of existential trepidation

I was on the Metro one day, heading back from Old Town Alexandria. I’d had a smoked salmon wrap drenched in creamy onion/dill sauce at this French restaurant there. The thing had wreaked havoc on my breath, so I sat in my seat, nestled into the window, trying to shield the vaguely pretty woman next to me (my peripheral vision is always quick to give the benefit of the doubt in these moments) from the toxicity of my breath. I passed one of those sleek electronic ads they put in Metro tunnels now, the ones that seem to supernaturally hover outside the window. I forget what the ad was for, but remember quite clearly what it inquired of me: Who are you? Actually it was in the form of some queer statement. It had periods after each word just like this: Who. Are. You. It didn’t register at all at the time, but that trite, contextual little phrase took a nap in the corner of my brain and awoke a little later as a ten-foot-tall monster, all claws and fangs and supercharged with violent mischief.

Who am I? I’m Benny Caddo. Who am I? Ah, let me think about it. I have different identities, therefore I have no identity. Bona fide shapeshifter, this alleged identity of mine. My identity, just like that troublesome little phrase hovering in the Metro tunnel, is totally contextual. It’s all about perspective. Different people know me as different Bennys. I’m a lot of things, and all of them are not so solid. Not even so much a person as I am an event. Motion all over me, cells are falling off, new cells replacing them and then new cells replacing them. I’m different everyday. I play different roles for different people. I leave movies verbally and mentally influenced by a good protagonist. These flashes of supposed insight led to the mother lode: I began to fear that deep down I did not like who I was therefore I took every opportunity possible to not have to be myself.

I nearly lost my head because of that seemingly innocuous inquiry. Some might even say I did lose my head. But my new colleagues tell me that this is good news because losing one’s head is a prerequisite to becoming a clown.

So there you have it. I questioned my solidity, my presence, and ended up in clown school. What kind of job title has presence? Instead of the words “culinary artist” or “massage therapist,” my mind had simply exclaimed “clown.”

You have to fill out an application to enroll in clown school. Did you know that? I didn’t know that. Do you consider yourself funny?—that’s one of the questions on it. Have you ever been charged with a felony?—that’s another. I was there six weeks and I took not one pie in the face. And my shoe size didn’t increase one bit.

It’s true: People are not just afraid of clowns, but goddamn terrified of them—especially kids, which is a real drag since they make up an overwhelming majority of our demographic.

And contrary to popular belief, this is also true: Clowns and mimes are actually allies. Like aging pugilists, clowns and mimes have shed their differences and formed a sort of amorous camaraderie amidst the collapse of their collective sphere. Mimes aren’t the best of company, I admit. But I’m able to relate to them better than say a bank teller or an accountant…or a defense attorney or a prison guard.

Part of the program was my complete immersion into clown culture. No amount of anything could have prepared me for this. I now know everything in the world there is to know about clowns. And my default emotion is now melancholy.

Being a clown put me in perpetual proximity to children. I never liked kids which is why I never wanted to have one. There are already seven billion people on the planet: an airplane crash of a fact for a softcore sociopath like myself. Some kids are ok, granted Labrador was not one of them. Eight years old, I think he was, but seemingly much dumber than his peers (these things are difficult to tell as any kid anytime, without warning, can brandish a flamboyant lack of intelligence). Labrador had all sorts of problems with making an “R” sound. And he had a terrible stutter that he unleashed freely and loudly and with a kind of myopic confidence that prohibited you from feeling sorry for him. He was severely freckled and had a set of ears that wrapped nearly halfway around his head. And the clothes he wore were the obvious residue of his nouveau riche parents’ desperate attempt at making him look like a somewhat normal kid. Labrador’s hair was boot camp all the way and did well do showcase his swollen misshapen head. When Labrador was completely still you might mistake him for being handicapped in some way or another.

My colleagues at clown school told me that Labrador’s mom always wanted a dog but an allergy to furred beasts prohibited her from ever owning one. They said she birthed a child to compensate. I’m not sure I ever believed these colleagues of mine. Clown gossip, I’ve learned, can be comically unreliable.

Minimum-security prison is actually not that bad. There’s tetherball, a couple of rugged pool tables, and even a little trap kit I bang on every now and then. Altogether it’s kind of like an enhanced vacation bible school for adults. And there’s no barbwire to be found anywhere. In fact, technically we can leave anytime we want. Just like that, we could hop the little fence and trickle into the horizon. Only problem is when we’re caught—and we would be caught, with their dogs and their choppers—we get shipped to a medium-security prison which is a heck of a lot worse than a maximum-security prison. Let me explain: In a maximum-security prison, all the serial rapists and wife murderers are compartmentalized—their crimes so respectfully and transcendentally terrible to merit them their own solipsistic little worlds. Not so with a medium-security prison. A medium-security prison is like a zoo where all the animals are thrown together in one giant pin. Not much fun if, like me, you’d find yourself playing the role of some timid round-eyed herbivore.

I’m set for release in 2027. I look at those numbers and, man, they seem distant. I’ll read a lot until then. Maybe wrangle with those classic cinderblocks of yesteryear that everyone aspires to read but never does unless they end up marauded by a surplus of free time. Maybe I’ll finally learn how to play cards. One drawback about this kind of prison is that there are no criminals around. It’s embarrassing what most these guys are in here for. I’ve learned nothing about gang, nothing about the mafia. No one here has ever smoked banana peels or constructed a bomb out of household appliances. No one even reads the Koran. I lied for a little while about what got me in here, but like loose change in a dryer, the truth has a way of coming on out and making its presence known. They laughed about it at first—maybe the first genuine laughs I’ve produced as a clown. They’re not an imaginative bunch hence my nickname is indeed Bozo. But they’re amiable enough and, like I said, they’ve got their own flimsy renegade personas to deal with. Porn got a lot of them here—porn and marijuana and manslaughter.

I can wear a belt in here, and I have access to all sorts of screwdrivers. At first, I approached this fact with optimism. Surely, I thought, it just means that they trust us. I mean, who would want to kill himself because he got busted with some stacked-up misdemeanors? Now, I think just the opposite. I think it means: Go ahead and do it, jerk-off. See if we care.

The guards here are a dreamy, humorless bunch. They carry themselves with an air of mild concern, like someone who has just drank a glass of questionable milk. I think they’re actually worse off than us in a lot of ways. Essentially they do the same thing as us except they can run off at night and make love or fuck somebody or another. They don’t carry batons, but they do have whistles. Supposedly there’s a guy with a rifle somewhere, but nobody’s ever seen him.

I’m going to go to sleep now. Some high school kids are coming by tomorrow for a field-trip. The guards told me not to smile or laugh so much while they’re here. They even confiscated my fake doggie-doo and all my balloon animals, granted they’ll give it all back as soon as they get burnt out on their blackjack.

Van Jason Hillard 9/3/24 Van Jason Hillard 9/3/24

Muriel, or the Time of Return: a dreamy overview

Sept. 3, 2024 - Washington, DC

I can remember sixteen-digit codes from thirty-fuck years ago (see: Castlevania II) but I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. This may or may not explain why there don’t seem to be enough B vitamins on the planet to help properly etch Alain Resnais’ 1963 new wave psycho-drama Muriel, or the Time of Return—a syllabic tank battle of a name—into any of my more trustworthy brain cells. In short, I had to tulpa up the mnemonic “MOTTOR” to come to the rescue, and it has done so aplenty, mainly while discussing Muriel with the benthic cryptids that I tend to schlep with in those slender hours of the night that sort of seep into each other, that ephemeral opening act for the all too often bad idea sunrise.

