"Heartbreak Hotel", Portland Tribune, 01/23/08

http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=120095288471721800

Ha.
Ha.
Ha.

He got a lot of things wrong, but he got the important details right. That person "walking the hall every hour" every half hour, actually... was myself or any one of a revolving cast of others. I did five months there voluntarily.

It only took the City of Portland twenty fucking years to get around to doing anything like what they mention that article, and if there weren't such a big flap with "urban renewal" (since that's what they're calling Gentrification these days) this City would have let those people drown in their own filth the way Hasson was letting them since 1970. Everyone up and down the chain in the whole debate that this article describes is so full of shit it made me sick to be wearing any kind of public safety uniform and taking orders from any of them.



"Dog Lady, to me, is a living node of City Politics, avatar of The Way Things Actually Work, though she'd never admit to that in a court of law. .. Atlas Escher's motto is, 'If they don't like it, they can move... If this hotel is a clock, Atlas and Dog Lady are the hands, circling each other with knives even as the mechanism grinds to a halt. ...If you live at the Last Chance, your family has restraining orders against you adn you've been evicted everywhere else..."

---from Firewatch, out soon...



GENTRIFICATION by Edward Morris (c)2008 All Rights Reserved


Don't follow us, this time.

From sea to shining sea, the country now a dream
Of hip squalor reborn as million-dollar condos, rings
on white, blighted trees, block after block, district,
city, state, Potemkin villages virally replicating as
the radiation from Walt Disney's frozen corpse
sterilizes the whole world to look like Anaheim.

Don't follow us, this time.

No one will miss these buildings when they're blown flat,
when the crazed jihadis your leaders hire to thin the herd
get a big one off again behind your gates. You've Starbuck'd
all the others. Keep your leaders' half-assed stabs at Space.

I ran up here from San Fran to escape your waste.
The Elders have me guarding our launch site now
With a gun bigger than any I've ever seen.

At my back, our wormdrive Kulkulcan points a middle finger at the dawn stars.



Turn
that goddamn Escalade around
before I power up
the big loop of wire and spare parts that will render
[every gadget you play with while driving ]
into a useless white-noise generator;
you'll gasp on the pavement, buck, convulse,
turn blue.

Don't follow us this time.

Look out on your pristine streets and inbreed,
Eloi. Remember when you tripled our rent and
kicked us out?

Remember?

Well, it's kind of like that.

Do what you want with the place.

Complaints will be answered in the order received.
In the meaningtime, this is our land you're on.
See the deed? Read. Weep. Turn back.
Have a nice day.

G'way.

Ulp...

Just got my old job back. In between, I am holding in my hand Tiny Terrors 2, a Hadesgate anthology of horror that features my sf-horror Crooked Man Universe story 'Courtesy Call'. This is the second Crooked Man story to see print, the first being 'Game Over.' This is also the first time my work has ever been in an honest-to-goodness print anthology. Period. Party over here.

And... Details are sketchy at best, but it appears I have sold a poem to Helix SF. We're trying to get film crews on the ground for visual confirmation, will return after...

(Cut to commercial, William S. Burroughs in an apron with a bottle of Palmolive, about to say something...)