Here are around a hundred of my favorite songs from 2023:
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Chainsaw Mouth
A man goes to the dentist and has a chainsaw installed in his mouth. The chainsaw is not something he specifically asked for, it just works out that way. Leaving the dentist’s office, he tries to say “Thank you” to the receptionist but the only sound that comes out is the deafening rev of the chainsaw.
He gets home early and decides he can probably get some work done. The man is a salesman. Grabbing his bag of merchandise, he heads out to the neighborhood, going door-to-door. Whenever he has something new, some kitchen gadget everyone needs, he always starts in his own neighborhood, figuring neighbors with a lot of appliances are happy neighbors indeed.
He knocks on Mrs. Frick’s door. She lives at the end of the street. He waits impatiently for her to come to the door, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. An inordinate period of time passes and Mrs. Frick throws open the door. Half of her face is covered in make-up. The other half looks old and wrinkled.
The man goes into his spiel but the only thing coming from his mouth is the grating sound of the chainsaw. Mrs. Frick gasps in horror and backs away from the doorway. The man holds an arm of comfort out to her, begging her to stay and listen to him. She slams the door in his face and he reaches into his bag and pulls out some merchandise, leaving it on her doorstep. To his dismay, the merchandise is not some new household appliance. It is a bondage magazine and a snuff film. He wants to reclaim the merchandise but he’s so appalled and frightened he can’t. He scampers off to the next house and repeats the same process, telling himself it can’t be that bad. This time he finds himself throwing child pornography and a crack rock into the home of the retreating Miss Gallop.
The day does not get any better. His neighbors become more abrupt and violent—some of them openly hostile. His chainsaw voice becomes louder, more antagonistic. His merchandise becomes even darker and more illegal—Nazi propaganda, body parts. He retreats back to his house, throwing the door shut and locking it. He hides in the closet and crouches down, weeping with his new gasoline-powered voice.
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The Hole
A man receives a call from his sister-in-law. She tells him his brother caught lazy eye at work. Immediately thereafter, the man develops a hole halfway up his forearm. Curious, he explores the hole. Too small to fit his index finger into, he probes it with his pinky.
“I wonder where it leads,” he muses, still digging with the pinky. He removes his pinky from the hole and smells it. The odor is only moderately disagreeable. Something similar to a sweaty navel smell.
The next day at work he brushes some of his arm hair over it and, luckily, no one notices. When he gets home that night, after showering, the hole’s smell wafts up to his nostrils. It smells much worse than before the shower. Nearly pungent. His sister-in-law calls again. This time she tells him his brother’s lazy eye has turned into a cataract.
“I’ve got problems of my own,” he growls at her and hangs up the phone.
He returns to the bathroom and scrubs the hole with great rigor. Finding a sliver of soap, he works this around in the hole until it disintegrates. It doesn’t help. In fact, the man is quite sure it smells even worse.
“Shit,” he thinks. “This is the worst smelling hole I have.”
The next day, fraught with embarrassment, he stays home from work. He breaks apart a stick of deodorant and places a piece in the hole. After a few minutes, the deodorant is gone and he puts another piece in there. If ever his vigilance declines, the hole reminds him with a scent more powerfully chilling than the worst flatulence he’s ever smelled. That evening his sister-in-law calls to tell him his brother went to the doctor. In order to solve the problem with his brother’s eye, the doctor shot it out with a slingshot. Now his eye is fine—better than before, even. The man asks his sister-in-law for the doctor’s name. He calls and makes an appointment.
The next day he goes to see the doctor.
The man forgets to bring his deodorant and the nurse directs him to a room, pushing him into it and quickly shutting the door behind him.
A few hours later the doctor walks in. Upon opening the door, he is visibly taken aback, hours of stink greeting his nostrils.
“My God that’s horrible,” he gasps.
The man points to the hole on his arm.
“Oh. I see. You have a hole.”
He pulls out a cotton swab and swabs the inside of the hole. He pulls it out and smells it, visibly suppressing his gorge and bracing himself on the bed.
“Jesus that smells. Let me write you a prescription for that.”
“Thanks,” the man says. “I’ll be happy to get rid of it.”
“Here’s a prescription for two grapes and a piece of tape. That oughtta do it.”
Skeptical, the man goes to the store, selecting the grapes and tape. He gives the cashier his prescription and medical card. She nods and hands him a receipt, suspiciously eyeing him. Once home, he inserts the grapes into the hole and applies the tape over top of it.
The next morning the hole is gone. The man breathes deeply. He feels reborn.
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Bonus 12
To the person who downloaded all of my books at once (for free, of course): That’s a lot of toxic garbage to put in your head. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing it.
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Death Sentence
I receive a death sentence in the mail.