“You like this flick a lot, eh?” asks one such cryptid. We were hunched darkly at a stoop outside of my apartment building, drinking gin out of coffee mugs and trying to avoid eye contact with those weird daybreak joggers that infest the sidewalks of the District of Columbia.

“I’d friggin’ boink it if I could,” I say, dreamily. “Seen it damn near ten times since Memorial Day, whenever that was. You know, piecemeal and such.”

“Interesting… What’s it about?”

“No clue, brother.”

In fact, I do know what Muriel is about, but it’s impossible to offload it on someone without sounding like you’re making it up on the spot.

Roll film…

Here we are in Boulogne-sur-Mer, a small coastal city that received the Rotterdam treatment during World War II by, yeah, getting bombed into goo and then hastily resurrected via hard drab symmetry and glass. Its streets are wet and gray, often reflecting the neon lights of its boulangeries and shops. Boulogne’s inhabitants seem neither here nor there. “Where is downtown?” someone asks somebody later in the film. “You’re in it!” somebody responds.

We begin in Helene’s apartment, where everything has a literal price tag hanging off it. Most of the film takes place in this apartment, which basically plays hangar for the old English furniture, plateware, and bric-a-brac that Helene tirelessly tries to sell to whatever well-to-do couple comes knocking. People eat off plates and nestle into couches that are to be picked up by buyers “tomorrow”. Helene is about forty-five years old and mired in the trembles of some regrettable yesteryear. She seems to stay busy just to stay busy, either by peddling the contents of her apartment or by gambling (for all the wrong reasons).

If the manic montage of the film’s first sixty seconds doesn’t convince you that Muriel is going to be a bona fide weird flick, the introduction of Helene’s twitchy son Bernard, our protagonist (if only by default), will obliterate all doubt. Bernard, played by Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée—a sort of Madame Tussaud Scott Baio, is himself trapped in the past, albeit a more recent past. He was in the Algerian war, where he and four other soldiers interrogated and tortured to death a young woman named Muriel. (Bernard, who is courting an actual girl named Marie-Do, additionally, has an imaginary fiancé named, yeah, Muriel)… To better understand the appearance of Bernard, imagine the faces you see in the sand while on two hits of high-octane blotter acid. Strychnine smiles for miles…

Now we’re at the train station (nobody coming, nobody going) where Helene scoops up her old fling Alphonse and his ”niece” (discreet lover) Francoise. It becomes clear Alphonse and Francoise are broke. In fact, everyone in the film is broke (with the exception for Helene’s in-and-out lover, the kind-eyed Roland de Smoke, Boulogne’s very own Robert Moses). Alphonse is built like a former professional athlete: tall, sturdy, fifty-ish, but his charisma is betrayed his white jellybean of a voice: uncertain and higher-pitched than his appearance would suggest, a mismatch that pre-chews for us the fact Alphonse is an inveterate fraud, bridge burner, deadbeat, drama queen, and proto-fuckboy (and, as we will learn later, absent husband). On the other hand, the voice that comes out of the mouth of the very young and very pretty Francoise is much deeper than you’d expect. Francoise is an aspiring actress (thanks to Alphonse having summoned up just enough residual sway to get her a bit part in whatever wherever). She walks through the world like she’s strolling through one of those tubular glass walkways at high-profile aquariums, rubbernecking at her surroundings like a navy aviator and constantly remarking on every pleasure and displeasure. Francoise, we come to quickly realize, is basically a first-generation vapidista, her thoughts unoriginal, her gaze severe, her movements robotic, and it’s not at all surprising when she immediately takes to the equally synthetic-looking Bernard (to no avail), both of whom wouldn’t make it through the opening credits of Blade Runner.

If you watch Muriel out of the corner of your eye, it looks like an adaption of any given nouvelle roman, where allegorical figures sit around all day, sucking on vermouth and puffing endless cigs (there is mention of Winstons, Pall Malls, and Gaulioses within the film’s first five minutes) and wrangling with softcore trifles that they’ve patched up for themselves for no good reason other than to keep from capsizing in ennui—but, what’s this? the modernist mush shushes itself when, while watching his grainy films of French soldiers in Algeria with a friend, Bernard describes the details in which Muriel was tortured, primarily by another local boy, Robert, who Bernard still occasionally bumps into around town. “Robert takes a flashlight, uses it on her… Her mouth is foamy, she couldn’t talk if she wanted to… Robert lights a cigarette, walks back over to her… Muriel screams.” This is just a kiddie cup of the details of the living breathing nightmare that would be the last day of Muriel’s short existence, its hideousness amplified by the manner in which Bernard plainly narrates, as if he were reading off the back of a box of Frosted Flakes.

Helene and Alphonse spend much of the movie reminiscing, sometimes fondly, but usually with a low-grade accusatory air. They mentally tiptoe around each other—for all it takes is one wrong answer or one wrong question by one of them to send the other scuttling off to the next room to sulk and pout. Lots of “I should have never come here” or “I should have never asked you to come”, etc., etc… In the age of cellphones, this movie would be about thirty American seconds long, since these two surely would have long ago blocked each other into oblivion. But it’s 1963, and here they are in Boulogne-sur-Mer, up to their nostrils in regret and both getting by on nickels and trinkets. There’s mention of a letter that Alphonse long ago sent to Helene, confessing love and the desire for them to be together. Alphonse, as we learned in the first five minutes (when he says Francoise is his niece), is a liar. But there really was a letter. Alphonse had given the letter to a competing girl’s brother (why do that?) to drop in the mailbox, and that brother, Ernest, as it were, dutifully tossed said letter into a muddy river. We know all this because Ernest, on behalf of Alphonse’s now wife, Simone, comes calling and knocking. Ernest catches Helene, Alphonse, Bernard, Francoise, and various guests at dinnertime. He sings them a song (Dêja) before abruptly letting loose with why he trekked all the way out here to Boulogne-Sur-Mer: to gather Alphonse, of course. Time to go home, buddy boy, is the general message, before serenading the room with what he really thinks about Alphonse. Understandably, Alphonse is not into this. He grabs Ernest and the two men paw at each other and tussle awkwardly until Alphonse eventually acquiesces and agrees to go back to his wife, only to ditch Ernest (“I’m gonna get some smokes”) by ducking in and then discreetly out of a market and jumping on a bus to anywhere but home. This whole undoing of the stratus of bonhomie the film had been coasting along on proves to be the straw that punctured the camel’s aorta for Bernard. When Alphonse and Ernest start fighting, Bernard starts snapping pics (he spends the whole film armed with a muscular-looking camera— “collecting evidence”) and hollers at Francoise to grab his camcorder and start recording. She accidentally presses play on the thing instead of record and suddenly loud metallic sobbing/whimpering fumigates the room—the sound of Muriel, we assume, based on Bernard’s reaction. He begins crying his innards out and excuses himself out the front door and basically out of the film, but only after going full blown Menace II Society on Robert, the villain in Bernard’s constant mental stream of awful memories. “Robert, come down!” he hollers at Robert’s apartment building, a big beige Corbusierian Kleenex box. Robert pokes his head out of a window… “No, don’t come down!” a still weepy Bernard says, but, yeah, too late, Robert’s already ambled out of the shadows, so Bernard plugs him in the stomach. No more Robert. Helene hears the gunshot, and her motherly wile knows exactly what’s going on. “Bernard!” she says, jumping up and running over to the studio Bernard uses as a second home. No Bernard. She panics. Bernard appears in the doorway. Helene embraces him. He tells her he’s leaving. But you have no money, she says. It doesn’t matter, he replies, as he walks out of the frame and out of the movie.

