Awwwgust

There was a moving van sitting outside our house yesterday. There was a hot guy in the driver's seat. The moving van was the most generic moving van I've ever seen. I like to imagine it wasn't a moving van at all but some sort of mobile surveillance sent by the government to monitor our house for ghosts/magic/aliens.

This heat, I tell you. I'm wild with dumb impossibilities.

One of my college friends was in town for the weekend. She lives in Chicago. She's used to the Midwest, but I feel like we still bored the shit out of her. Josh and I are the old gay couple who party once every thousand years to celebrate the mystic secret of our eternal youth. We drink the blood of raw summer tomatoes from a chalice made of shed cicada exoskeletons. There are pictures on Facebook of this rare occasion.

Some muddy people came to our house to clean up after they ran an obstacle course in a field near the airport. The women left their muddy panties in our bathroom trash. The men didn't shower together, though they should have. Instead, they took all the mud from their bodies and put it in the sink. One of our white towels is now gray. These people should be a little embarrassed to read this, but they've never been embarrassed by anything in their entire lives. You can't shame the shameless.

I got a rejection that was exactly the rejection I should have received. I'm working on the story. It's about a couple of men in a muddy field looking for the Ghost Light that manifests on a country road every night near Joplin, Missouri. I've been a few times to see the light. The first time, I didn't see it. The second time, I saw it, but the people in my car freaked out and demanded we leave. One of the people in my car actually said, "I have a bad feeling about this." All the other times blend together, but on one of those trips, I saw a ghost dog running alongside my car. No one else saw it. It was a white dog as big as a pony. I've had the insensitive thought that maybe the tornado killed the Ghost Light, and God forbid, that ghost dog too.

I have a story up in the August issue of Hobart. It's the one about a man living on the water with his cat. You guys are so understanding, so understand this: I don't want a cat. That's not what I'm trying to say with this story. What I'm trying to say is I want to die surrounded by jellyfish.