It’s not a death threat. It’s a lot more sure of itself.
U WILL DIE
5:37 PM
It’s written in crayon and, even though it was in the mailbox, was not delivered by the postal service.
I look around the neighborhood, thinking maybe it had been left recently and whoever left it might still be around.
The neighborhood is as dead as ever.
I look back at the death sentence. If it’s true – and I don’t really see any reason why it wouldn’t be – I have just over three hours to live.
I know I should make the most of it but I’m drawing a blank.
I could buy a prostitute but I don’t really have that much money and stealing a prostitute is really just rape, I guess.
I could walk to the park but it would take me about a half hour to get there. Plus it’s kind of hot out and there will probably be a bunch of irritating kids and their more irritating parents there.
It’s kind of an odd amount of time. Not really enough to go anywhere.
I could watch a movie or listen to a couple of my favorite records but that seems too static. I feel like I should be moving, doing something.
I decide to go on a crime spree.
I don’t own a gun or anything more dangerous than a kitchen knife so it’ll have to be a petty crime spree.
I head to the gas station on the corner, leaving my house unlocked. I don’t even know if I’ll be back. Besides, there isn’t anything in it worth stealing. And, maybe, if I’m not at home, whoever’s job it is to kill me will just give up.
I haven’t allowed myself any beer or cigarettes lately, so I decide to steal those.
At the gas station, the teenage clerk has an afternoon talk show up really loud on the television and he’s leafing through a porno magazine. One of the really sleazy kinds.
I grab a case of beer from the cooler. The cigarettes are behind the counter, practically under lock and key. I’ll have to fight the clerk for them.
I put the beer on the counter and say, “Now I’m going to fight you for a pack of cigarettes.”
The clerk has already scanned the beer.
“Huh?” he says, looking at the monitor of the cash register.
I don’t feel like repeating myself so I just blurt out the brand of cigarettes I want and he smacks them down on the counter and gives me the total.
I pay him and leave.
Outside the gas station, I tear open the cigarettes and throw my trash on the ground. I go back inside and buy a lighter. I open the case of beer and take one out.
Instinctively I head for home. I should probably go anywhere but there really isn’t much to see in this town and home is really where I want to be.
I’ll just go sit on my couch and drink and smoke and wait.
Nearly home, a cop pulls up to the curb and beeps his sirens at me.
I think about running but then think, “No. What if that’s how I die? What if I run for like two hours – exhausting myself when I could be drinking and smoking – and then I end up getting shot by the police?”
I walk over to the car.
“You can’t be drinking on the sidewalk,” the cop says.
“I just figured it didn’t matter,” I say.
“Why wouldn’t it matter?”
I fish the death sentence out of my pocket and hand it to him.
He reads it and says, “You better get in.”
I start to open the handle of the passenger door and he says, “In back.”
I get in the back.
“Am I under arrest?”
“Not unless you’re not going to share.”
“You want a beer?”
“And a cigarette.”
I can’t pass him anything through the wire mesh separating me from the front and there are no handles to open the door.
He gets out of the car and comes to the back. He opens the door and gets in next to me.
I hand him a beer and a cigarette, the lighter.
He lights the cigarette and takes a deep, satisfying drag.
He pops the can of beer and sucks off some of the foam.
He looks out the window, at a distance that doesn’t really exist, and says, “Five thirty-seven, huh?”
“That’s what it says.”
“Not much time.”
“No. Not really.”
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The Laughing Crusade
After finishing my treatise on the New Anarchist Revolution I decide to head out to the back porch for a beer and a cigarette. The television lies on the floor in a broken, smoldering heap. I pull a beer out of the refrigerator, cross the kitchen and go outside. It’s hot and humid. Quiet, but the neighborhood kind of quiet, which isn’t really quiet at all. Wind in the trees. The humming of a neighbor’s air conditioner. Buzzing streetlamps. Televisions murmuring through open windows. A telephone ringing. Distant traffic. Distant trains. Distant sirens. All the real noise is distant.
I light a cigarette and take the first deep drag and all the quiet unquiet is shattered. Someone laughs. It’s loud and continuous, emitted from somewhere high up in the nasal passages. Female. It’s like she has some sort of loudspeaker between her eyes. I don’t hear anyone else. Just this one woman, laughing and laughing. I sit down in a chair, rest my beer bottle on the small patio table, and try to block out that heinous laughter and focus on my next treatise. I can’t. Jesus. She sounds like a braying donkey. I finish the rest of my beer in a single gulp, take the last drag from my cigarette and toss both of them out into the yard.
Inside, I can still hear the laughter. I picture her standing there on her porch, leaning out over the steps, laughing and laughing and laughing.
