The artist must now live in a state of perpetual distraction. Art will be the measure of response to those distractions.

I’m currently approaching the final phases of The Suiciders, a novel I’ve been working on for the last nine years. Below, you’ll find an excerpt from the final-ish version.

Lukas (this was Peter’s name again all of a sudden) got his GF preggers so they went out to find an abortionist to take it away from them and put it in a trash can where it belongs. They left Adam at home with his creepy butthole spider, me and all my friends staring at the ceiling fan, wishing we had a midget to define us. Zach came up with a wonderful idea: Let’s kill ourselves. Great, I suggested, but first, let’s take the world out with us. How do we do that, began Adam, whose spider hung in the shape of a question mark from his knee, I mean, we do not even have a high school education. Remember, I got kicked out for licking toads in phys ed. We mustn’t overanalyze things. Otherwise, we will only give ourselves enemas.

Here comes the retard from next door. She’s always coming over here looking for Matthew. She has a real thing for him, I don’t know why. After all we’ve put her through. There was the time we took her out to the woods, stuck a dead squirrel up her pussy. We told her we’d give her five bucks if she did it, then we took a picture and ran away. Adam used to have it as the screen saver on his computer, before his computer died. Now that’s an image that will just have to remain burned into the sides of our brains. So that we can laugh to ourselves for no apparent reason whenever she walks by.

Adam’s running around squeaking like a mouse. He can’t control the voices in his head and he doesn’t want to. His version of freedom makes me so horny. We got into a car and drove to the other continent; we had to pick Lukas up from the abortion clinic. Did they let you watch the proceedings? When they took it out of her, it looked like the inside of a jelly doughnut. It made me hungry. Can we stop up here at the donut hole? Speaking of holes, where’s your girlfriend, fucktard? Oh, she died on the operating table. It’s okay – I forgot her name anyway.

In an ideal world, we would all be retarded. That’s why they invented drugs, to get rid of all the burdens. Before we went to the other continent, we had a few pitstops to make. Wait, are all my friends here? I just have to make sure. I can’t travel anywhere without them. No reason to download any new ones. My first friend was Adam. We met in art class. I liked him because there was nothing to understand. That made it easy to be myself (someone else.) Dry rot invades the ceiling. We had to get out of the house that was holding us prisoner. Another continent is never far away.

It’s not because he did acid, it’s because of the voices, the squeaky voices – that’s why Adam got kicked out, Lukas protests. Don’t contradict me, I said. We’re all dropouts because we see the future. Lukas what’s that on your t-shirt.

Lukas left school too. One day all the kids made fun of him. It’s because he overslept, just grabbed the first t-shirt he could find, laying next to his bed. The t-shirt turned out to be a cum rag. The other kids saw the splatterments and laughed. He was so embarrassed, he set the school on fire and ran away.

Matthew has a third testicle. Adam has a pet spider. Lukas has so many friends. I still want to go to the zoo. We will invade something instead.

I just stared at the illusion. You’re supposed to be driving the car, doofus. To fuck is to be free on top of someone.

Hey guys, did you remember to bury that dwarf? Oh fuck we had better go back to the house then. No, don’t you remember, the wolves came and ate him? In his coffin made of sugar. Oh I feel bad for the wolves then, they must have diabetes now. No, that’s taken care of, I called the diabetician and reported it. He came and captured the wolves and now they’re undergoing insulin treatment. Black wolf died but you won’t go to jail. You can’t go to jail in this country for making a black wolf eat a sugar midget corpse.

They were on a mission. A mission to recover Jesus H. Christ, who had flown away from them. They weren’t feeding her enough meat, so she got mad and went away. When you have a pet parrot, you really should feed it with the brains of smaller animals on a near daily basis, otherwise you will have to grow wings and go catch it. Parrots don’t stick around for long. It is in their nature to wander. They don’t like it very much when it’s cold out, either, and neither do I, for that matter!

Hey guys, did you remember to pack the suicide pact? It’s in the trunk, don’t worry. Good. We had written that suicide pact together as children and now that we were teenagers, we would have to make it real some day. We just weren’t sure when. We wanted our teenage mass suicide to be fun, but also appropriate. For that reason, we want Jesus H. to be with us.

That’s not a parrot, that’s a black crow. Get that black crow away from this vehicle. I don’t wanna ride the lightning tonight. Is the sky trying to tell us something? Lukas takes out a metal pipe, jams it in his ear. Scream that one more time, into this pipe. I want to feel the words vibrate against my skull. I did what he told me. It’s like pornography, he says.

