I am supposed to describe my childhood.  There is a world I live in, I’ve been told, and this is what’s special about the process.  I approach this writing business with negativity, and all I receive in return is cynicism.  I’ve been told I’m very cynical.  That I have an unhealthy obsession with money.  That I’m boring, repetitive, hit one note, don’t know syntax, or women. Yes, I’ve learned the hard way that the people around me would be devastated if I died, but they sure as hell don’t make me feel welcome while I’m alive.

There is nothing here and wham!  The beginning begins.  We are impressed by the words, the characters, the story, and we continue.  To the next line and the next as truths are told.  “This is so well-written it must have been real.”  The truth stands in for well what?  Our own hard-fought wisdom.  Maybe we discontinue use here because the ends begin to flail, and there is no truth no more.

I am here to play a vital role in something.

These women are here to be beautiful, to torture men with their flawless skin and long legs.

People want realism. 

My dog lies beside my chair.  He sleeps on a striped dog pillow.  He is more glorious than anything I could write, because he is real and can’t talk.  

These women I spoke of before live in seaside villages in ancient homes, and no one is there to chaperone them, because their industrialist parents travel half the year.  How do they entertain themselves?  Not with my writing.

I am mad at culture.

It sold me on itself.

Could I not say I contributed to the demise of the human race and the extinction of many species?

My cynicism would be appropriate then.

The Broken Home™ detaches from itself because of irreconcilable differences.  The lanai can no longer get along with the brick pool, which has always clashed with the Japanese garden.  Much as the marriage of the Jew and the Italian, enemies by association, was doomed from the start, the ranch home never recovered its congeniality.  Everything bonhomie turned blitzkrieg.  Many years and owners later, the house was disfigured by a gate purchased after my father’s Porsche was stolen from under the carport.  An aquarium divided the living room from the foyer.  Who knows what other aftermarket atrocities took place.  Not that the home deserved to be preserved.  It was just a simple ranch home, indistinguishable from the thousands of other post-war assimilations.  Like my mother, I blame my father for the tacky additions, the brick pool, something I agree belonged more to my grandfather’s generation, whose largesse paid for the house.  The brick pool was the first addition my father made with the money he earned defending prostitutes and drug dealers.  At least my grandfather, a produce man by profession, could be proud of the pool.

We begin on a Brooklyn street in a house, with a factory, a retail store, and an office all built into one.  Time stole our few chickens and the goat we milked.  A hundred years later our car, lonely after the day’s commute, calls out to us in the middle of the night with its alarm.  The church spire in the distance belongs to a pair of artists, and in the rectory window, a red neon heart bleeds through the curtains.

Suburban neighborhoods have become as stacked and unkempt as the inner city, though not as dirty, just unbridled add-ons replacing its provincial air with that of an overstuffed cemetery, each headstone competing for space with the next.  (Why does Grandpa take me to the cemetery for the few hours we spend together each year?)  The Broken Home™ devolves into a bunker, a bulwark only accepting of deliveries.  The once easy manner of the countryside now elicits rage from the most pacific of husbands, outfitting their families in MRE’s, first-aid kits, all-terrain-vehicles, GPS systems, and oxygen masks, the irrationals of war.  Neighbors jockey over property lines.  Cul-de-sacs cost more.  Gates within gates within gates.  All booby-trapped.

My Dad would never allow me to wear the clothes he bought me to my mother’s house.

When I was a kid I had to leave my Dad’s house in the same clothes I came in.

Globules. 

The closet doubles as a cloister, you know, somewhere you go to cry.  Periodically it breaks off from the rest of the house and plummets into a gulley.

Like the coliseum, the suburban home qualifies as a standard of beauty, something we might put on the cover of a book.  But when we think of the atrocities committed in the home, the proverbial lions the slaves were thrown to, then the Doric columns, the piazza, the arcades, and arena seating, seem that much more bloodthirsty.

I’m reminded of a form of torture employed in the coliseum.  A chair, not unlike the one at the dinner table, only made of metal, with hot coals stoked beneath the seat, where we sat until renouncing our youthful idealism.

Homes were once constructed in stone, then in balloon frames, and, today, in virtuality.

When the kitchen cleaves, a hairline fracture splits the countertop in two, and as the kitchen halves groan across the yard, dribbling appliances in their wakes, husband and wife, stranded on opposite ends, wave goodbye.

Of course we lived on a golf course.  Everyone did.  I forgot the name of my street, what my house looked like, as I wandered from Begonia Lane to Tulip Avenue to Chrysanthemum Circle, even though I knew I was close by from the smell of the reconstituted pond water.