I urinate on the busted television and head upstairs. I lie down next to the woman who has been lying comatose in this bed since I moved in nearly two years ago. She breathes slowly and steadily. Normally, her breathing is soporific but tonight it is drowned out by the braying donkey. She must live in the house across the street and just to the north.
Hours later, pillows piled around my head, I finally fall asleep.
And wake up to laughter. Loud. Raucous. Bursting forth in unrelenting waves.
What can possibly be so funny? This woman has laughed more in one night than I have my entire life. In fact, I have only laughed three times I can remember. Each time, something dreadful happened in the following days and I don’t know if I remember the laughter because of the funny things that happened or because of the subsequent tragedies.
I curl my hands into tightly balled fists and hop out of bed. I will wait until nightfall, I decide. And then I will have to find out what donkey girl is laughing at, if anything.
The laughter continues unabated throughout the day. At dusk, I delve into the closet and suit up—a black jumpsuit, black leather gloves, and a black ski mask—items I keep around for just such occasions.
The laughter has tapered only slightly. It seems she must have gone inside. No bother. I still had to find out what all the laughing was about. I go outside.
Unseen, I slowly approach the house until I am at eye level with what must be her living room. She doesn’t use any curtains or blinds. There’s practically no one in the neighborhood anyway and, even if there were, surely someone who laughs with such reckless abandon is not the least bit interested in privacy.
A burly female with short, spiky hair and skin like a potato’s sits on the couch, staring at her television and laughing uproariously. A large caramel-colored dog stands on the couch next to her, licking the side of her head. Where the dog has licked, the hair is wet, matted down to that gross skin. I notice what’s happening on her television and her laughter shocks me even further. Mushroom clouds, atrocity slaughter footage, torture, buildings crumbling, farms burning, people screaming before being consumed by conflagrations.
Not funny stuff.
Amidst the laughter I hear footsteps. I duck behind a row of shrubs and watch three people in gas masks approach the house. Not bothering to knock on the door, they just walk right in.
Now I’m totally enthralled. Perhaps they’ve come to take her away. That kind of thing happens all the time.
Simultaneously, they pull off their gas masks. Even more laughter rips through the night. So they weren’t gas masks at all. They were anti-laugh masks. How full of joy or insanity must one be before needing an anti-laugh mask?
Now the burly laugher rises and they all head toward the front door, led by the dog, the atrocity footage still playing on the television. That kind of thing was exactly the reason I had to deactivate my television. The world had become a brutal place and I didn’t want it in my home.
The dog sniffed a trail to the neighboring house. No one lives there, I thought. The dog sniffs the door, raises its paw and scratches. Maybe someone does live there. A squatter, perhaps. Someone hiding out. The laughers enter the house and come back out with a withered, sad-looking old man. They circle around him, laughing and laughing. They tap him on the shoulder, indicating for him to share a laugh. He tries. He bleats out a laugh, raising his arms in the air. Forced. Unnatural. Even I can tell and I’m not even very close. They shackle him, drag him down onto the ground, and strip off all his clothes—choking him, beating him until he is dead.
What’s the point of this?
Are these people with the government? Are they law enforcement? Is it now a requirement to be a laughing hyena?
Apparently it is.
I retreat to my rooftop and, through powerful night vision binoculars, watch the laughers continue their cruel crusade. Or is it a hilarious crusade? They drag the quiet and the sober from their homes, beat them to unconsciousness, and toss them out into the road where a large truck equipped with a giant clown head comes along and scoops them up with a creepily fleshy, oversized hand. Meanwhile, people like Jimmy, the neighborhood drunk, the one who pisses in his lawn all the time, are able to join their ranks, increasing their overall volume of laughter.
I don’t know what to do. What will become of me if they rush into the house and find the television all broken or, worse, what if they find my treatise? I flush it down the toilet. I try to be quick about it but I have to go nearly page by page to avoid clogs. Now they are knocking on the door. Has it always been like this? I can’t remember. I can’t remember much of anything. Still, they knock on the door. My memories are not important. Was I ever one of them? Did I ever laugh like that? I can’t imagine it.
The dog scratches.
The laughers laugh and knock and laugh.
I look at the comatose woman.
What if I was in a coma?
Where did that truck take all of the non-laughers?
The front door opens downstairs. I throw myself in bed next to the comatose woman. She smiles, opens her eyes and says, “It works. I’ve been faking all this time,” before snapping them shut and resuming her breathing. I close my eyes as the laughers enter the room and wonder what the comatose life will be like.
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Bonus 11
As with most nights, I’m sitting around wondering which undiagnosed disease I probably have.
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The Animal Trainer
He must be on some form of disability. Home all the time. He lives across the street and I see him come out of his house with a puppy behind him.
