BLACK LIGHT, WHITE DARK
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all 18 short stories in one collection
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Black Light, White Dark is a collection of 18 short stories. The 18 tales are divided into two main sections, 9 romantic comedies within the realm of Black Light, and 9 dark comedies within White Dark.
They are all written in Chaos Riddle Prose and take place in the City of Angels - Los Angeles. The two sections are further divided between female and male. The 9 romantic comedies (Black Light) have 5 female stories (the narrator is a female), 4 male (the narrator, obviously, is a male). The 9 dark comedies (White Dark) have 4 female and 5 male stories.
The lead characters in Black Light, both female and male, however different they are from each other, share a strength of character defined by unconventional innocence. Thus the "black light." The "light" refers to innocence, and the "black" points to an individual who, despite their innocence/Light, are deemed as outcasts.
The tone of the tales in White Dark are much darker, more satirical, less forgiving of the characters. All 9 lead characters/narrators in White Dark are not lawbreakers, not criminals, they in fact mold themselves into whichever role society asks them to play. There lies the "white" in them just as the color white is commonly associated with Purity, Innocence, Good, Truth, and Honesty. These characters at first appear to the world around them to be "Good Guys" and "Good Girls." The "dark," the hatred for others and themselves is not easily seen. It comes out through normalcy and conventionality.
Below is a sample of one of the stories, Life-Long Romance. The lead character in the story, Elisabeth, is also the narrator and so is a part of the Black Light, The Women section of Black Light, White Dark ...
[ ... Identity and Appearance. … Art and Artifice. … Truth and Trembling. … Teardrops and Saturdays. … Theatrics linger, I lust for this, lust for that … tarnish tents and ventilating systems. … I wear black inside my heart as well in all my clothes. … Black is not an evil color … not deceptive nor frightening nor intimidating. … Black is projected downward and upward at the same time … transfigured by William Blake … for the philanthropy of flipping incorrect meanings … for inversions of the insipid. … Black is the cremation of not misery, not bitterness, but Born of Sweet Delight. … For Black is Freedom, Love … the Chaos that lies behind the Mask of the Cosmos … The Nirvana behind the Maya … The Lord’s Light behind the Sewers of Satan, the Light of Lucifer behind the Crimes of God, the Forms behind the Objects, the Truth behind Time, Space, and Matter …
Black is the Sacred Soothing Light of the Other Side. … To wear Black on your clarion call clothes means to show allegiance to the other side of the wooden world … yet relish and kindly kiss the beauty expressed through the wooden O that is here. … To place Black Implants within your Soul is to remind yourself of where you came from … to open your Backwards Eye to the Black Glow of Beauty behind the here and now … and to comfort you for where you will go …
My natural hair color is a dusty and dark blonde, but I dye the dungeons and aeons black. … I’ve languished over the black lizards in my hair since I was 12. … Truth-telling Tubeway Armies tinker with trident tram synthesizers. … A river-boat marshals in a mid-wife, moved over from the removal of maxed-out credit cards … only to find out that those two friends of mine – him and her – destroy practically everything they throw into the patent office of parks and recreation.
The cab driver queried the queen’s factory but got a response from the renter’s riot. … I jingled into a cab with two friends … one male, one female, both ex-lovers … both wishing the ex was no longer part of the equation. … Well, settle they must with simple friend.
But I forgive their false hopes. … They laughed, they cried, they drank more than I did, did ecstasy when I did not, smoked pot when I did not. … They are both on the verge of getting sick, physically sick, as in the stomach. … I loved them but I wanted to get away from them as soon as possible … get them home quickly … so I could be alone finally. All alone. … I like being alone at times. … The cab driver, though, was superb at driving as slow as possible and for not understanding a word I was saying. … I told the cab driver he was an idiot and based on his reaction, he seemed to understand me then.
