It must have been around the 29^th of December when the water finally broke, the wet slick turned ice all over the dumb dirt of the world heralding the imminent birth of my one and only, my 2009.  I was in the front passenger seat a speeding car, drunk and reeling as a sort of asshole called Slip, shaved head, madguy laugh and glasses, drove us out to the country to paint trains, the sun in its golden cup being dragged slowly up the wall of the sky.

On a red Canadian grain car I did a portrait of Jesus Christ, a burning nimbus behind his brain like the cooked moon of a hardboiled egg, a third eye on the forehead and rabbit ears a personal touch.  With fine detail I sharpened his mean teeth, all the while screaming and bleating like the little lamb that I was, Slip busily shouting “Mandingo mandingo mandingo!” for no reason that I could tell.  Next to my painting I wrote in white oil paint, “I FEEL SIMPLY DIVINE”, which was the truth I was weaving.

I got frostbite on one of my little toes because I’d worn slippers to go and stand around in the cold and snow and ice of the last days of the year.  Back at Slip’s place we drew graffiti on pornographic magazines, 12 inch cocks running through so many pages of vaginas, everything dripping wet in the end.  It was depressing as hell.  I’d been alone for as long as I could remember while his nasal blond of 3 years had just left him, possibly for a middle aged meth addict.

Slip was attending Alcoholics Anonymous and Anger Management with his father, who was a veteran of many things.  His brother was alright, at least then, but somewhere in the sick gut of 2009 he’d get hooked on heroin and end his run by clearing out his bank account, his wife’s, his whole life; eventually he‘d lose her and the kid, because sometimes that’s just how things go in America.

I looked through pictures on his camera and stopped on one of his ex-girl naked in a washtub, rosebush abloom.  I stared for a minute and then moved on, because what good would it do?  Before I left he explained to me through clouds of green smoke how he was really Job from the bible, and that all the suffering in his life was just part of a series of mounting trials, to test his faith I guess.  Whatever gets you through, the whole thing sounded alright, and he handed me another beer.

I went home to my apartment and waited for something to happen, my only companions being some bottles of Old Thompson whiskey and the collected correspondences of Zelda and F Scott Fitzgerald.  Looking back things could have been worse- lounging around, waiting through the mounting contractions as the annual cervix dilated: 6 feet wide, 14 feet tall, 10 feet long, the strange dimensions of my boxy sleeping room that divided the warm amniotic bath of 2008 from the icy world of life, when the 2009 child would spill out bewildered ‘neath the moon in its silver bag.

-Al Mueller, book release party here, buy  book here