Helene, too, leaves. She hurries down to the train station, looking for the train to Paris, presumably to snatch Alphonse, since she carries no luggage. The train to Paris no longer stops here, a bored station attendant tells her, it now only stops at the new station. Things change, he tells her.

It is unclear what happened to Francoise. Roland de Smoke takes her for a suspiciously long walk to “see the beach” at one point in the film. And we do know she’s grown tiresome of Alphonse’s antics. “When we get back to Paris, we’re done,” she tells him, to which he has no response.

The film ends with the introduction of Simone, Alphonse’s wife, as she goes to Helene’s apartment, its door ajar. “Hello?”, she says, entering the apartment. We follow her around via a handheld camera as she goes from room to room, calling out for Alphonse, but Alphonse, as we know, has hit the road, and there’s no sign of anyone else in the apartment either. Just a phalanx of dirty dishes, empty brut bottles, and some flowers that are a little droopier than they were the last time we saw them. Simone takes it all in, does the math, exits the apartment. FIN. The cinematic tinkerdom (“Look, ma, I’m makin’ a movie!”) ebbs here at the caboose of the film and this final scene does well to line up the film’s previous 115 minutes or so and wallop you in the chest with the whole big thing.

According to the script, Muriel takes place over two weeks in late September/early October. The only indication of time passing at all is that the characters are sometimes dressed differently than they were in the previous scene, and of course the occasional beddy-bye.

I’ve seen a lot of stupid-looking words, but nothing could have prepared me for “Fantabulous”, and yet I feel that’s the best descriptor for the outerwear featured in Muriel. Bernard bikes around town in a cyberpunky raincoat/windbreaker that you’re more likely to see on Korben Dallas, meanwhile Alphonse and Helene putter about draped in half the African Savannah.

The musical score of Muriel will drown out the most inveterate popcorn crunchers. Violins and an electric organ jump out of nowhere. It sounds like a bad day at the office for the Kronos Quartet—angry strings duking it out with menacing keys. Occasionally there’s opera. And then Ernest’s Dêja.

The movie’s real star is the town of Boulogne-sur-Mer itself. Historically, this area is where England (a mere 25 miles north) plays footsies with France. A region both ancient and modern on the dot, which, sure, is half of Europe (see: World War I and II), but it seems almost caricature here: one scene we are in Orbit City, and the next it’s Middle Earth.

Joining the ranks of Zazie Dans le Metro and Red Desert and Robocop 2, Muriel has become one of the default flicks I put on to sort of flicker in the background while I heat up leftovers at the homestead or to play on the boob tube at the bar. “What in the name of all that’s holy are we watchin’, guy?” asks a customer, as Alphonse wipes shandy bubbles from his mustache and troubleshoots with his copy of Le Monde. “Ah, it’s this real neat French flick called, eh, shit,” I say, gesticulating like a maced chimp. “Any chance you can flip over to, hell, anything else at all?” they ask. “I don’t think so,” I tell them. “Maybe later.” After all, yeah, things change.

Van Jason Hillard 7/19/24 Van Jason Hillard 7/19/24

The Georgetown Lighthouse

The first thing one generally notices about the Georgetown Lighthouse, apart from its considerate height, is the absence of a nearby credible waterway. The second thing is that it is composed not of bricks but of books.

The Georgetown Lighthouse sits atop a small but ambitious hill in an otherwise lackluster residential area of northwest DC where Georgetown seeps into Glover Park. Realtors affectionately dub the area Lighthouse Heights, though residents refer to it as either Georgetown or Glover Park. It was designed and built in the caboose of the nineteenth century by one Tuppy Muldoon, an Australian who immigrated to the US to open up his own clipper ship business but failed to do so because the US was already a score beyond the Age of Sail and cozily nestled in the Age of Steam. Muldoon, who had never eaten a fruit or vegetable in his life and even boasted of clobbering a man into three wee men for gesturing at him with a fully grown eggplant ("Malice or no malice, I still got me dignity!"), became mired in a severe strain of scurvy at the age of thirty five and began succumbing to the hallucinations that would hold considerable influence over the final five years of his life. Many a citizen was to be woken up with Muldoon's midnight yelps of "Shiiiiiip! Shiiiiiip!" only to see the vociferous madman pointing not in the direction of the thoroughly distant Potomac River but rather. . . north? Muldoon, on the other hand, was at once perplexed and appalled with his new countrymen's apathy on the matter and decided to take accountability for maritime safety into his own hands. He built his lighthouse inside four years, using the bricks of its original composition, though reports on exactly how Muldoon built his lighthouse vary greatly. Muldoon's journals routinely make reference to his enlisting the help of a forty-man crew, as well as six African elephants, four white tigers, three "elvish types", a pair of languid harpies, a giant squid named Cecil, a wingless albatross, and three gilled but humanoid figures from "up 'round Bal'mer", though an issue of the District Gazette from June of 1896 contains an editorial piece about a "muttonhead Aussie git hollerin' orders at his shoes all day." Friendlier accounts claim of "a garrulous Australian fellow who built a lighthouse with his two hands and using nothing more than his own blood and sweat and tears and fecal matter."

These days the Georgetown Lighthouse is routinely given a flimsy benefit of the doubt since it can technically be seen from the Potomac, though any further speculating is quick to suggest the two have zero camaraderie. Earlier in the century the Lighthouse's popularity was stuck at a perpetual state of wane, and was said to be about one loose brick away from being officially condemned by the US Park Service.

Then came the only credible ally of the Lighthouse since its creator.

"I just took out the bricks and put in the books. One by one by one. It was easy." Mimi Octopus has been living at the Lighthouse off and on since 2012, when she purchased it for an undisclosed sum that consisted wholly of three dollar bills, a legendary transaction now steeped in Georgetown lore.

Miss Octopus is an ideal sixty years old. ("It's the stairs. These things don't have elevators.") Her age is only betrayed by the swathes of grey in her long black hair.

And how many books does it take to make a lighthouse? "I lost count at forty thousand. Virginia Woolf's The Waves. That was number forty thousand. Had it been To the Lighthouse I would have flipped my lid."

When asked about the future of the Georgetown Lighthouse as well as her own future, Miss Octopus, a self-proclaimed connoisseur of puns, abstains from any claims of waiting for her ship to come in and simply says, "This is my corner of the universe."

And when it is no longer her corner?

"The lighthouse goes away and the invisible ships will have to look out for themselves."

And, according to the wishes of Miss Octopus, the DC public library will inherit a joyous dilemma.

Van Jason Hillard 6/22/24 Van Jason Hillard 6/22/24

On Litter and Littering

Okay, sure, littering sucks, but, man, sometimes you just gotta.

Here are a few 100% acceptable ways to go about littering:

~ Passive littering, where you “leave” your litter on the top of your car or cab or whatever and simply drive off. If you’re on foot, gently place the litter on your shoulder or atop your head and walk off. Whatever happens next is beyond the realm of your control.

~ Throw your litter up in a tree or in a thick bush. Litter only counts if it touches the ground.

~ Dress the litter up so it doesn’t look like litter. Get artsy with it.

