Las ilustraciones ilustradas psicodélicas más largas en la tierra.The ForeverScape is an on going social commentary embodied in an expansive, continuous image that grows until the artist ceases to exist. Politics, religion, body image, natural resource allocation and the calamity of urban life are a few of the topics woven into the scape. Please enjoy this epic journey of distress, warning and hope. This horizontal landscape goes until eternity; take deep breaths. Alas there was one beer in the fridge.
I could not part easily with a force that had guided me for so long. Here I was on my own, never had a house out on loan, always renting, paying for the security of others. I've never had a real brother, though many real brothers I have had. The sisters I never had stand behind me and support me as well. The mothers and fathers I have never had make me glad. They once were, and they will be again.
FROM THE 3-DAY NOVEL CONTEST, LABOR DAY WEEKEND 2009 (c) All Images, Writing by Vance Feldman all rights reserved.
Can this really be? Is there room to wiggle or is there an obstruction? Chapter 1:
I’m Lovin’ It
I will always remember the day McDonalds saved my life. I couldn’t remember
what she said to me though. That’s when I decided to use the control valve. Rather, that
was the moment I chose to go to first. It turns out she said, “What is that smell?” I
thought it was more profound than that, but the next moment could have drowned an
entire species of endangered lizards, not to mention the voice of the green haired lesbian.
I slammed on the brakes and veered to the left. Out of all the intersections with
stop signs, I chose to speed through the one that happened to have a Denver Police
cruiser in the middle of it. I narrowly avoided T-Boning a cop. Maybe that’s why I came
here. It would have been no big deal if it weren’t for the quarter pound of Mexican Brick
Weed under my seat, complete with baggies and a flathead screwdriver to pry off chunks.
Maybe that wouldn’t have been a great deal of trouble either with a halfway decent
lawyer. What made my entire body go numb was the 400 hits of the finest LSD money
could buy in my pocket. I picked them up just around the corner from a shack of a house.
If I wasn’t already sober, I instantly crammed ten years of a twelve-stepper’s life
into the next thirty seconds. To avoid looking suspicious as I hunched over, I reached for
the glove box with my right hand and grabbed my sack with the other.
A QP of weed fit perfectly under my Quarter Pounder. The cop was already out of
his car by now. He probably started to notice that this 1991 Pontiac was full of garbage
and expected to make a nice possession charge. I fumbled for my vials of acid and
somehow managed to get them under the greasy yellow fries. His flashlight was drawn; I
caught a glimpse of it in the side-view mirror. There was a spider web on it.
Fortunately the spider’s paralyzing bite had not yet been delivered. I grabbed my
ice-cold carbonated corn syrup and without hesitation dumped it all over my crotch, all
32 ounces. At some point before I rolled my window down, I ended up with my
registration and insurance in my hand.
Before the officer said anything, I opened with, “ I’m Sorry! I spilled my drink
and didn’t see the stop sign. I’m a dumb ass.” He ran my papers and said all the usual cop
stuff. As he sat in his car, I exited the vehicle with the soaked McDonalds sack and
beverage and sat it on the hood. He said because of the circumstances he had to take a
quick look through the vehicle. After patting me and the lesbian down he gave my license
back and wrote me a warning. He didn’t want to get near my wet bag of cold food. It was
probably near the end of his shift.
On the way to the next sale me and the lesbian didn’t say a word. She fumbled
with her paint-splattered camo pants and brushed her blue-green bangs out of her eyes. I
chain-smoked Parliaments, they were white. If you call their consumer hotline a large
sounding woman with a genuine southern drawl answers, “Hello Darling. Thank you for
choosing Parliament.” If you then ask the most obvious question, “why do Parliaments
have recessed filters?” the response is quick but doesn’t sound rehearsed, “well,” se will
say slowly, “Our customers find delight in the recessed filter. It adds a certain level of
class you find smoking other brands. Our customers are elegant.”
Elegant was the last word I would have used to describe my smoking while
digging up a grease trap in a Rib joint that had been soaking the mud around it for the
three years with fat and gristle. By day I was an apprentice plumber, or in other words the
I had maybe one hundred customers that occupied my nightlife. Sometimes they
would let me and the lesbian inside to fuck in their bedroom. My pager beeped and
vibrated for an hour before I went mad, “God Damn It!”
“Why don’t you just turn it off?”