You don’t believe in yourself enough to do this. To go to the nightclub, kill all the girls that used to taunt you in school. Or at least one, to make a symbolic gesture. We don’t want to leave the house haunted, do we? I don’t respect the authorities enough to make them a mess too big to clean up.

Adam draws a picture. I don’t want to look; then it will be a surprise. Lukas and Peter switch positions in the driving seat, almost crash the car into the brickwall we’ve been driving along all the while. Wait, I thought Lukas was Peter. No, that was never the case, Peter was merely Lukas. They found a double-donged identity in the dump, brought it home to burn in the oven. This all transpired before the tanning salon incident.

Let’s go on a roadtrip to the end of the world.

I don’t even want this novel to end.

Thankfully it hasn’t even begun.

Oh and it never will.

Haha Lukas, that’s a pretty mustache you’re drawing.

I looked over at Adam’s paper and it was full of mustaches. The mustaches were all real – not drawn mustaches. The disembodied mustaches looked so real, a fly landed on one of them and began to lay eggs. That mustache belonged to a real motorcycle man. The motorcycle man is riding after us. We have to escape. He knows that we want to kill the world, so he thinks he’ll be a hero and try and stop us. He’s watched too many goddamn hollywood movies. He doesn’t realize that in real life, the villain always wins. Goodness never triumphs over craftiness. Chasing after us like that just gives me an erection.

I once thought of myself as one of the good guys too, then I met Zach who blew my mind across fifteen continents all at once. At the gas station, the window cleaner queefed into her own milkshake. Suddenly we were in a landfill with imaginary features. Mom, I don’t want to go to Texas. There are too many limitations there. It’s like its own country too, just like the house I grew up in.

Did motorcycle man fall off yet? I want to see the pink sparks that shoot up when his leather jacket slides across the highway. You know how much it costs to get another one? If every individual were to practice their own version of democracy, we wouldn’t live in one. Where we’re going, there’s a female dictator who makes all the rules.

A messed-up umbrella was found floating in the sewage. Lukas pulled it out. He needed a present to give to his dead GF. The umbrella had a leopard on it. For some reason he thought this would help it fit inside her.

There’s medicine in the tampon of my ears. Full-bodied forcefulness clean up the backseat before someone slides back there. We almost got into an accident all because of motorcycle man’s hollywood gadgetry, but I know that there’s a better day in store for all teenage whores. Silence means it’s the end of the song. Or it could be the song itself…

Don’t let the dashes shooting out of motorcycle man’s engine confuse you. They are just flaccid lights, they have no lasers embedded within. He is just doing it for effectuality. We have planted fleas in his mustache so he will never catch us.

Sometimes the future tastes nice. You have to be disciplined about it, though. You can’t just let the schizo take over the entire nipple-biting scheme. The dwarf’s entire family could come out of the porno to chase us down the highway. I don’t want to go to war with a bunch of midget porn stars, do you? There are comets in your eyeballs, Adam – erase that last mustache, I don’t like it.

He was thirsty, so he stuck a plastic cup out the window to collect some rain. Jupiter felt closer than where we were going. It didn’t matter; it was only a fox. The borders are opening up, they are represented by red curtains. Men with machine guns are frying lobsters in the kitchen. This house became theirs when we abandoned it. Follow the course of this house through its abandonment, you won’t get any interesting stories out of it. You’ll only find out how loose the floorboards were before the collision with the dumpster occurred.

We’re bringing Adam back to the zoo he escaped from. It’s because of the mustaches he’s drawing, we don’t like them. Oh shut the fuck up Lukas just drive the car. You need to get us there before the sun turns purple and my skin begins to melt. You’re an asshole, Matthew, nuclear meltdown is such a last century notion. A mercy blackout is better than getting a blowjob from the mustached stallion.

The whore wears a t-shirt advertising a popular beach resort and a white denim miniskirt with numerous stains of a questionable nature. She wants to offer us something. She gives us a smile that has no teeth. She’s a teenager just like us, so we let her in the car.

When Adam’s around girls, he can’t talk proper. So then the squeaking got even worse. Love is a two-fisted bicycle seat. Which continent y’all headed toward. Anyone you don’t have a passport for, baby. I might be a saint, but I ain’t got a name. That’s all we wanted out of you: to hear you admit that while sweat dripped from the windshield.

We let her out at the next reststop without killing her. Why do you have such an emotion, Peter, I want you to know how good the spectacle tastes when it’s been inside you, okay? In the reststop restroom, Peter found his father holding his dong over a pissoir. Oh dad, can we get emotional now all over each other tonight? Well gee, I don’t know son, sometimes it hurts to be me. You’ll understand one day too, when an alien comes out of your wife’s twat on your wedding day. Peter stuck his tongue in his father’s mouth. Thank you so much for teaching me a lesson I never thought I deserved.

