by Travis Catsull

eddie.

I remember being really proud of this apartment and that I could afford to live here and hold down a steady job making good money. I also had a cat named Ash while I lived here. Honestly, I had a great future with Dr Pepper, but I eventually felt a bit suffocated and stunted by the corporate atmosphere. I saved up a few thousand dollars and bought a ticket to Paris, France and ended up bouncing around Europe for about 8 months. I stand behind that decision, but I often wonder what would have happened if I’d simply stayed with Dr. Pepper. One of the reasons that I decided to leave was that Dr. Pepper was moving it’s head office to Plano, TX and my apartment complex was raising the rent to $750. This apartment was literally 2 blocks away from Dr. Pepper at the time and them moving to Plano would have made it a half hour drive, at least. I was driving an old Hyundai Excel that was on it’s last legs. I knew that if I wanted to keep my job I’d have to invest in a new car. There was no way that car would have delivered me back and forth to work in Plano. I guess it just all made sense.

I moved out on a cold November day a month before my 21st birthday. I think being able to make it my own at the age of 19 gave me the confidence to start exploring more. I decided that this life thing may not be so damn hard after all. I gave my cat to my friend in the apartment complex next door and I abandoned my Hyundai at a gas station on Walnut Hill. I left the keys in the ignition and walked off. This photo is the first of I’ve seen of that apartment since I left that day, 17 years ago.

Galaxies w/ yellow eyes, bleach a daisy second prize
Cherry picking vagrants, my dashboards locked I guess I feel fine

What does all of that mean? It means nothing other than randomly associated images. I do have a suspicion though, if you’ve flown a kite then you are familiar with the standards and one of the most old school kites is the Gayla Sky Spy. I used to live in an apartment complex in Houston and across the field was a kite manufacturing plant. I don’t remember the name of it, but a bunch of kids who were older than me broke into the plant one night and stole a bunch of kites. Almost every kite they lifted was this standard white with yellow blood shot eye designed kite that is in the photo. Who the fuck thought this would be a good design escapes me, but I’ve seen this kite in circulation for at least 30 years now. I see them every year at the kite festival. It’s got two yellow eyes with a cursive font reading, “Gayla Sky Spy” above the eyes, but the the font is done in such a way that from a far it kinda looks like the word “Galaxy Spy”.

So the next time you hear that song by Pavement and he sings “Galaxies with yellow eyes” this might be what he’s talking about. I took this photo this weekend at the Austin Kite Festival:

At times I think about the world’s first ghost. It must have happened at some point. He or She just walked around thinking, “This fucking sucks. Where are all the other ghosts? Oh look, there’s a length of chain. I guess I’ll just rattle this.”

The other day I organized all of our hot sauces on the shelf in order of hotness. We have lots of different kinds. Probably 9. There’s one in particular we got from a wedding in 2006. The couple divorced after a year of marriage. I always find it odd that their hot sauce lasted longer than they did. I also find it odd that we still have it. It’s almost empty, but I can’t bring myself to throw it away as it has a picture of them on the bottle looking very happy. It’s like that couple is stuck in time on the hot sauce label in my cubbard. When I reach for it I think, “There you two are. Look how happy you were back then.”

Somewhere there is a middle aged Mexican man writing, “When I was a kid I would go over my friend’s houses and if they had lots of different bottles of hot sauces I thought they were rich.”

I was married one Autumn on a beautiful day in a fancy mansion in Austin, TX. Moreover, it was truck month.

When I lived in Long Beach I used to hang out at this house in Huntington Beach. It was a huge house, but the 3 guys that lived there only hung out in one particular room upstairs. They wore hockey jerseys and watched that movie, “Kentucky Fried Movie” over and over. I would go over there with Jaimo Welch and buy weed until I met Lil Scoop G, but for some reason, at that point in my life, the place was too weird for me. Maybe it was because of the lack of furniture or whatever. Years later  I lived with a guy, Josh B., who watched the movie “Idiocracy” like these guys watched “Kentucky Fried Movie”. Both of them ruined that movie for me.

One time when I was at the Kentucky Fried Movie house a guy came out of the bathroom and hadn’t zipped his pants up  yet and started rubbing his balls on the mouth of the communal bong.

Everyone laughed.

I’m pretty sure they were Canadian.

The only reason I would want to go to Cost Co at this point in my life is to watch all the birds that are trapped in there. Every time I’ve ever been to Cost Co there are always some birds flying rafter to rafter all freaked out wondering what the fuck is going on. They don’t know why they decided to go into Cost Co or how they got there or how to get out. It just happened. My wife and I decided a couple years ago that we don’t need to buy a 4 pack of canoes or a mattress of toilet paper. People who shop at Cost Co don’t need to. There’s no reason for that. I understand the idea of saving money when buying in bulk, but that place is simply unneccessary.

