Alcholics Anonymous

Th is is the print edition of a multimedia projectavailable at the website AAAAAAAAAAAA.info

(that’s 12 As for savings)

JEFFREY DANIEL LYKES

BOOKSWWW.WEEKLYBOOKS.NET ©2015 JDLUSA Industries

TABLE OF CONTENTS

O P A Q U E G L A S SB A S K E T B A L L T E A M

P I Z Z A W E A T H E RH O T M I L D E W

(Intermission)

C H R I S T M A S M ES M I L I N G D E A T H

S M O K E D A N X I E T YH U M I D S M O G

(Intermission)

T H U M B M U S I CD U S T S T O R M

H I P P I E C H O K EI L L I T E R A T E P I G S

(Intermission)

D O G B LO O DM I G R A T I O N S P A W N

G O L F D A DF L U N G C A P

(Postscript)

OPAQUEGLASS

I started drinking an octopus milkshake on Saturday. On Sunday I quit drinking that octopus milkshake and went to the zoo. It rained large potatoes from the sky because god is crazy and he wanted to punish us but also feed us. I went inside the gorilla facility. The opaque glass ceiling was seemingly see-through and we could see mashed potatoes as one would expect on the roof during a potato rainstorm. I went back outside. I climbed a tree and got on the roof which was mashed potatoes. I played in the mashed potatoes as the un-mashed potatoes still falling hit me and hurt me. I vomited octopus milkshake and it was a gravy for the potato roof. All the children at the zoo laughed but they eventually climbed the tree and ate the roof with me until we were disgustingly stuffed. We all puked off the roof into our mothers’ mouths and we were feeding them like baby birds.

BASKETBALLTEAM

I rode a camel into the locker-room. I asked Coach if I could ride the camel during the basketball game. After checking with the refs and the other team’s coach it was determined that I could ride the camel during the game only if I agreed to not eat carbs for a minimum of fifteen years. I reluctantly accepted the deal with the added caveat that my opponents wear a camel musk which would make my camel exceedingly horny and thus a more aggressive defender. Our team won by thousands of points. The camel chipped in with a game-high six blocks. After the game our starting two-guard and backup center got jacked on carbohydrates and stole a sign advertising fifty-dollar wigs outside of a boarded-up Rite Aid. I was too weak to call the cops and too bald to pass up such a great bargain. Coach drove us to the wig store and bought the whole team neon-colored wigs.

PIZZAWEATHER

I ate about five slices of pizza because the weather was perfect. The power of pizza is big and there is only sunshine when you order a pie. My Local Barber doubles as the Pizza Man at night and makes a hot pie. It’s interesting how fast and without warning a barber can change into a pizza man when the night comes calling. Night is the only part of the day when anything is possible. My Local Barber cuts my hair real nice but at night he supplies the hot pies till the cows come home. As the Pizza Man he is sure not to mix business with pleasure. You won’t get very far ordering a hair pizza on his watch. As tempting and delicious as it sounds none of the hair my Local Barber acquires ends up in his pizzas. He stores it in large vats labeled by the four temperaments of the heads of the people he chopped it off of. He assures me I am not phlegmatic.

HOTMILDEW

I chopped off my feet and sewed on amphibians. I can control the amphibians mostly with my brain but sometimes they like to do their own thing. It can be embarrassing. Like at my junior prom when my left amphibian fingered the chap-erone’s daughter without permission. They also contribute to the mildew and mold problems at my Father’s house. Their amphibian breath makes the air wet with mildew and mold. Everything is damp and never dry in my Father’s house includ-ing my Father and I. My wet Father sits on the radiator with all our possessions in his arms. He is hugging all our possessions in his massive arms. He is trying to free his body and all of the things that we own from the shackles of this damp and ugly feeling. But the mildew will not get hot and burn away. He says he wants to cut off my amphibians and put my real feet back on but I tell him it doesn’t work that way.

Do you want mustard, onions, pickles, or sauerkraut on your hot dog? This piece of pizza ... We like hot weather ... The whole basketball team is going out for pizza after the game ...

