copyright © Justin Stone

Summer 2009

presented in conjunction with
Dept. Of Lurid Histories
and
Karst Topography

“I don’t know that I’ve seen a less auspicious debut. Left me weird.”
– Gideon Mariner, Southern Relic Magazine

“Go, go, go get a big bite of this dog’s breakfast. Bring a towel.”
– Jackson Silver, The Middle-Arkansas Herald

“Provocative. Confusing.”
– Doug Whiles, Community Theatre Today

I was talking with a peer at my present dayjob and I mentioned to her that I was trying to write comedy, that I wanted to write comedy, and she looked at me, dead serious, and said, “Don’t you have to be funny to do that?”

I stood in the mouth of my cave and blinked.

I said to her,

copyright © Justin Stone

The show begins, finally, once you are bald, once you have tumbled down the mountain. The show will be a half mile outside town. Me and Tim Sleep and Jakespeare and Petrified Forrest in The Assassination Of Justin Stone By The Coward Justin Stone.

Smell the creek on this one.

I love you!

(As I hurried about)

(Harried)

I caught a sidelong glimpse of myself in reflection and I saw there Doc Brown of Back To The Future.

Things never turn out how you mean them to.

you howling

I listened to the song and I remembered

What did the language say to the void?

“Hi.”

I listened to a snippet of the song this weekend and I remembered.

if you want to know a secret
everything here means something

The Most Tired Person In The Entire World

He was being driven slowly crazy by the unemployed semi-literates packed like sheep into the apartment above his. There was, like, an inch of cardboard between them, his apartment and theirs, if that. The walls were boxboard. These heavy-footed plodders talked on and on about being artists, being broke, being geniuses. Thunderclaps of devastating laughter between them, hilarious. The sound of things being broken into, broken up, pounded back. Like everybody these days, they yakked on and on about every subject under the sun in an all-knowing, condescending manner, pissy & deploring know-it-alls with not a drop of wisdom in the bucket between them. To know so little about so much. Christ Jesus, we are doomed.

Jackboots, work boots, cowboy boots, biker boots, hiking boots. Size-13 know-it-alls.

It seemed they were moving a pile of rocks from one side of the apartment to the other, over and over again.

The words hard slog.

Their every declamation torture.

The world will end in fraternal laughter.

He felt this payback for his own youth. Back when he lived on the top floor. Karmic retribution for the neighbor downstairs he and his misshapen gang had most certainly pushed to the brink, doing time.

Oh man. Exhalations a’plenty. Heavy shifting.

The sky outside sighing.

Release me.

Meanwhile, the novel went nowhere.

resilience
in/to
life’s weird pressure

mike shannon called it—ankiel’s homer
he felt it,
I felt it—

“way way out there”

!