I'm saving my last brain cell for my next party.

Top of the morning gents,

I gotta cut down on my drinking.

Ever wake up from a drunk, behind the wheel doing 90?

Yup, stole another piece from Richard Pryor. If you ever need to bust a gut, he was the first, and the innovator.

Genius ain’t ever pretty.

The reason I oughta limit my pick of poisons, is cuz the current recipe of caribou soup, mushuk, and bourbon makes me lose my place. Some of you know what I’m talking about.

Since the goddamned sun returned so has the open sign at Karlukmun’s Speakeasy Bar.

Same crew, same pharmaceutical inventories, some shit never changes even for my Siberian party mates. We drink and smoke for geographical reasons, cuz we’ve crowded out onto this narrow spit of land with our dumb asses stuck between 2 warring oceans enduring violent alcoholic weather and violent bloody friendships. I’m lying; we drink jet fuel like piss through yer mom’s sieve due to a yet undiagnosed latitudinal malfunction.

Wait, this shit is just like fucking Kotzebue.

You smell something? Me too. It’s the aroma of fresh and undiluted bullshit.

Call me a dumb ass; but more and more I’m failing to distinguish between nightmares and flashbacks. Some days I don’t know where I woke up. This morning I woke up in house 918, lying in dirty sheets next to old lady Ada Ticket, or as we called her as kids, Mrs. O’Malley. In the Inupiaq formal tense, Mrs. Omaluriq.

Waking up next to really old women is scary shit, I don’t have the luxury of fetal alcohol syndrome, so I can’t drink such a nightmare off me mind. I was given a choice, and we all are; FAS is a double-edged sword; a frontal lobotomy and a bottle in front of me.

Fetal mongoloids are doomed from birth, and doomed for life. No baby should ever be forced to drink like me, if I was carrying a baby, it’d be smoked, pickled and tenderized. My typical rural Alaskan caustic consumption level has been known to kill entire villages.

Back to awaking next to grandma; I checked my gonad package to make sure I didn’t do anything vile and unnatural. Whew! I was clean and had my shit packed right. No post-rape ‘em sludge accumulation in my claws. Every human being is like a fox; we smell our own shit first. Scratching the base of my fat bat where all the blood and guts accumulate, and claw combing my evil beard yielded no trace of 70 year old pussy.

I had to move slowly as to not wake the rum drunk septuagenarian Eskimo lady that was breathing in my face. Seal oil and booze, we all sure know that flatulent arctic breath. There's only a few places on Earth that I’ll ever smell that partiularly aboriginal pussy odor, so I’m reassured that despite waking with a bell ringer of a hangover, at least I know I'm somewhere on the North American continent.

Just to make sure this was a dream, I peeked out the dirty window to make sure I could see Sara Bird’s and Irene Stalker’s.

When Bunnik, Dee, and Vel all said good morning, I knew it was a dream. Folks are only nice to me in my dreams and as my foggy brain slowly gained awareness of its artificial existential bearings, I remembered dozing off alone; the cackling skeleton next to me was a bonus.

Fuck you, I know what yer thinking.

What a thought. Imagine Ada Ticket on top of me, writhing and fixin’ to cum. It ain’t necrophilia if the old geezer can still wheeze and holler; the more wrinkly the tit, the more the monkey. Yeah, me too; I’m praying bad dreams inside nightmares never become real.

“I don’t know, I was really drunk at the time.” –Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon.

I stealthily arose, put my rotten boots on, and went to sit at the dining table with the ladies for morning constitution, a Sisoliq breakfast, coffee and smokes. Sometimes these ancient Eskimo ladies take their morning constitutional smoke through a water pipe of Turkish derivation. Eskimo ladies are funny that way. Fuck ye.

Making matters more confusing, Vel and Dee had red swollen eyes. Not like normally chinked Inupiaqs, but like they’d been crying. Lesson: keep mouth shut, ears and eyes open, if you want to live to see yer next boner. A cluster of weeping native ladies can turn on ye, and kill ye. Best shut the fuck up and keep coffee and tea brewing, cigaq and immoos burning too.

Which is exactly what I did.

I brewed and served gallons of stimulating steaming beverages. I also kept a quick lighter nearby to maintain the pace and frequency of this crew’s typically voracious Siberian smoking habits. I also kept my mouth shut and listened to these ladies reminisce of polar playground pals long gone dead and buried, frozen, broken, shot and eaten.

I’d had my fill of Eskimo stories, ‘cept the ‘eaten’ ones. Jesus fuck, I hadn’t heard any local “Eaten by wild animals” tales since Karl Stalker inserted half his trunk and head in a polar bear. Vel and Dee’s story involved little aborigines getting chowed down by domesticated poochies.

Yup, you bet I was paying fucking attention and absolutely perfectly concealing my grin. My boner too, cuz I really love vicious Alaskan Animal Tales, especially the horrible endings.

5 and 40 years ago, on a shitty little spit inhabited by short and sturdy little Kikiktagruk Inupiaqs, you’ll find a familiarly behaving and clannishly consistent people competing for calories with an equal number of mushing dogs, including several packs of strays too.

Before electricity and phones, nor modern plumbing, we see little Eskimo girls scurrying to school. I find it comic and endearing to watch darling little midgets in mukluks and parkas boogying up and over drifts and around dog lots.

Tough lesson: even if you don’t see any snapping mongrels, they’re just below the surface of the snow hibernating like angry bears.

Dee, Vel, Bunnik, Violet Goodwin, Cora Henry, and Margaret Hess all met up and walked to elementary school together. On wet rainy days, they held hands while navigating across stacks of pallets and boardwalks over puddles the size of ponds.

On subzero arctic mornings, they’d all play tag and chase each other over snow drifts and ice sheets in a circuitous fashion towards school. One morning, a little girl ran across Sam Barr’s yard.

It was a snow drifted Eskimo yard, just like any other. Violet Goodwin didn’t know she was running and playing above a veritable minefield armed with starving canines.

Mousetraps all snap in a loud series like popcorn, and so do exploding dogs chained in a cluster on Front Street in Kotzebue, Alaska. That’s the sound these girls heard as they fled in all directions, not knowing where Violet disappeared nor what triggered the explosion in the dog lot next door.

These poor little girls almost lost their speech.

Between sobs, gasps, and fits of coughing, any alien would’ve thought these little Eskimo girls had seen a ghost.

They did; the whole violent process from beginning to end.

Short coffins are cheapest. Just like burying the Karl from Pt. Lay, the upper half of his torso was also carnivorous ass paint, but buried with his mukluks on no less. Violet Goodwin was also abbreviated from the waist up with half her mass forever recycled as dog lot snickers.

I awoke this morning, carefully. I had to look around to make sure of my surroundings.

It appears I have found my place again. Best I tell someone about it.


Karl.