When the baseball hit the front window, one pane of glass was broken ... While I was gone, my puppy ate my cookies, but she left my milk ...

christmasme

Around Christmas my Step Brother died in a horrible gardening accident so I turned him into sausage. A garden is nothing if not a secret world of danger what with all the poisonous insects and sharp tools. I wish sausage could grow inside of me. I wish there were sausage eggs I could swallow to grow sausage inside my stomach. I could poop or vomit the sausage and that would be my food. We are all capable of pro-ducing enough food right inside our own bodies. I like to think about how we change as people. We are different people all the time. I like to think that Christmas Me is the best Me I can be. My family is a bunch of ruthless cannibals. When we were young my Step Brother threw a book at my chest and I still have an indentation from the spine. It’s where I keep my change purse. I hot-glued it right in there.

smilingdeath

My Mother chewed gum and kept all the paper wrappers. She wrote love poems to gravity on the paper wrap-pers and put them in her purse. Each love poem was exactly seven words long. Like the water going down so slowly. I’d fall because I know I can. Those were just two of the poems. I love my Mother the chronic chewer of gum and author of at least one thousand tiny poems inspired by gravity. When she died she gave to me to give to god the collection of poetry. I joked that god would not be able to understand them because the concept of gravity did not exist in heaven. My Mother laughed and told me I was wrong. She told me that that would be the exact reason they’d be a big hit. But then her tone changed and she told me I had to transcribe them and burn the paper wrappers. That god would be offended as he did not approve of chewing gum.

SMOKEDANXIETY

The Writer examined his neck in the bathroom mirror and thought it was a stranger’s neck. He had just awoken from a nightmare. In the nightmare he opened a fresh pack-age of paper to print his resumé. But instead of finding paper a black ghost escaped and the plastic wrapping fell to the floor. His neck was no longer his neck and he went back to bed. In the morning he printed his resumé and drove to a job interview at a nearby college. He anxiously smoked three cigarettes in the parking lot before going in. When he pulled out his resumé it was dripping in black ink. The whole page was black with ink. The Writer noticed some white words sticking to his palms. He tried to show the Man Across the Desk the words but security had him removed. At home he smoked cigarettes and looked closely at his neck in the bathroom mirror. He tried to see if he could see it changing.

humidsmog

The boat was a mess. All the animatronic beetles designed to eat the growing sea-things off the surface of the boat had been destroyed by a humid smog. It rolled in with an attitude and the Captain hid in his quarters behind a red door. The Lady took pictures of the door with her vintage camera. She asks me what’s he’s up to in there and I tell her god only knows. Before he locked himself away the Captain swept the animatronic beetles into a pile and peed on them. I ask the Lady why she is taking pictures of the red door and she tells me she’s trying to create a coincidence. She says he’s more likely to come out if a coincidence is involved because coincidences are the most impatient phenomena. I don’t challenge her odd logic because the Lady is beautiful and I am in love. We sit quietly and look at the humid smog sweating over some other boat off in the distance.

I needed a drink and my anxiety levels were horrendous ... For others, “God” is the wrath of the creator––death and destruction ... My father’s second hand smoke was like smog on a hot and humid day ...

I lit up like a Christmas tree ... I jotted down all my blessings and things that truly made me smile ...

thumbmusic

A gang of single-celled organisms attacked the kin-dergarten. They used a miniaturized nuclear device and wiped it off the map. Sixty-two children and five adult teachers died a painless death in a great white flash. The government investiga-tors had no idea how they got the lil WMDs and the scientists had no idea how they developed the intelligence to pull it off. The rest of us simply wondered how anyone or anything could be so heartless. I played a toy piano and watched the news on CNN. It was a single-celled suicide mission so there was no one to talk to except the victims’ families who mainly just cried. The single-celled organisms were found to be wearing black satanic t-shirts. However the satanic t-shirts were eventually determined to be a virus attached to the torso of each cell. I tried to play a pretty melody on the toy piano but my fingers were too fat for the tiny keys.

duststorm

I photographed the dust storm before it killed me. Six months after my death my Mother the museum janitor found them on my iPhone and went straight to the Museum Direc-tor. All the pictures were beige abstractions with gray and black speckles. She asked if they could be featured in an exhibit. The Museum Director said he would think about it. I started taking the pictures when I realized my lungs were mostly dust and I was going to die. I wanted to capture my death to take my mind off dying. My Mother and the rest of the museum janitors had to wear bright orange vests which I found ugly and de-meaning. I wouldn’t have wanted her to put my pictures of the dust storm in that museum. I would have rather she uploaded them online somewhere for everyone to see. But my Mother isn’t too good with computers. The Museum Director agreed on a small exhibit and it debuted on what would’ve been my thirtieth birthday.

hippiechoke

It feels good to sweat in the sun he thought. He was jogging at noon on a Tuesday because he had been fired from his job at the knockoff shoe plant for painting Nike swooshes on every third pair that passed him on the factory belt. The Boss asked him what he was doing and he told him he knew people would know they weren’t buying Nikes but maybe it would feel good to pretend. The summer sun drained each cell in his body as he thought about the conversation. He thought about how the Boss had laughed at him. He thought about the sound of the Boss’ voice when he fired him. His voice had the tone of a sympathetic favor and he could hear it crunch beneath each footstep. The running turned into the manic culmination of suppressed pain and was no longer exercise. He stopped at a store to buy Gatorade. He drank it in one sip and thought about how he didn’t want to jog home.