~ Turn your litter into a statement. You’re not littering, you’re proclaiming, “Hey, man, I wouldn’t have to fuckin’ litter if there were more fuckin’ garbage cans around here. What the hell are you guys doing with my tax money?”

~ Littering doesn’t count if your litter is biodegradable—but technically everything was stardust and will end up being stardust again. Your empty box of Hot Tamales is ultimately just as ephemeral as bee spit, echinacea leaves, and banana peels.

~ The brazen litter, where you litter so brazenly and openly that people are like, “Well, I guess that’s protocol here. You just toss whatever wherever and it’s totally cool.”

~ Sometimes the universe demands that you litter. Any cursory trek to any food court in basically any mall in the galaxy will reveal an astonishing number of garbage cans that say NO GARBAGE. This is the universe texting you a little thumbs up emoji.

Thanks for reading—and I hope this helps.

Van Jason Hillard 6/14/24 Van Jason Hillard 6/14/24

MOTHMAN SUCKS (AND OTHER POINT PLEASANTRIES): an excerpt from upcoming pseudofiction INDRID COLD IS DEAD

June, 2024 - downtown DC.

“Not all heroes wear capes.” – Aquaman

I am preparing my brains out for another sortie into the luscious innards of West Virginia, where I shall attend the grand opening of the Grafton Monster Museum (in a kook-centric bookstore on the main drag of the Grafton Monster’s eponymous hometown).

Driving in West Virginia is not for the weak of spirit. There are biker gangs, falling rocks, potholes the size of fully-grown manta rays, a technicolor variety of aspiring roadkill, tar pits, sand pits, leftover pterodactyls, Middle Earth holdouts, and “blackout areas,” where wireless internet curls up into a whimpering little ball and you have to consult esoteric stars like Alpheratz and Zeta Fuqmuhlife for direction.

I was to launch my ex-girlfriend’s little Audi back and forth from Grafton, were it not for a recent G-rated liaison with her that inspired her current boyfriend, some thin-headed ratero type who looks like he’s not had a warm meal in six to eight weeks, to threaten to make manifest her secret mild salsa recipe so I will be taking my boss’s vehicle instead—a babyshit-blue minivan that’s old as time itself.

Of course, this is all assuming that I live through tonight…

“You goddamn sausage eaters!” my friend Michaela hollered into the phone. “We will invade the holy spirit out of you sons of bitches!—and this time we ain’t taking prisoners!” Michaela was the big kahuna at the Italian Cultural Institute and was on the phone with the Austrian ambassador, who had just informed Michaela that the Italians were to bring only cold food to the EuroAsia Shorts Festival, a film event being held at the Austrian embassy tonight. Not only will I be attending this event, but I am in charge of all the food for the Italian attaché. I manage a kooky little Italian joint in downtown DC and my boss had whipped up enough hot-as-lava polpettine al forno and arancini siciliano to feed the whole cast of La Citta Delle Donna and now here the Austrians were telling Michaela and company you’ll eat cold caprese and like it. “I’m a serious as a snake bite, you Crypto-Stasi spinster! Italy is the culinary capital of the galaxy, whereas Austria was eating bugs and tree bark until like three Thursdays ago,” Michaela said, bug-eyed with rage. “Oh, and sausage, you’re right. Sausage upon sausage upon sausage… Let me guess, you will be offering sausage at the screening tonight, Herr Ambassador? Twenty different types of sausage, and each link with that stupid little flag of yours sticking off it… Hello? Hello? Porca vacca, that son of a bitch hung up on me… Van, I regret to inform you we may have to go to war tonight.”

“Whatever you say, Capitano,” I said, shrugging. I am about as Italian as a bowl of Gaeng Daeng pudding but here I am about to jump boner-first into a shiny new continent-sized bloodbath. Ah well. Better people have died for less noble causes. Besides, I kinda always did hope I died on a Friday…

Okay, back to West Virginia. To paraphrase that slinked-out gringo from Talking Heads: How did I get here?

My infatuation with West Virginia began in 2015 at the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, a living breathing Twilight Zone episode of a town that’s nestled into where the Ohio River meets the Kanawha way over on the western fringe of the state.

The Mothman Festival is a basically a flea market/jamboree for cryptidistas, ghost trackers, kooksters, ufologists, podcast bros, and every other strain of occupation that won’t win you any points on a Scrabble board.

The story of Mothman is well known, and it is a story with many exclamation points and question marks but few commas and periods. Sightings of winged humanoid critters reach back to ancient times, but Mothman’s main stage debut was in the guts of the late ‘60s, back when they called him Birdman and the Man-Sized Bird and other Sesame Street-inspired kookacana.

Every bag-of-bones in the Point Pleasant area seemingly saw Mothman, either reenacting the last ten minutes of Top Gun on desolate stretch of road, or skulking around in their backyard, or playing barnyard freeze tag with the family pooch, et cetera, et cetera.

The story famously ends with the collapse of the Silver Bridge, which spanned the Ohio River, while it contained a whole herd of rush-hour automobiles. In addition to allegedly being poorly maintained, the Silver Bridge was built back in the 1920s—an age where dainty roadsters and livestock ruled the roads. It was not constructed for the behemothic motherships of the late ‘60s American roadscape. Forty-six people died in the cold December waters of the Ohio. The word “Mothman” left the lips of every Point Pleasanter and was replaced by ominously practical phrases like stress corrosion cracking.

Aside from the spotlight abandoning him for more fashionable prey, Mothman has indeed discreetly still been popping up in West Virginia and Ohio and beyond.

So, yeah, in 2015, a couple of buddies and myself went clambering westward across the wily West Virginia landscape until, along with an unholy number of other paranormalheads, we reached Point Pleasant, where we planned to drink the town out of Yuengling (and Mothman IPA, et cetera) and possibly maybe get a sneaky peek of what makes this little town so desirable to undesirables like Mothman and his creepy brigade of enthusiasts, present company included.

We stayed at the Lowe Hotel, a charming establishment that’s older than gunpowder. The Lowe was vast, with nebulous dimensions. It was also allegedly haunted, which made me and my two buddies (to avoid being sued into silly putty, I shall call them Ned and Zeb here) bug-eyed with glee at the prospect of getting tangled up in something from the beyond, though several cursory chats with the locals revealed that everything from the UPS store to the Jamba Juice was haunted.

We went down to the hotel’s bar and inquired further with the Lowe’s proprietor, the lovely Mary Ruth, who was congeniality personified.

“Oh, it’s haunted, alright,” she said. “We had this old boy in here recently who had come to Point Pleasant for work. Kept getting late night visits with a strange woman in a gown who wasn’t on the payroll, if you know what I mean. He ended up skipping town before he could even clock in.”

We sipped our three-dollar Yuenglings and nodded in optimism. There was an implied commotion around the hotel. Something, it seemed, had happened to someone somewhere.

“What’s the rumpus?” I asked.

“Some fella drowned,” Mary Ruth said. “Jumped in the river for whatever reason and never came back up. That’s actually his glasses right there.” A set of wire eyeglasses sat on top of a neighboring booth. I put on them and took them off. Later, on the internet, I learned that a fifty-nine year old man had been found under fourteen feet of water. Neither suicide nor foul play was ever suspected.

The next day Ned and Zeb and I ambled around town eyeballing the cosplayers (guys and gals done up as Mothman and Bigfoot and Men in Black and other low-hanging cryptidacana), while every paranormal hack worth their hundred dollar fedora was camped out at a convoy of tables peddling their books and DVDs and trinkets and crafts. I bought a panel of sheet rock with caricature of Mothman deftly painted on it (which was later shattered into two dozen pieces on DC’s 18th Street in a late-night encounter with a malign ex-ex-ex-girlfriend—a variety of living breathing cryptid I know all too well).