Late in the afternoon the goldfish in my pond sing slave songs.

Last year I got drunk at the Crappiethon after me and Ricky smoked out behind the Golden Chick.

An elephant led a few cows down to the beach for a bath.

He then traded two rain ponchos for a vodka bottle of cooking oil.

Slowly, high tide washed away the daily sacrifice

when a dead blowfish washed ashore. A surfer buried

it on his way , way out

The shells, now just a symbol of their youth

waited.

In the sky, the sun, was just some weird spice.

Hatchet FACE

OH Hatchet FACE

there’s 2 dead lizards just a floating in the pool

pray to krisna

you can be a dad

I keep thinking I should get “WEIGE” put on the back window of my truck in Old English stickers to let the other German’s know our family made it over.

I know it’s common place that moths and bugs crowd around the front porch light, but I spend so much time there. I’ve seen many a moth die there, on the front porch and I think to myself, “You almost made it back to Mexico.” And then I bury them by kicking a kick of my boot tip into the dirt, putting the moth in and then kicking some dirt over it.

It’s the least I can do.

4 Mexican ladies come to clean my house each week. They fold all my clothes, do the dishes, clean the blinds and ceiling fans and even change the sheets and mop the floors of the rooms we never go in.

I wish one of them would cut my hair while they are here. This would save me a trip to down to “Cortes Rapido” on the East Side.

I have guns hidden all over the house. I know they see them when they clean.

I learned how to hide guns when I worked at a pawn shop in old Mesquite.

I’m ready.

Come and try me.

Not anymore. Its been months. I haven’t seen the snake in months. I haven’t seen its tracks in months.

I guess it must have moved on. Probably realizing that certain spot wasn’t the best spot to live after all.

I guess that’s what happened to that part of me.

Anyhow, I built a man a big  14 inch knife out of some of the shit and broke out into a serious allergic reaction. It took me awhile to trace it back and I thought it was from some Australian Iron Wood I was working with, but… Basically, it ate all the skin off my arms, stomach, feet and after 13 days of that shit got into my face and puffed my face up so bad I had to go to the doctor. The doctor said, “I don’t know how you’ve been tolerating it this long, but here’s some steroids.” So he gave me some steroids and said he’d like me to make him a knife. Said he had a custom kitchen knife made when he was young and wanted another. Paid for my fucking doctor visit.

So here’s the deal. This shit literally ate the top layer skin off my fingers, wrists arms, up to my elbow, then created a scab hole in my belly button and all around my stomach, ate the skin off my dick and then fucked up my arm pits so bad I can’t wear deodorant and then ate the skin off my ankles, feet and between my toes. I was totally fine with all of this until one day I woke up and my wife said, “Travis, you’re face is all swollen up. You look terrible. I’m going to call the doctor.” So she did and I went.

I started taking this medicine and it dried up my face so bad I can hardly see. I’m taking 4 huge pills of steroids every day to get over this terrible infection. My eyes are so sensitive that if a ceiling fan is on it hurts because the wind is chapping my face more and more.

Most people would cry and whine and lay in bed. Fuck that. I’ve literally had some fucking leper shit, skin peeling off me for almost two weeks and am up working even now. Godamn midnight on Valentine’s Day.

It feels like I have terrible sunburn on my face and ants are stinging me on that sunburn and there’s a bright light in my face constantly. What the fuck are you looking at? I’m a godamn leper with the skin peeling off my face everywhere and I can’t breathe right at all because I been making knives.

There’s some godamn poor kids out there that ain’t ever heard the sweet sound of a dollar hitting the window of an ice cream truck ordering up a spider man bubble gum with gummy bear center and you’re wanting to complain about some obama taking away your assault weapons to kill the rich honkeys. Fuck all you honkeys. I can’t even breath right because I been drinking crown royal and smoking marlboro golds and working outside 14 hours a day out back near my kale garden, where the koi vanish and the weeping willow weep tears of joy and the pecan trees feed dog sized squirrels  when I can.

I don’t mean to get mean, but everything changes when your skin starts to fall off your entire body. I gotta lotta rage built up in me in right now because of all the pain I’ve been tolerating. I’m looking at this screen right now and it’s literally blurry with cayenne pepper waterfalls on my godamn face. Fire ants been stinging my skin for 2 godamn weeks and you don’t hear me complaining about it until I need something to write about. I grilled chicken last night half blind in the dark with a lantern motherfucker.