The man walks the puppy to the bank of grass growing on the curb. His pale gut hangs out of his tight and stained t-shirt.
“Come on, doggy,” he says. “Make poops.”
The dog looks innocently at the man. They stand that way for a few minutes, the man as vacant as the dog.
“Come on, make poops.”
The dog stares.
“Here,” the man says.
He pulls down his gray sweatpants, turns his buttocks to the road and squats. A turd slides out, landing on the shaggy grass.
“Do that,” he says to the dog.
The dog sniffs at the man’s feces, hunches his back, crouches, and lays one down.
“Good,” the man says. “Good dog. Good dog.” And he pats the dog on the head, feeding him something from his palm.
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Gas Station Drugs
I buy most of my prescriptions from the gas station.
Sometimes I can’t afford everything I need and have to go without one of them.
Then I get sad and mopey or manic and productive.
I don’t know.
I think I feel best when I can afford all the gas station drugs and don’t abuse them too much.
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Delayed Reaction
It’s a good thing Virgil doesn’t react to the knock on the door and squeeze the trigger. Because, well, because his head would be on the kitchen wall. Virgil has to admire the irony. He is sitting in the kitchen with a fully loaded gun resting on his bottom teeth. It isn’t a series of events that has brought him to this. It is a series of nothing. Not even really a series. More like a wave. A giant wave of static nothingness slowly devouring his sanity.
No friends. No conversation. No laughter. No visitors.
This knock on the door is the first knock he’s heard since moving into his apartment two years ago. Roughly. Somewhat bemused, he puts the gun in the refrigerator and walks to the door. Opening it, he is stunned. There are five girls backed out into the hall.
“Hello,” he stammers.
“Hi,” a blond girl in the front says. She looks to be at least seventeen or eighteen. The rest look younger. They all look delicious. “We’re from the Springdale chapter of the Daughters in Christ Brigade. Mind if we come in?”
“No. Not at all. Please do.”
Virgil steps aside and motions them over to the beaten couch. They all sit down in a militant line, their skirts riding up as they cross their legs.
“You ladies care for a drink?”
“No thanks,” they all reply in unison.
“Well, then, I’m just gonna go get myself a drink.”
He walks into the kitchen and stands frozen for a few minutes. He can hear them talking in the other room.
“It’s so bare and… and run down.”
“Isn’t he ugly?”
“My goodness, he smells.”
“What do you think he uses in his hair?”
“Did you see his shirt?”
Virgil looks at his shirt. A few holes here and there. A grease spot or two. Damn, he’s buttoned it up all wrong.
He puts some ice in a cup and runs some water from the tap, walks into the family room and sits in the chair across from the couch. The chair looks like rats have tried to eat it.
The oldest blond who answered the door starts talking but he’s long since lost himself in the blue of her eyes. They sparkle with complete emptiness. Then he looks at her legs. From where she has recrossed them he can see a lingering red spot on one of her calves.
The time flies by and he tunes in to hear her say: “All we need you to do is sign right here and we’ll be by later in the week to drop off some of our literature.”
“Oh, sure,” he says, shaky hands reaching out for the pen and paper.
“Thank you, Mr… Bentley?” She tries to read his signature from the paper.
“Bunting.”
“Thank you, Mr. Bunting,” she says and leads them out the door. The apartment is still filled with their collective scent. It’s light and beautiful. He hasn’t smelled anything like that in a very long time.
Good, he thinks, they’ll be back.
Virgil goes out the next day and buys an entire used suit. He is careful to make sure there aren’t any stains or tears in it. He shaves, clips all of his nails, tears the hair from his nose and takes four showers a day.
For the next three days, he sits around in his suit, graying hair combed, and waits for the girls to return.
On the evening of the third day, he hears a knock on the door.
It has to be them. Virgil doesn’t even know anyone else. He eagerly crosses the room and opens the door. There are only three of them this time, but the older one is still there. All of them carry pamphlets and register a look of surprise at the new Virgil.
“Have a seat,” he invites them.
They do so, sitting in the same semi-militant formation.
“Lemonade?”
“Sure,” they say.
Already, Virgil can sense they feel more comfortable around him.
He enters the kitchen and pours the lemonade, sporting a semi-erection.
As he begins walking toward the living room, he stops, holds his head, and then bursts into flame, the lemonade in the glasses lighting to a boil before the glasses fall to the floor, nothing left to hold them. From his torso up, he has exploded, the rest of him burnt down to a charred stalk.
After their intitial surprise, the girls walk over to his remains.
“Oooooh, are those pieces of his brain on the wall?”
“My goodness, he’s all black!”
“Oh, can you smell the stink?”