Ned and Zeb and I drove out to the TNT Area, as it’s known, where Mothman allegedly still lays his creepy little head at night. We parked and got out of the car and ambled around, spying for any indication that anything had been there recently aside from 100,000 Mothman fanboys. We poked our heads in the silos, which were sepulchral and musty and as empty as a Buddhist monk’s piggy bank. “MOTHMAN SUCKS,” read a burst of graffiti in the interior in one of them. A tragically asymmetrical swastika adorned another one, as well as “ BURN BITCH 666,” “VOORHEES WAS HERE,” and the obligatory pentagram, of course. On a broken baseball bat, someone had magic-markered “MOTHMAN WEARS GRANNY PANTIES,” which was a statement I could neither confirm nor disconfirm.

“It is my understanding,” I said to my colleagues, “that Mothman keeps a little studio apartment in Cincinnati that he zips over to during this laffy taffy festival.”

“He sure as shit ain’t here,” said Zeb.

“We’ll come across Jimmy Hoffa’s false teeth before we find Mothman,” said Ned.

This type of cynical banter went on until we agreed it was time to go back to the hotel and look for ghosts.

We got back to the Lowe just in time to catch Mary Ruth in the bar before she closed it up. We gunned down an attack dose of Yuenglings and went skulking around the guts of the hotel, working our way from the lobby up to the banquet room, which was vast and dark and sufficiently spooky.

“I am 100% certain that if we find a ghost, it’s gonna be in this room,” I said, skulking around, bending over, and looking under the dining tables, all the while using our cellphones as flashlights.

Zeb scoffed and said, “Any type of a ghost or, you know, autonomous residual energy or full-blown poltergeist or whatever, would hopefully have the wherewithal to steer the heck clear of us three drunkards.”

“There’s an old saying,” I said, “I forget who came up with it—maybe me?—it’s simply, if you start blabbin’ about how drunk you are, you probably ain’t that drunk.”

“I am six wool blankets and a couple of sleeping bags in the wind,” said Ned.

“Me, too,” said Zeb. “I am loaded beyond belief.”

“Horseshit,” I said, strafing them both with spittle. “We’ve only had like twelve beers each. Nobody’s even cracked into that bottle of Old Muskethead yet.”

This went on until we finally wriggled our way back downstairs and into our hotel room, which, for better or worse, seemed to also be sans ghosts.

There is one prospective ghost that I was not at all interested in coming across, provided I wasn’t equipped with a proton pack: the ghost of Shawnee supreme stud Hokoleskwa, known as Chief Cornstalk to the palefaces, and who was buried right here in Point Pleasant. Chief Cornstalk’s life was not an easy one, which is basically where the facts stop and the speculation starts, but what we do know of his story makes the movie Platoon look like a spotted puppy on Christmas morning. After enduring a lifetime of headaches caused by being in the middle of the unceasing trifles between the French and the English in the 18th century, Cornstalk, his son, and two other Shawnee were shot at close range by a bunch of cranky American militiamen while being held in arbitrary captivity at Fort Randolph (a revenge killing, the militiamen called it, in response to one of their own getting offed in the vicinity by a Native American who had nada to do with Cornstalk’s diplomatic little visit, the purpose of which was to basically scope out the Americans and learn their handshakes and congratulate them on their breach baby of a new country).

Due to the humans again confusing reality with fiction (this time by way of a 1921 outdoor play, whose scripter decided to whip up some hocus pocus hubbub about Cornstalk applying a “200 year curse” to the whole creepy region right before the Americans plugged him), Cornstalk has posthumously been blamed for western West Virginia’s eerie disposition, setting the stage for Mothman, Indrid Cold, the Men in Black, Sheepsquatch, dogmen, the Grafton Monster, and ten zillion moving lights in the sky. In short, the world has always been sufficiently weird.

We checked out of the Lowe in the morning, all three of us wrangling with saber-toothed bewilderment that tags along with that ferocious variety of hangover known only to ambitious boozers like ourselves. We troubleshooted with coffee and pastries, wreaked havoc on every American inch of porcelain in the establishment, and then Quasimodo’d our way to the car, all stumpy syllables and dark sunglasses and missteps and directionless apologies to the inanimate objects that impeded our amble.

I expect the upcoming weekend’s sojourn to Grafton shall be a similar messcapade, thick with everything from despair to rapture. In fact, “expectation” is the only four-letter word the good people of West Virginia allow to cross into the state without a notarized letter from Yahweh or His attorney. And if you expect to roll into to West Virginia to just “take it easy,” you will be beetle bait before Wheel of Fortune comes on. With that in mind, I have packed a snake-bit kit, a “family-size” box of gauze, enough band-aids for the whole cast of the Walking Dead, a six-hundred-dollar crossbow and a whole gross of arrows, each tipped with freshly squeezed poison dart frog juice, eight sticks of CVS-brand dynamite, a helmet big and thick enough to midnight as a kiddie pool, an imaginary sidekick (Jiffy Hormel, per usual), a DIY hang glider, a taxidermized paw from a monkey that won both the Fantasy Five and the Powerball, some night-vision goggles, a few flares, and an unopened VHS of the original Red Dawn, in the event I need to barter with the natives.

For luck, which I will need in unlimited gobs, I have tossed a freshly minted nickel into every pond, pool, fountain, river, run, lake, and bayou from my doorstep to Planet X. I shall report back here from the bleeding belly button of the beast, inshallah. As David Bowie said, it ain’t easy….

Van Jason Hillard 5/16/24 Van Jason Hillard 5/16/24

SCARE TACTIX (prologue)

I can still hear our screams competing – a-ha

Nobody but the skipper has any relish for the sea – Iain Sinclair

Prologue: Barrio Ga Ga on the Magdalen Islands of Quebec

(Planet Vaan / Summer of 2032)

We ran out of Spanish wine before we ran out of Gaulioses and we ran out of Gaulioses before we ran out of hashish. Jean Louis and the Argentine girl had begun talking about Soviet art and the Senegalese boy with the motorcycle said we should all go listen to Dixieland at his flat in Trieste in exactly one year. Camilla returned from the beach, which was about a hundred yards beyond a hill on the other side of the river. She set down her flip-flops, which she had taken off to cross the river, and placed her coffee mug atop one of them and then unrolled her beach towel in the red sand and sat on it. Her coffee mug was filled not with coffee, but with the last of the Spanish wine that Jean Louis had stolen from his father’s café. The river was very shallow but swift and muddy from all the rain. An ambitious sun elbowed its way through a phalanx of dull clouds.

“Turista, baby, tell me a joke,” said Camilla.

I passed the fishing rod off to Jean Louis, and in the chunky-style squawk of his native province, he said, “Go tend to your little dead girl.”

In English, I told him, “I hope you get eaten by a shark.”

“In these waters the only danger is eels.”

“That’ll do.”

The Argentine girl was humming a kiddie pool Elvis tune and deftly playing along on her bongos, effectively drowning out the dainty soundscape of the river and nearby beach.

Quebec’s Magdalen Islands, an anorexic archipelago shaped like an upside-down semicolon, were located in the middle of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. I had been here four days and slept maybe twelve hours.

Camilla said, “Turista, I want a joke.”