Easter day the residents carried crosses down to the water hazard on the 17th hole for baptisms.  The pond frothed like a head of beer.  Later when my Dad and I dredged it for golf-balls, we pulled a crown of thorns from the shallows.   

Designed by the architecture firm, Continental Drift, The Broken Home™ is a prefabricated ensemble set into tracks like those once used by trolleys.  A computer system processes the fault lines running through the house based on repeating patterns of conflict.  TheBroken Home™ begins in a state of Pangaea, only to be sundered by perturbations in the rhythms of daily life. 

On Sundays we hiked to the “Lake of Indifference”.  Dad refused to bring a map and so we never found the “Land of Feeling.”

Globules.

Conurbations.

Wanderlust rooms.

Mnemonic depth of the suburbs.

The suburbs as an entropic entity running out of steam.

My dinner guest, the accidental archaeologist, discovered a cutting board and cookie sheet under the kitchen floor.  Striations of cookware disappeared into the quicksand of a room forever swallowing itself.  She emerged from a hole in the floor stripped by house slippers shuffling in circles over millennia, the paths ancients paced, their maelstrom descent, round and round, until a hole yawned in the floor.  “Where’s the cutting board?” the guest asked.  After rooting around for hours up to her shoulders in nothingness, she was about to give up when her fingers brushed against a doorknob slick with dregs.  Behind the door lay a treasure trove of misplaced objects, family heirlooms like a reversible corduroy jacket and WWI medals, and knickknacks like a 1/3 measuring cup, a corncob pipe, and crumbling parchments with doomsday proclamations.

Machines rule the earth in straight lines.  A consensus of pygmies sabotages the ironworks.  They dissolve the pharmaceuticals.  No small injustice goes without a just cause on its heels.  People strike out against their best interests, hungering for a commonality to reduce dirt to something more.  Ascetics starve because they can’t make a buck.  The church and the machines conspire to blow up the planet.  A small band of Gypsies rises up from their caravans to steal the wallets of the corrupt.  We believe we know certain things like the denuding of ecological diversity, the greenhouse effect, and other statistically proven events, like linguistic hegemony.  And then the Gypsies and the Pygmies rise up.  Some more straight-laced individuals, architects with their straight lines for example, balk at the idea that people could instigate a revolution.  Look at the Luddites.  Nobody challenged the Pygmies as they ran haywire over the infrastructure.  Buried deep in the ocean, a fault line unfamiliar to anyone except the dinosaurs began to shift, releasing a toxin that killed all the fish.  For months fish covered the surface of the oceans like lilies over a pond.  Species, the likes of which humans had never seen, were washed ashore.  Bizarre hybrids of birds, prehistoric shrews, and lizards.  The fishing industry was crippled after the rot set in.  Only hatcheries survived the mass die-off.  Romance was illegalized in light of the depressing news.  Ice floes, ruptured by the pressure of the dead fish, floated pell-mell in the direction of major cities.  The unknown was once again apropos.  This fetish concerning the end of time saturated mainstream media, which always provides us with somewhere to go and something to do.  Small chunks began to go missing from the ears of elfin girls.  The saddest part was nobody cared.  Dots appeared in the middle of Christians’ foreheads.  It became all too clear which devices served a purpose and which did not.  Insignificant portions of the population were sterilized.  Nobody cares from beginning to end.  Go back to the time when kissing a girl at night was something to be pined for.

The Venetians knew they were slipping into the water foot by foot.  Nobody expected the water to meet them halfway, for the fish to leap at the idea that…was how most Venetians ended their conversations those days.  Care had left them zeroed out, bums in their belfries.  You know how it goes with the end of a civilization.  I’m perfectly happy to while away the day talking about a negligible people known for their blown glass.  If only they’d floated like their art.  Perfect place for a horror story really, and who’s the bad guy in this flick, nature, as usual, in this post-anthropocentric attitude when we all banded together as a planet, one without a lot of time left to quibble.  Galoshes sold well in the summer and made rich men of the haberdashers who’d invested in snorkels.  They laughed and laughed at their predicament.  Oh how funny the water was, how it found its way into the most unusual of places, their music boxes for one, their urns for another.  The difficulty with approaching the square usually filled with pigeons, now with water, deterred tourists from ever stepping out of gondolas.  The gondoliers ditched their traditional striped shirts for ponchos.  The dead-end alleys lost their dark flair, opting more for the aquarium-like, ostentatious, glass-bottom-boat angle.  Venice through glass.  See Venice through a hull of glass.  Clutch your head close to your body or else it might get ripped off by the current.  Sharks attacked Venice.  Tore her stone from stone.  There was a piazza.  There’s piazzas everywhere in Italy.  Their blown glass floated like an algae bloom into the Mediterranean.  My geography’s not so good now that the continents have been reduced to islands.  The Venetians were circumspect once the water reached their knees, and they had to start wearing fisherman gear, because the Italians were all fops and always had to be seen the latest get-ups.  It was a national embarrassment.  Like the Fiat heir being found with a harem of transsexual hookers.  The challenge of producing a historically accurate report on wet paper challenged the Venetians.  Not even paintings survived the eustasy.  They crinkled in the wet of the dawn.  I’ve attacked people, bit their arms off for much less than suggesting Venice never existed.  That it’s an Atlantis.  But beneath the waves it does crumble, and octopi do nest in its dark alleys.  The opacity of the glass floating out to sea charmed many Venetians into thinking the water had frozen.  Boy, were they wrong.  Upon stepping into the opacity, they were submerged in underwater vases where they ceased to breathe like taxidermic insects.

