Just the Other Side of Nowhere

Hi all,

This is Guy.  In theory I am the co-author of this blog, but I have not been co-authoring that much lately, being hard at work on a screenplay and editing Sean's new story (awesome and will be liked by people who are into well-crafted prose, time travel, soulless debauchery and ass-backward euphoria in equal measures).

In free moments I also work two jobs.  I am writing this in my notebook as I am at one of them, pumping brown water out of a motley crew of buckets and bins set up to collect leaked rain in the top floors of a crumbling, soon to be demolished building in downtown Milwaukee.  Shingles of rust and clumps of wet insulation have fallen from the widening fissures in the ceiling.  It is getting worse up here.  We need more buckets.

Drops trickle on my hair a little as I sink the suction pump into the buckets and I brush it off with my hand.  It is gross but its been worse.  Once I picked a clump of insulation out of a bucket and I gagged for a while.



Another time I got lost in the darkness up here looking for the door to the roof and I popped out in the basement, expecting to have grown a Rasputin beard and for five years to have passed me by.  The experience inspired a section of the screenplay I'm about to finish as a first draft.

I really don't mind the bucket duty.  I worked in this store for six months without realizing these floors were up here liquifying over my head.  It was a department store in the '60s.  Old women come in sometimes and remember buying dresses here when they were girls.  There are hand-painted signs and a rusted pile of metal plates with names and addresses that used to be impressed on receipts for credit transactions.

It takes a couple minutes for each bucket to empty so I have time to think or write or explore or take pictures.  The dressing rooms are the scariest part.  I listen to music on my iPod also so today I've been mostly jamming to Kris Kristofferson (such as the song for which this blog is named, which you can listen to here) and also Jerry Lee Lewis.

So, I'll have more stuff to share soon.  Isn't Sean's adventure exciting?

Most of the time I've been writing the screenplay I've also been suppressing bubbles for a fiction piece which I am going to unburden myself of as a serial on this blog starting in a month or so.  I don't have a title yet, but I can tell you it will most likely involve a community radio show, badly mishandled acid, dogs being blessed over the airwaves, a test of memory, a prison escape, and the do's and don'ts of Buddhist postmortem examination.

Yours Truly,
Guy