“I heard you. What kind of joke do you want?”

“Any kind. Tell me something that’ll make me laugh.”

Camilla was blessed (or cursed) with knowing the exact date of her death: today. This was according to a month-old text message from an imp named Preston, who, in my opinion, ought to be skinned like a rabbit and stuck in a microwave for fuckteen minutes for bestowing her with this information. This had all happened here on my home planet of Vaan. Camilla, who was not only my doppelganger, but also my steadfast lover, was from Vaan’s doppelganger planet: EARTH.

I said to her, “All the jokes I know are long and complicated.”

“Even better.”

Jean Louis casted into the river and said to us, “What did Marshall McLuhan say when he went to Starbucks?”

I made direct eye contact with Jean Louis for the first time all day and said, “The medium is the grande.” French Canadian jokes were all the same: snobbish, wacky, and about as much fun as a head of wet lettuce.

Jean Louis mumbled something about me destroying his joke and how he was going to dice me into chum and then started troubleshooting with a perch he caught that was about as big as a paper airplane. He had hooked the thing through its eye and it was laying a very enthusiastic guilt trip on him. Finally, it wriggled its way off the hook and disappeared into the muddy water.

“One-eyed Willie rides again,” I said. That late afternoon murk of the body and mind that is so familiar to all inveterate day-drinkers was beginning to set in. “Camilla, babe, if we stay out here, we’re gonna need more wine, more beer, more cigarettes, more hashish, more everything.”

“And more tick-tock!” the Senegalese boy said, using a coin to scrape dried mud off the exhaust pipe of his motorcycle.

“Definitely more tick-tock,” I said. “But actual tick-tock this time, yeah? Real cocaine. No more of that nonsense we were brushing our teeth with earlier.”

“We had koh-keh-een-ah?” said Camilla. “Who had koh-keh-een-ah?”

“Jean Louis did.”

“Jean Louis did what?” asked Jean Louis.

“I was talking about that baby laxative you oinked up.”

This confused Jean Louis enough for him to reengage the fishing rod. He undid the red bandanna around his neck and folded it and set it next to his tackle box and then opened the tackle box and changed lures—losing the beetle spin and putting on a Hula Popper—and then started casting around a different stretch of the river. His dark brown euro-shag always looked wet.

“I’m runnin’ on fumes, y’all,” Camilla said. “Do we have anything to eat besides poor people food?”

The Argentine girl dug around in her wicker basket. “We have a mango, another mango, some sort of zombie plantain tragedy, and a plank of dark chocolate that cost me ten American dollars.”

“Bienvenido al Café Proletariado.”

“What happened to that little box of fried okra?”

“Gone like a train.”

We gave the Senegalese boy three Canadian fifty dollar bills and he motorcycled into town and came back an hour later with a flotilla of vice: drugs and beer and junk food. Camilla had fallen asleep and Jean Louis and the Argentine girl had walked over to the beach and not yet returned.

The Senegalese boy, who called himself Zing, gave me a big can of Beck’s.

We stood there by the river staring at Camilla, motionless in her sleep. Zing ran through those universal sound effects people squeeze out when they hear of someone who has died or is dying.

“Today’s the day, eh?”

“Allegedly,” I said. “Guess we’ll see.”

“How’s it supposed to happen?”

“I have no clue,” I said, lying through my teeth. “The little dude didn’t say.”

The beer was cold and tasted good.

“You two are very close, aren’t you?” asked Zing.

“We are as close as two people can be without being related to one another.”

“I figured you to be twinsies.”

“Everybody does.”

“You’ve known each other your whole life?”

“Nope. We joined forces about ten years ago.”

“You met in a bookstore, I reckon.”

“Exactly. I asked her to suck my coochie right there in the Occult section and the rest is history.”

And… Silence. If I was good at anything, it was putting an end to unsolicited interrogations.

I asked Zing for a bump and he pulled out a husky set of keys and strategically picked one out and then dipped it in a little baggie of coke and brought it to my nose and I vacuumed it up with my right nostril. The coke baggie looked like a little pillow

“Whoa. This shit’s the real deal. This shit’s got zing, Zing.”

“Only the best for mademoiselle.”

We were standing where the red sand meets the red mud near the bank of the river. Little weird birds near the water’s edge were either fighting or mating or both. Zing was wearing a white Tottenham Hotspur jersey that was dotted with dozens of small dark red spots.

“What’s going on here,” I asked, pointing at the cluster of spots. “You get in a knife fight with Jackson Pollock?”

“Ah, this…” Zing stretched his shirt out in full display. “This is nature’s way of saying: Don’t eat me, I’m poisonous.”

“Thou art a strange creature.”

“Nah, for real, it’s a souvenir from America. I got jumped by some guys.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be,” he said, grinning. “It’s not my blood.”

Zing reached into the front pocket of his jeans and pulled out an unopened pack of blue Gaulioses and gnawed it open and took out a cigarette and lit it.

“It’s cool that you call it America and not the US,” I said to him. “You go down there often?”

“Only when I have to,” he said, holding up his little coke baggie and dangling it. “Or when I need to go to CVS, of course.”

“Ha… I have to admit, Zing, it feels real goddamn good to be away from the prickly vibe of modern day America… The United States of America, grown thoroughly exhausted with itself—grown bored beyond belief with itself!—has taken up the hobby of self-micromanagement.” I schnozzed up a husky bump off Zing’s key. The stuff really was strong. I took a big sip of beer to even it out. What was I rambling on about? Ah, yes, America…

“When I think of the current state of America, I am besieged with the impossible imagery of farts versus turds, ” I said, now totally steeped in the effects of the coke. “It’s basically a whole nation of snitches and trash zombies and unessential businesses and rock bands without drummers.”

Zing nodded in noncommittal accord and said, “In Dakar, my hometown, at any hour of any day on the calendar, I can go to the market and buy bottle rockets, cold beer, heavy-duty pornography, anything I want.”

“Well, see, that is freedom. In America, you are free to sit there and fuck around on your phone and, brother, that is it. You’re free to live and die by instant replay—you know what I mean by that, Zing? America is constantly rubber gloving itself, trying to see what it did wrong… Always trying to blast its own ass, always lopping away at itself like a damn maniac… Thwap! Thwap! Thwap!... The whole country has turned into an uninspired, uninspiring pile of rocks and garbage and dead bugs, which is a total drag, because it used to be such a hip spot, you know?” I said, gesticulating like a simian the whole time. I zipped my lips and took a sip of beer. My superpower was my ability to realize when I was talking a lot of bullshit about absolutely nothing.

Zing did a massive bump and sucked the innards out of his key and got bug-eyed with whatever emotion the coke was amplifying and said, “America is where you get overdraft fees because you have overdraft fees.”

“That is absolutely right,” I said, cheersing him. “You’re a cool dude, Zing… Tell me three things about yourself. Three things that I would never ever know otherwise.”

“Three things?

“Yeah, three things. There are no terms, there are no conditions.”

“Hmm,” he said, digging in the sand with his foot. “Okay… Number one, I have an irrational fear of cops in shorts.”

“Cops in shorts? You mean, like, police officers wearing shorts?”

“Yes. Gives me big time anxiety. Let’s see, number two, I slept with your twinsie last night, and the night before that, and the night before that.”

“I figured y’all scrumped that first night, but not those other two. Interesting.”

“And number three, it took me six and a half years to learn how to spell my name.”

“Z-I-N-G.”

“My real name. Souleymane.”

“Solomon?”