Think of the Shakers as the first suburbanites.  And Fourier’s vision of the ocean turning to lemonade as the overriding impetus for white flight.  The utopia before the apocalypse.  Upon waking the next morning, hungover and remorseful, the sun still shining, they sequestered themselves in puritanical subdivisions with elaborate covenants to gloss over the embarrassment.  Nothing had happened.  No End Times.  For privacy hides our failed beliefs.

In that respect TheBroken Home™ appears timeless, immutable, like our cities, but, honestly, aren’t we all living in ruins?

We live in an age when small mammals sacrifice their species to the spread of real estate, while the plucky cow rules the earth because our inexorable taste for meat demands that they outnumber us two to one.  We may have the upper hand for now, but if all the cows in the world were to stampede, what electrified fence, what grate in the road, would keep them from trampling us all to death?

Release endangered species into your pattern book homes.  Let them eat you alive.  This is the sort of self-sacrifice we need.

Or stasis through constant kinetics.  The world’s not going to stop turning for little old me.  But I can still wait to die. 

“Why have you become so obsessed with your manicure?”

“I don’t know.  It’s the only thing I can change.”

The new and improved Broken Home™.  Think Terra Amata of the 21st century. 

No judgments, but my mother rearranged the furniture everyday after work, while my father preferred built-in entertainment centers, and even when he moved, he brought it with him.  To further complicate matters, I’ve inherited my father’s dress shirts and my mother’s sweaters.

Grievance #2:  I was only allowed to go to a local state school, because my grades weren’t good enough to warrant an expensive trip back east.

Globules.

Grievance #3:  Too many father figures broke my heart.

Grievance #4:  My mother cried on my shoulder too often.

Hauntings were the inventions of unhappy families.  A good excuse to pack up and leave.  Blame the house.  TheBroken Home™ is haunted not by long dead desires, but by half-forgotten memories, traces of who we were before our paths became codified in yesterday’s blueprints.

Once the rhythms of disjunction have reached stasis, or we just don’t care enough to fight anymore, TheBroken Home™ corrects its own operating system by instigating a sequence of random moves.  The living room spins like a hamster’s wheel, or the master bedroom shrinks to the size of a pillbox.  No two models are alike, except for all have rooms, ceilings, floors, and doors.  We wouldn’t want to frighten away customers by suggesting they climb into a particle accelerator and simply live on the air (scientists have already achieved similar results by breaking down toxic waste). 

What we have here is essentially a skeuomorph.  From their very inception, suburban homes harked back to obsolete living arrangements, namely farms and villas.  Their design features, such as lancet arches and windows, as illustrated in the original pattern books, were lifted from gothic churches.  But these design features didn’t serve a function beyond assuaging phobias of rapid change.  Even today typical suburban homes are decorated in colonial and mission vocabulary.  The mirage of tradition eases us all into a horrific future.        

Grievance #7:  I made fun of fat people and punched smaller kids because of “problems at home.”

Grievance #9:  Just plain old sadness.

Grieveance #10:  My parents never spoke to each other unless my life was in danger.

If in its deconstruction, TheBroken Home™ is stacked one room on top of another until teetering, then the yard overwhelms our quarter acre and a mule.  Killer bees drizzle pollen from roses; sod whirls around the leaning tower in a storm of vegetation; eventually weeds overcome the structure, festooning it with vines, layering dirt over the front door, and we must excavate our way out every morning. 

Amazing new Broken Home™ has achieved artificial intelligence.  Lonely?  Carry on a conversation with your best friend, the very thing that gives you shelter.

