An Excerpt

"He saw the futility of life, yet felt amazingly clean, like a dying ant on a bar of soap."

From my forthcoming novel, The Lugubrious Goober

Dark Chocolate

Nobody loves me. Why don't I have a girlfriend? I wish I had more nice things. I want a big couch with comfy cushions that are nice and soft but not too soft because then they get all squishy and you just wind up resenting them. Why doesn't someone go out and buy me some candy? I want chocolate. The kind that's 70% cocoa or higher. I want no less than 70% or I was will throw it at the wall. Look at all these piles of books and comics and magazines in the bedroom here. It looks like the NY skyline. I should get organized. I should get bookshelves. I should pay that big-ass fine I have so I can get my van back on the road so I can buy bookshelves. I saw cheap bookshelves at a used furniture place down the block for $40 that looked nice, not like you're thinking right now because you read "$40" and thought "probably cheap and crappy."

I think I bite my nails too much. But you shouldn't bite your nails at all so I guess anyone who bites their nails bites them too much. Of people who bite their nails, I am probably among the more high-frequency biters. I should cut down. I want to take a big trip. I either want to go to Tokyo and see all the Japanese people and the toys and lights and the shops and the comics and then go to Hong Kong or I want to go to Europe and see David in Madrid, Lilith in Barcelona, and my mother's cousins in the little Tyrolean mountain village where they live in northeast Italy called Val di Non. Lilith pronounces her name "Leeleet." She is little and funny and has pink hair. Like some people from Japan. I stay up too late and don't read enough. I still want chocolate. I'm waiting.

Heal! Heal!

You haven't lived until you seen televangelist Robert Tilton. He sits at a desk, speaks into the camera, reads prayers viewers send in, speaks in tongues over them ("Afllaalllaa, Aabbllittalla, Fllabbabala"), and eventually builds up to his pitch where he suggests that God will give you what you want if you just send in $1000 to him.

My favorite is when he heals people via TV. He'll read a letter where he mentions that "a woman in Dirtybutt, Georgia has a stomach ail-uh-ment." He'll then say, "Ah wont you to put yore hands on the TV screen and puh-ray to God. Okay." He then puts his hands up, squeezes his eyes shut, and then yells, "Heal!! Heal!! Heal!!" He's great. He's better than the circus.

I remember the prayer cloths that he would hawk. You would send away for the cloths, pray into them, get'em really soaked up with your prayer, then send them back. Tilton would pick a few out and pray over them to heal your goiter, or get God to pay your Aunt Tillie's mortgage. Unless of course he just threw them in the dumpster as Diane Sawyer and Primetime Live discovered when they did an expose on him.

Check out this link -- it's Tilton speaking in tongues. Either that or singing, "Oye Como Va," by Santana.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X54O1zniJE8&feature=related

After Primetime exposed him he went off the air for a few years. But you can't keep a good man down. He was back on TV by the late 90s and is still there, still owns multi-million dollar homes, and is still asking for cash. I used to say to friends that when he would yell, "Heal! Heal!" into the camera it may not have cured anyone but that because of the force of his voice, dogs all over America sat down as one.