illiteratepigs

I met the Cop at the book club. He was my husband two years later. I watched the Cop in his police suit speak about famous books. The bad lighting of the book club’s basement space made his hair seem worse than it really is. His hair is shiny like an otter’s fur but in a good way. I looked at his gun while he explained why Daisy was the most relatable character in The Great Gatsby. I don’t remember what he said about Dai-sy but I remember the gun. The Cop is retired now and owns only books and not guns. He was something of a Renaissance Cop if there is such a thing. He often spoke poorly of his fellow policemen. The Cop told me there was no difference between not reading and not being able to read. I disagreed for obvious reasons. We’re divorced now but I often go sport-fishing with the other ex-wives. We trade fond memories as we hook marlins in the deep blue sea.

A protest song recorded in the late 1960’s during the hippie movement when long haired people were viewed ... About the dangerous drug angel dust or as it is also called PCP ...

And a thousand who stayed there at the island met their fate at the Bay of Pigs ... A woman’s place in this world is under some man’s thumb ...

dogblood

There was a real big blow-up at the lake house and my Brother stormed out of the kitchen. His fast food burger sat on the plate untouched. We watched as he put the Family Dog in a life raft and pushed it out onto the lake. I picked up his burger and put it inside my burger and ate the double burger in a furious rage. The Family Dog started bleeding a river out its neck. Soon the whole lake was blood. I ran outside and jumped in the blood lake and swam. When I got to the Family Dog I climbed aboard the life raft. I grabbed the Family Dog and hugged him. I pulled him close to my chest. I tried to find the wound but it was gone. I looked around. The lake was full of water and not blood. I looked back at the lake house and saw my brother decapitated on the roof. Mom and Dad waved at me from the bay window as his blood trickled down.

migrationspawn

Inanimate objects sprouted from the ears of all the animals. The Zookeeper was perplexed. It was 2AM and he had been masturbating in the break room when a transistor radio emerging from the skull of a tapir flicked on and started blaring local sports scores. All of the objects grew full size and detached from the animals’ ears. The Zookeeper watched the animals sniff and stare at the various things on the ground. A monkey peed on a toaster. The Zookeeper was on the verge of breaking down when from the ether appeared a mysterious man who began to collect each object in a shopping cart. The Zoo-keeper asked him what was going on and he said not to worry about it. He said he was a hoarder and that he would remove all the things before the zoo reopened in the morning. So the Zookeeper watched as the Hoarder did just that. The Hoarder pushed the fully loaded cart through the front gate. And this is how hoarders get all of that stuff.

golfdad

My Dad didn’t care about golf. He was a local poet who wrote poems inside the stalls of every public bathroom in town. Even the ladies’ rooms. All of his poems were either about me or Mom. One of his poems about me ended with the line “golf is god and confusion is the ghost of sports.” I was a champion golfer. One day we were drinking martinis at the country club and I asked him about that poem which was cur-rently on display in the second stall of the Olive Garden mens’ room. He took a long sip of his martini and told me it was dif-ficult for him to recall particular poems which made sense since he regularly changed and replaced them. He had an unofficial agreement with most of the local businesses. He said something like I switched “golf ” to “antiquing” and that poem is about Mom now. Mom never went to antique shops but I didn’t feel like arguing. It was a beautiful day.

flungcap

I turned the lights on and off. I had to make sure there was nothing but energy in the walls. When I was a kid there was a sadness in the walls. Hitting a light switch could induce a weeks-long depression for my whole family. My Father was especially prone to picking up the sadness when it escaped with the light. Our energy bills were outrageous. Now I have a family of my own but these walls are the same. When I bought this house we replaced the new walls with the walls from when I was a kid. My Father did not approve. He said it was too risky and that the sadness never really leaves. He said regardless of how much money you give the energy company it will remain. I thanked my Father but told him not to worry. I told him I’d rather have a family sadness than an unknown one. I carried the new walls into the forest and I shall return to check on them soon.

I wasn’t aware that Dad was asleep on the couch ... Don’t let the dog bark so long ... The forest fire still blazes out of control ... The blood flows through your veins ...

I put the cap on my head ... Karen crumpled the paper in her hand and threw it away ... He wore a single glove, while playing golf ...

about the author

Jeff Lykes is a content creator /editor, website media specialist, free-lance designer, musician, podcast host, author and artist.

He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, daughter and dog.

Visit him on the internet at www.myameri.ca, and also on Twitter at @myameri_ca.