“Well, yeah. Solomon is, you know, the gringo version.”

Jean Louis and the Argentine girl came over the hill and waded through the river and dried themselves off.

“The little dead girl is dead,” Jean Louis said, talking about Camilla, who appeared to still be sleeping.

Camilla yawned and stretched and said, “I’m alive, you twink.”

“Ah, too bad for us.”

She rolled over on her stomach and faced everyone and said, “Is there anything more exhilarating than letting people down? Turista, babe, how dare you direct your fly-by-night compassion elsewhere. Mama wants some zing, Zing. And bring me one of whatever is in that ice chest.”

The Argentine girl said, “Jean Louis and I were talking about taking the boat to the mainland tomorrow and going to a horse race.”

“There literally is no tomorrow,” said Camilla. “Not for me, at least. And why the hell would you want to go to a horserace? Racehorses are the prissiest bunch of psychopaths on the planet.”

The weird little birds had doubled or tripled in number. Their chorus of chirps was growing oppressive.

“Jesus,” I said. “What’s with these birds?”

“They’re called piping plovers,” Jean Louis said, rummaging through the freshly-stocked ice chest. “Endangered species. Only about eight thousand of them left on the planet.”

They had the stature of a sparrow but were white with orange legs and had this little black band around their neck and face that looked like a windy day scarf.

“There’s eight thousand of them right here,” I said.

The birds were all fiercely angular and manic in their motions… A swarm of a tiny little war faces.

“I’ve never seen them do this,” Jean Louis said. “Something’s not right.”

One of them buzzed us. And then another… And then they were upon us, everywhere, in full-blown frenzy.

“Oh my God,” someone said.

Something hit my head from behind. I touched the back of my head and looked at my hand. Blood. Someone started screaming through the cacophony…. Terrible, throaty screams…

The Argentine girl…

Where she had been was now a globular pile of feathers.

Zing king-konged at the birds: swatting, grabbing, stomping. Shit. I hope the little fuckers don’t eat the coke. He went to his knees… Was he crying blood?

I ran through the river, fell down, loped on all fours, fell, scrambled, ran… I used both my lungs to narrate my actions, all verbs and adverbs and no nouns.

Maybe I’ll reach the beach. The mad flurry around me persisted. Stinging sensation all over me… I reached the beach and ran into the water. Cold as anything ever.

My mind does this thing when it comes face to face with overwhelming situations such as this one. I think of chicken nuggets. Big juicy chicken nuggets, lightly breaded, and accompanied with an array of dipping sauces…

Someone plowed into me, reawakening my focus, and then others splashed down around me… I scrambled deeper out, grabbing at the others, pulling them, getting pulled by them, maybe four feet deep now, I baptized myself and stayed under… I held my breath for a shit ton of seconds… I resurfaced, gulping at the air… I heard the elusive, distinctly nightmarish sound of heavy hyperventilation. The sky was all birds.

“Not like this,” Camilla said, from somewhere. “Not like this.”

Van Jason Hillard 5/8/24 Van Jason Hillard 5/8/24

WATCH YOUR HIDE FOR THE WOMEN IN WHITE: an excerpt from upcoming work of pseudofiction INDRID COLD IS DEAD

Occoquan, VA -

Windows started tremblin’ with a sonic boom, boom . . . A cold girl will kill you in a darkened room – Jim Morrison

What is the opposite of Men in Black? Don’t overthink it, eh? There you go, bubba, you nailed it: Women in White.

So . . .

It was the middle of November, a comprehensively worthless part of a worthless month, and I was sitting in a fake Italian joint in the cutesy microtown of Occoquan, Virginia. Animated soccer was flickering on the boob tube behind the bar in front of me. The US men’s soccer team was pistol-whipping the Mexicans in the colossal slab of concrete that is Azteca Stadium and this has a stranglehold on the attention of everyone in the restaurant, including all six bartenders.

My dog was moored at my feet and was wearing a poutish expression. He is too old for people food—that most prized possession of all warm-blooded creatures—so he was laying a passo-aggro guilt trip on me.

I coaxed a kid wearing an apron to fetch me a bottle of anything with bubbles in it and he alerted one of the bartenders who passionately ignored him.

The US men’s soccer team hadn’t beaten the Mexican team in Mexico since they had orcs and wood dwarves in their starting eleven, so the bug-eyed raptness was merited, however I wanted a goddamn beer. It had taken an hour to drive twenty miles to this kooky little hamlet and there is no beer on this planet or any other that is more satisfying than the post-driving beer.

I left five bucks to cover the basket of bread and butter that I had demolished with Beyond Thunderdome panache and walked outside to a honked-out crowd of fellow day-trippers (it was some half-ass holiday, and every six-figures Harley Davidson cosplayer in the mid-Atlantic region had come here to do seemingly absolutely nothing aside from clog up the sidewalk). I immediately noticed a weird whirring sound. I turned around and behind me idling down the skinny street was an eggshell-white NASA-looking SUV thing with a pretty brunette at the wheel. She stared at me like I was her dead twin as she rolled past me. My dog was a steadfast connoisseur of the outré himself and displayed high alertness at the sight and sound of this weird vehicle. The thing had no license plates, and I swear I got an audio whiff of Golden Earring’s Twilight Zone as it whirred up the street.

Later when getting back to DC, while stopped in a turning lane near the Lincoln Memorial, I looked in the rearview and saw the same weird vehicle stopped behind me in the lane next to me—and seemingly the same brunette at the wheel. The vehicle was about two car-lengths back, but there were no cars between us and no reason to keep such a distance. I took my eyes off it for a second or two and looked again and it was gone. I surveyed my surroundings for it, but it was nowhere upon nowhere upon nowhere. It could not have made a U-turn and sped off in the other direction because there was a low barrier in the median, nor were there any side streets that it could have turned off on. I am certain I had seen the thing and my still cannot summon an adequate reason for its disappearance.

I did not have supper that night. Why was this woman in white driving a weird white vehicle a la Atari’s Moon Patrol follow me back to DC and pull a Copperfield on me? I had gone to Occoquan for no legitimate reason other than to squander a few hours and cast around the Occoquan River for a little bit.

Later that week, I would at once gain more insight into strangeness and become even more baffled. I was driving up to Silver Spring, Maryland for band practice—I sing and drum in a local DC two-piece rock outfit called Public Figures—and I had pulled off in a little commercial drag of leafy Chevy Chase, Maryland to nab a coffee and, voila!—the same weird vehicle was parked there in front of the little café.

I walked in but there is no sign of the brunette I had seen at the vehicle’s helm the other day. It was nearly noon, but I ordered a coffee anyway, and I was fortifying it with an attack dose of cream and Splenda when I spy the brunette emerging from a hallway where the bathrooms are. She looks like she had jumped out of Cannonball Run—white jumpsuit, cascade of wavy brown hair, huge sunglasses . . .

She walked right up to me and said, “Where’s your pooch?”

“He’s home, probably snoozin’ for a bruisin’,” I said, displaying a coziness that surprised even me.

She laughed and said, “Do you live down in . . .” It was clear she had never said the word Occoquan aloud before either.

“Nah, I was just there screwin’ around for a bit. I live in DC.”

It might have only been for a literal quarter of a second, but I swear the lady’s eyes momentarily went completely black. Her face responded to my change of expression: one seized by bafflement.

She said, low, slowly, and in a brand-spankin’ new voice, “There are things that exist and events that occur only because you fear them. If they were not summoned by your fear, they would remain forever latent.”