One source of light is the window. Another is the rain. Another is the lampshade. Another is the sky. A nun runs in front of our car. She wears a fur collar and forgot how to sing. Zach stopped the car just time, made a U-turn, drove us back into the broken computer. Now we have a third reason to thrive. Mordant plasticity.

Once there was this girl who believed in something. We pulled up in the driveway, no more transportation of excess. Lukas set his knife down in the empty passenger seat. Zach ran in to fetch the laundry. Saxophone on the radio. Stealth is such a filthy word. Afterwards we’ll drive our car into the canal. I know you’re evil when you look at me in that way. Stay focused on energizing the banana, Adam squeaks.

Monday comes I feel like hallucinating. Why are we back at the house again? Beware of flying objects. The floating church meant to transmit the truth, but it got all caught up in optics. Never a flower.

Adam told the world stories, they didn’t want to listen. So he became a silent pop star instead. Skullfucked drifter doesn’t want to invent himself alright.

Back out on the highway, we ran into the teenage whore. This time she wore no t-shirt, waved as we passed her by. Should we stop the car, give her a ride somewhere. I can’t be forced to make these decisions on my own. Adam stuck his head out the window, began to bark at the wall. The wall stuck its finger in Adam’s frilly hair, oh that feels so good don’t you just want to bite it. Where are we going, says Lukas. I thought we were going to the zoo, I say. No, says Zach, who is driving now, I say we’re going to the other continent. Oh fuck, says someone.

If we’re going to go on such a long journey, then we need to stop somewhere and get a TV for this car. I cannot go to another continent without bringing a stained TV with me. On screen, a savage Indian slave boy sniffs opium off a knife. There is still some glory left in the world. A nun gets slaughtered in the amazon, the tribe don’t recognize her garb. There are planetary reasons for this. Cannibalism is only for special occasions. Somewhere I’ll wait for dawn.

Adam’s in the backseat re-writing the words to our teen suicide pact. He needs to get it just right before we all sign. The compulsion to fly, the compulsion to smoke cigarettes. Disaster disorder, Zach staring at the TV sitcom as he drives. The car eats up dotted lines. It is Adam’s parents’ car. We stole it and we will never return. I need to go to the bathroom.

Whore climbs into the front seat, gives Lukas head while Adam bones her from the back. Zach rolls down the window to eliminate the stink that arises. I hope to turn that television set into a mobile bathing unit, but have to wait until my favorite show finishes. Mama always used to watch the price is right while she played with her titties, says the whore as Matthew sticks it in her behind. Once she lost a bet with Uncle Cleetus and had to eat the trailer.

The whore smoked a cigarette and led a discourse around tragedy. At one point, Zach mistook Lukas’s boner for the driving stick and shifted into the wrong gear. We all lurched forward, Matthew even further into whore’s anal cavity, and crashed through a fast food restaurant that really had no business being there in the first place. In the back seat, we found a new animal – half-chicken and half-crab, it waddled into Adam’s orifice and sang a beautiful melody:

Grapevines for sweety

Strawberries on her teeth

If you want to marry

Pluck the feathers off my spleen

And set me free

Oh that was so beauteous, the whore had eyes. Please let me just freshen up before you tear me apart any further, I want to look good when my maker divorces me.

They were all just dolls, you decide, those angelic people that satisfied your lightbulb yearnings. Now it gets dark and the ride gets faster. It’s all black and yellow, the way the road works when you shout down at the asphalt. Lukas screams for five minutes without inhaling once, his face leaning out the window the entire time. The whore recites a poem.

You know what strikes me, says the whore suddenly: I haven’t had any children yet. I want to go to Vietnam, she says, growing bored. I can’t offer you this relapse. The flower-shaped drug went drifting out the window. She busted the windshield with her thoughts.

Get out of my car, shouted Zach, pulled over. We don’t have to pay for that either because we took you farther than you’ve ever been. Wouldn’t have gone nowhere, just standing back there all black and sacred. Please, she protested, let me just tell you a story. I know you’ll like it. They drove off. She told it anyway, even though there was no one there.

Have we found Jesus H. Christ yet? I think he flew into your brain, you nimwit. I would have definitely noticed, had that happened! I don’t think you would. You’re so tired these days. I dropped out of high school because of the insinuations. A lot of institutional settings make my breasts hurt.

They drove on, or at least they pretended like they were driving. I drifted off into a place I’m not allowed to tell you about, less you get the wrong idea about this blue plastic garbage bag I’m always wearing on my head. The only thing that woke me was the sound of the telephone ringing – a sound that I always confuse with the dull hum of running water. Some people never get a chance to pray.