Spokane, Washington

prose by eppy
08 July 2002
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In Spokane Washington all the kids gather round the urinal that says, "JFK pissed here," and they agree that it would make a good idea for an emo song: "JFK pissed here and my girlfriend left me and it feels like JFK pissed on me." And they take turns pissing in the urinal and feeling a physical connection with American history swimming upstream into their urethras, experiencing firsthand the tidal change in public and political opinion with each drop of liquid converted to one month of time, their genitals feeling the thrill of diluting the pure excretory residue of our ex-President with the profane urine of children. ^[1] ^[2] The boys take aim and sweep the porcelain clean; the girls straddle the cusp and let fly. "I've always wondered what this would feel like," they say.

[ 1 ] mwirth: Tidal change.. Heh-heh.

[ 2 ] mwirth: I love "the profane urine of children". And the irony that something like piss (even if it did come from JFK) could be considered sacred and pure.

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Tonight I want to kiss someone, touching my lips to theirs like a lab rat delicately suckling the metal tip of a water bottle. ^[3] I want to corrupt the youth of Spokane, Washington with kisses; I want to be the basis of a thousand emo songs, earnest and urgent and dripping with untested medicine. The sweat of summer mingles with spit dripping from lovesick mouths to fall in public urinals and trickles down to the democratic utopia which is the sewer, where the juices of rich and poor, black and white, male and female all taste the same. ^[4] Tonight the steam rises up from the sewers through the sewer grates to soak the nubile bodies of the children like oracular vapors enveloping a Delphian priest. ^[5]

[ 3 ] mwirth: As someone who used to work with lab rats, I found this image to be very cool. The whole idea of connecting anything romantic with lab rats. Also, this gives a connotation of kissing as necessary to survive. I'd lose the word "delicately"- doesn't seem necessary.

[ 4 ] mwirth: I like this theme of the democracy of bodily fluids. But it was more subtle in the first paragraph with the thrill of diluting JFK's urine with one's own. I think you could take out "rich and poor.." etc. and achieve the same effect. Although there is a certain rhythm to those pairs, if this was a spoken word piece.

[ 5 ] brantley: Delphic, I think.

eppy: The "rich and poor" bit was meant to be read sarcastically, if that makes any difference.

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Tonight I want to bring a hammer to Circuit City and walk down the row of electronics and smash the screens of all the TV sets, the glass falling in fortifications upon the spackled tile. Tonight I want to strip naked and roll in the wreckage of the cathode ray tubes; I want to fuck the youth of Spokane Washington in the pile of broken glass and let the resulting blood mix with the spit and sweat and cum and pussy juice and piss to form a sacrament I can drink; I want to run my fingers over the scarified skin of this demographic to find the future, and in the midst of this orgy of oracularity, I will be thinking of JFK. ^[6]

[ 6 ] brantley: I think you should take out "resulting" - it breaks the momentum for me.

mwirth: Ooh, things get violent allova sudden. It made me cringe a little, the rolling naked in broken glass bit, but maybe that is what you intended. If you want blood, but you wanted to keep the tone more similar to the first 2 paragraphs, you could conjure blood in a more peaceful way, like picking up a piece of the shattered TVs and calmly, ritualistically carving into flesh. However, there is something to be said for the wildness/losing control scene evoked here.

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