I said nothing and just looked at her. I took a sip of my coffee, which was at once super burnt and not at all hot.

“Just about as grody as you thought it might be?”

“Yeah, and then some.”

She turned and started walking away. “Anybody who orders a cup of coffee at noon on the dot deserves what they get.” She paused at the exit and turned around and said, “I’ll see you around, Van.”

“Not if I don’t see you first,” I responded, as she was already three feet out the door.

Only when pulling into the driveway of our practice place did I realize I had never told the strange brunette my name.

I have yet to see her or her strange little eggshell-white vehicle again.

Van Jason Hillard 4/25/24 Van Jason Hillard 4/25/24

Data Science Fiction (notes & observations)

According to physicist/futurologist Michio Kaku, a *Type III* civilization is one where its inhabitants just sort of can intuitively figure out where out where the restroom, an inhabitant of a *Type II* civilization can breezily locate the restroom with a little guidance from their server or the hostess, whereas an inhabitant of *Type I* has to ask their server, the hostess, then the kitchen manager, both busboys, the valet, a whole fleet of chorus girls, the Coke machine, and still end up in the middle of the koi pond. We are a Type I civilization.

~~~

". . . And David Duchovny is in it but he's totally in drag and Ben Horne thinks he's General Lee and reenacts the Civil War in his office and fucking Billy Zane is there for some stupid fucking reason and then Josie gets turned into a goddamn NOB on a like chest-of-drawers or something and Cooper's still in it but he's all like Gap'd out in flannel and khakis and a poofy vest . . ."

Season 2 of Twin Peaks is basically the dream you have if you binge Season 1 and then snort a whole Red Baron Deep Dish Pizza.

~~~

Schopenhauer says false modesty is just a form of hypocrisy and l agree, which is why I enthusiastically proclaim l've eaten more crab rangoons than you've even dreamt about.

~~~

I would never ride in a time machine for fear it'd break down in that slice of the nineties when 10,000 Maniacs ruled the airwaves.

~~~

Saxony, 1850

“Last name first, first name last."

“Nietzsche, Friedrich."

“Shit, boy, how you spell that?"

*pulls out smart phone; Googles himself*

~~~

No one's ever gotten a Monte Cristo or Reuben or whatever and looked at their plate and go, "Welp, there it is. There's that pickle everyone's always carrying on about."

The average American spends over a hundred thousand hours every single year troubleshooting with pickles---pickles whose real estate could easily be taken up by an Oreo or Twizzler or plastic army man or something.

~~~

I drink ten thousand beers a week but here I am worrying if eating a red apple and green apple in the same day will explode me into six pieces.

~~~

Sonic Youth did some shit back in the day that today’s bands wouldn’t ever ever think of doing, like naming their band 'Sonic Youth.”

~~~

Breaking news: All I really ever wanted in life was a Lakers Girl, a red convertible Le Baron, Ed Furlongs haircut in T2, and some of those pills Gary Oldman takes all throughout The Professional

~~~

We'll never really know if there are elves in Iceland until we capture and interrogate every gnome, faerie, troll, and water spirit in the country.

~~~

What a drag it'd be to get a Ouija board and actually contact a spirit and that the spirit was just a goddamn awful speller.

~~~

Every time someone says "Friyay!", an angel gets held underwater for 90 seconds.

~~~

How long til international outlaw motorcycle club the Hell's Angels are officially sponsored by Under Armour?

~~~

There is only one truly dependable axiom in this universe and it is this: if you give someone ranch, they will ask you for blue cheese, and if you give someone blue cheese, they will ask you for ranch. (Same applies to grape jelly and strawberry jelly.)

~~~

On the Kentucky Derby: Race horses are the prissiest bunch of psychopaths on the planet. They should have a side bet---which horse will freak the fuck out and start biting itself and yelling about Dick Cheney & the CIA right out of the gate.

~~~

*“I did not get my Spaghetti-O's. I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this."*

~~~

Van Jason Hillard 4/23/24 Van Jason Hillard 4/23/24

Planet Earth to rebrand as Easy Does It

Planet Earth, the third planet from the Sun and the only known corner of the universe that can reflect on itself, is set to rebrand as Easy Does It by early 2023.

“We’re all very excited,” says Earth CEO Dex Chimney. “And we believe that potential customers, as well as our existing customers, of course, will share the same enthusiasm.”

Chimney, who heads the committee responsible for the rebranding, believes the new moniker Easy Does It is in tune with the recent market trends and the current consumers’ affection for establishments with cutesy, data-driven names that derive from low-hanging expressions and idioms such as Yours Truly, Loves Me Not, Mercy Me, Call Your Mother, No Kisses, Compliments Only, and Two in the Bush.

Will everyone embrace the change? Earth has been called Earth for a very, very long time.

“As much as we’d like to please all 8 billion bags-of-bones on this huge flamin’ ball of mud, we know that it’s just not realistic,” says Chimney. “Some customers are going to cling to the old moniker, and that’s just fine. Ultimately, they are entitled to call Easy Does It whatever they like, but I will say there will be no official name per se other than Easy Does It. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with a little benign discord to conjure up a little chatter on the internet.”

Why the need for a rebranding?

“It’s no secret that our planet had been steadily losing foot traffic,” Chimney says. “Downloads of the app were down, you’d see less buzz in all spheres of social media, be it GramaSpurt or Snitchster or Spaceface, there was considerably less action on Postblips and Boofdish…. I mean, the numbers don’t lie, and one could blame the economy, which is more fickle than ever, or the proliferation of options that customers now have, or the Covid19 pandemic, which, of course, was a huge challenge… But, whatever the case, after a careful examination of the data that our committee has collected, we decided to go ahead do it. Now or never, I say, which funnily enough, was actually one of the initial cutesy, data-driven expressions we thought might be useful in the rebrand before ultimately deciding on Easy Does It.” Chimney, who has been the planet’s CEO since 2018, goes on to say that the planet’s former name made sense at the time, but things can become stagnant, and sometimes a rebranding is necessary to communicate to the customer the fact that, not only are you still there, but you’re more vital than ever.

Will competitors follow suit? Are we to expect Mars and Venus to become Bend Over Backwards and Close But No Cigar?

Chimney chortles and says, “Look, what those other guys do is none of my concern. All I know is Easy Does It will be set to go by the spring of next year, and you can expect a full line of Easy Does It merchandise. T-shirts, jackets, trucker hats, visors, coffee mugs, patches, lapel pins, you name it! In fact, our preorders are through the roof and some of the items are already in danger of selling out. I encourage customers to download the Easy Does It app, if they haven’t already, open that sucker up, click on that little merch tab, put their accountability in zip-lock bag and toss it into a muddy river, and just buy-buy-buy ‘til their creepy little heart’s sated.”

What about the Moon?

“Oh, the Moon is staying the Moon, don’t worry,” says Chimney. “But we are installing 14.6 million square miles of faux boxwood flora panels—fake grass, you know—as well as conducting a largescale remodel of what used to be the Moon’s food court. We expect the new roll-out, which will be sort of a gathering place, culinary hub, and event space all rolled into one, and heavily featuring local merchants and local DJs, to take place by summer of 2023.”

The increasingly excited Chimney dreamily adds, “Oh, and the, uh, logos for both joints are changing. Easy Does It will be rendered in an adult cursive medley of electric pink, camembert yellow, and babyshit blue, while the Moon will be a QR code with a little moon under it.”