I am not anyone else right now other than myself.  I sit around all day and wish for something to come along and make my life worthwhile.  No more company than the world I provide for myself.  It’s white and fairly indistinct like the ideas I’ve forgotten.  I am trying my hardest not to be me, but every attempt is unsuccessful.  Speaking is genuinely difficult, to anyone who would care to listen, mostly because no one minds me anymore.  What am I?  The question’s thickness feels sticky, a trap whose design each stranger invents.  Those who know what day in and day out is like for me cannot speak to me anymore than you can speak to a wall and have it respond with anything other than a knock, dull and deadened.  The sweet tastes we all enjoy sharing, a familiar enterprise picked apart and puzzled back together without the familiarity it once provided, and because at this stage I no longer give, I only take, and I’d cry if I could, as I never in my entire life lived for anyone other than those people and things who fill my empty vessel with nourishment by their very existence, and the other, a world so filled with haze that to reach out to it is to blind yourself.  A continual re-centering, whereby my essence is drained from me, then pumped into the deepest, darkest, useless corner of my mind, the place I never knew before, because it was vacant, and that becomes my home, even though this blank spot has always been a part of me.  It just hasn’t been my everything.  The ups and downs through this field, really a nothingness that encounters illumination, can be as jarring as those found in life.  I am in the middle of becoming a house-noise, the rasp of the universe’s last push.  Revolt by doing nothing.  Listen to the expanding drone, as if at the node from which it tumesces, all experience is waiting to pop.  The increasing disturbance at the threshold between the real world and the artificial will be ignored until it goes away, and at the exact moment of its departure, nobody will be home.  Life wants to sell you its reasons for living but don’t be fooled.  The nearest you will ever come to its pleasantries will be the regret of a thousand dreams.  Instituting a life not lived requires one to parody an actual life lived by someone else, while eschewing the pretensions of meaning in a universe that was entirely accidental.  I wish to wrap it in something.  Divergent objects and sharp ends.  Picture a soft balm, a curative without proportions or construct.  Every once in a while a shaft opens and in pours a substance akin to terror but without the accompanying physical sensations.  Just terror.  Nobody knows what it feels like anymore, including myself, and so in more ways than one it is seductive.  I am cured in that moment.  Either the following lapse in time precedes the event I just described, or it mirrors it in a drowning way, where one state pairs with another to produce a third, which upon closer inspection isn’t a steady state at all but a period of flux.  I might be mistaken, but I am part of an attempt to not be understood.  I make as much sense as the next sentence, but there is no way to determine exactly what I’m saying before I say it, since I never actually say anything.  The flow is impeded by my unwillingness to cooperate with a world that refuses to recognize my existence.  I am here, just not here enough to be recognized.  Am I a floating abeyance?  A perpetual ringing, the sound of floating impossibility butting up against the hard realm of the future, a solid in which we are dipped.  Before now, an impossibility.  The life of numbers comes to an end, yet I’m still tied to a solid existence, one where tomorrow begins and ends as it should with the earmarked space it occupies shouldering its gravity.  But now the pale I have crossed disfigures my memory, so that the familiarity I’m introduced to disguises itself as a continuum of sheer facades.  I breathe the newness of each moment as if nothing resounded all around me and inserted its own backward mechanisms.  Feeling things, moving forward, recognizing my own thoughts as belonging to me, increasingly evanesces until I’m not even alone, rather a gathering of opposites.  You can’t taste air, and there is none here anyways.  Fully aware of the taste air possessed now that it seems to have passed into a consortium of air locks to which I lack access.  I can only describe it in terms of loss.  The disorientation and stubborn refusal to acknowledge that my present situation precludes sense making leaves me tired, but not in a palpable way.  Even my choice in communication distances itself from the person I once was.  I’m absolutely sure that I never spoke with such candor and expertise upon the subject of what I don’t understand and no longer feel.  If I could, I would delete every thought I’ve had up to this point.  But I think the circumstances surrounding my disappearance will aid in that far better than my own wishful thinking.  The pain I’m experiencing amounts to all the torture endured in the name of a greater cause.  What cause could be greater than the last one?  I’m confounded by my own cleverness.  Paralysis by overindulgence in all possible interpretations.  When I expel toxins, only disgust remains.  The beauty we all hope to attain is in fact degrading.  Every once in a while I remember how cruel and banal my everyday is.  With no one to tell such revelations, I harbor them until they’ve matured into the most deceptive mirages ever seen.  From where does this ache come? 

This is why homes set themselves on fire.