- Don’t complain! Yelled my Caucasian male ex-lover, Chaos Kahn as he called himself. I preferred to call him Cracker. … He was, after all, whiter than white American pie hiding behind extravagant Goth make up and clothes. … Don’t worry yourself, Elisabeth, we find friendly friends amongst your type-writers.
- You two should get married. … I’ll be the Best Man. … I said in dry humor. … I did drink dry martinis but just two and my mind was crystal clear because of the one illegal drug I allowed myself … crystal methamphetamine … shit. … I’ll make sure to smoke a lot of shit that day.
You should tape up your whistles of programs … that panic picnic crystal methamphetamine, Cracker’ retaliated. … They leaven Heaven’s bread, by all the Saints of Second City’s Sewers, the ones Seattle lost in the Aardvark’s marathon with Minnesota. … I told you before and I will tell you again.
He always preached large doses of male authoritarian hypocrisy … with a message I was never clear of, for he never consulted any one philosophy … never contrived to soak any meaning from anything he read or heard … just whistled it to work and playing fields. … He was an Athenian Alcoholic (so an old-school AA member), and an abusive one at that.
Tonight he was especially un-gentle, with no prospects of sex with neither me nor with said female figure in the back taxi cab with us – Hera - who’s head had been on my lap, then Cracker’s, then mine, then Cracker’s again, back and forth like that since we first jumped into this prairie dog cab.
- You panic from crystals, I responded to Cracker’s sermon … because Christianity bore you a tyrant and called it paranoia and limp penises. /// Not my fault you could never get hard when smoking shit. … I had other brothers in spirit who could.
He was quiet … which meant I hujim
- Defiant dentist of Denver! … He suddenly SnappedScreamed out of his brief yet protracted silence in the taxi cab.
- No, Cracker, I am not a dentist and I never lived in Denver. … How many times do I have to tell you?
- Dinosaurs have something different to say about you and Dionysus … I heard the rumors …
- Ha. You’re being silly. … Well, good then, be silly. I prefer that to your usual being boring.
- You’ve thought I’m boring most of the time … all this time? Even when we were dating?
- No …
- That didn’t sound convincing.
- Look, this is not the time and the location scout lavender you and I want to soap Hera’s body in. The Mountains have rivers for thinly veiled attacks on a person’s cottage, even if they never had a cottage, at least their coin could be minted in missionaries.
- You thought and still think I’m boring …
- No, actually, not really, I didn’t and don’t know, it’s just –
Just then Justinian the Judge and Jury of Jehovah and Jupiter and Zeus and Throckmarton, appeared on the stage, shortly after the rehearsal finished. But then within five seconds, Justinian disappeared. Hera, on the other hand, was grumbling about this or that until finally she woke up fully and raised her head.
- Where’re we going? Hera asked as her head lifted itself off my lap. I thought she passed out completely a few times. Where’re we going, where’re we now, and where have we come from?
- The three questions of philosophy, all sung by Sirens of Slutty Smoothness in that silent century 20,000 years ago.
- I haven’t been paying attention. I’m sorry. Cracker said as he looked out the cab’s windows while crying like a fellow female found on a faint ferris wheel.
I do suppose I was too harsh on him … I went up to him on my knee, holding his knee, to comfort him, hold him in support, in compassion, in honest to goodness concern for his well being … But then he snapped once again and turned to me in shrewish shrines of shrieks,
- Get your hands off me! You’re a slut and a whore and I don’t want anything to do with you!
- Cracker … Chaos Kahn … what is The Magic Tricks of Saint Jerome? How did he do all the things he was said to have done with an ounce of credibility? Never did make sense. He was still crying, refusing to look in my direction. … My son … I began in still softness, I hope we can be close again … don’t you?
- But you’re no longer alive, mom … Cracker tattle-tailed, still in the midst of Trojan Tears …
- That would be easily answered, just not all at once. The answers to that world appear accurate.
- How can hillbillies ever expect to be suspected by local attorneys if you talk like that?
- Ok now I’m finding you are indeed boring again ... ]