As I reached over to grab my pants, she pointed at my penis, “I think the condom
broke…” On the way to Planned Parenthood, I glanced at a One Day sign. I think it
pointed East on Seventeenth Avenue. I was seventeen and I was the first boy the angry
fourteen-year-old lesbian had slept with. I waited in the parking lot.
Apparently I wasn’t hallucinating when I read that sign. Mere had purchased five
hundred black and white letter D stickers and had been busy the night before turning One
Way signs into subversive messages that begged for justice. Eventually this girl with
braces and a gigantic smile left here studies in multimedia dance to join the Cirque des
Ole. I visited her once while she was at school studying multimedia dance integration and
performance art. I spent the week in Jealousy though. She was in love with a French
clown in Montreal. I couldn’t imagine a thirty-two-year-old man that actually made a
living as a clown. Really, a Red-Nose bearing clown. His picture on the nightstand stared
Everyone new Mere, the sweet pink-haired Raver Girl was pure love. Her middle
name was Fonda, as she was Jane Fonda’s cousin. I don’t think they talked much. Her
mother was psychic and had absolutely no sense of smell or taste. That was a shame, as
Mere would cook the most elegant meals, sometimes seven courses for the Winter
Solstice. Mere had left the states to travel the world. She worked on a coffee farm in
Costa Rica for a while before she left for New Zealand. Within a day she had a serving
There was nothing I could do. Even if I rode the control valve, nobody would
have believed me. There was no way to reach her on her travels anyway. “Control” is a
bit of a misnomer. It doesn’t really effect causality directly. In a high rise with five-
hundred to seven-hundred gallon per minute flow in a Stand-Pipe, you have to install
backflow preventors. Above this flow rate you have to install catastrophic release valves.
Reduced pressure zones are necessary in buildings over fifty feet tall. But a very clever
engineer finds other ways to deliver water from the main.
Mere’s mother left to study in New York and her condo was left in the care of
some College Students. When she came back, she decieded to sell the place. She got
through moving out Mere’s belongings. Cute little Japanese cars packed to the brim, she
had no need for this house anymore. Sometimes the memories consume the present, lost
in the couch and rubbed-off on the handrails leading to the basement. That is where her
and her best friend came for the last memories tucked in the basement. “What’s that
smell?” Her best friend asked. Obviously the question was only for the lingering spirits
since her mother had no sense of smell.
I’m not sure, but she probably cried when she found out all the memories if Mere
had been micturated upon repeatedly by stray cats; the house-sitters had adopted droves
of stray kittens and they made their day-napping home amongst boxes retaining her past.
The picture of Mere’s first ballet, her first hair-dye. Her list of 100 goals and her will. She
left Randy her skateboard from the back of the closet. She already gave me her airbrush. I
used it once. Everything was soaked in cat piss. I tried to imagine having all my
memories of the person I loved the most smell like the scent I liked the least, second only
after a chain restaurant’s accumulation of rotten grease. I couldn’t eat ribs for five years
Mere wasn’t on that particular fishing boat. A dozen of her friends and family
cruised down the warm waters of Costa Rica. Mano Chao was on the boombox. I
couldn’t visit this moment. The crew of this little vessel had been at sear for over ten
years. I’ve never even dated anyone more than nine months.
It came up that none of them had seen a single whale before, though they’re quite
common migrating those waters.
I think it may have been a Tuesday. I was in the back of a big Silver American
Car. This moment I would not have liked to see again. I felt something stronger than my
girlfriend’s antidepressants oppressing the sedan. Paxil leaves you horny but incapable of
having an orgasm. But there was more than the frustration of saying, “no” for three
months to the age old question of, “did you cum?” No, it was a sinking feeling that
procured the resonance with half a vibration of my oversized phone in my right front
pocket. I didn’t even have to look at the caller I.D. IU knew who it was. I waited in line
with her for hours at Wax Traxx for tickets to the Smashing Pumpkins. I didn’t even care
for them. She could have made me do anything. I hadn’t heard her voice in a long time. I
hesitated before flipping the green light emitting diode backlight phone open in my palm.
As I lifted the earpiece to my hand, the white picket fence slowed to a stop. I knew what
she had to say from the long pause.
In Mere’s will, a stipulation demanded her ashes be spread in the eight quadrants
of the earth. It didn’t much matter to her since she was always a child of the stars; the
stipulation was more for her psychic mother, and maybe the rest of us.
One Day the whales came out. The crew was astonished. Not only was it the first
whale they’ve seen in all those years at sea, it was the first family they’ve yearned for
since leaving the earthly troubles on shore. It was just like her mothers dream had
foretold. She was walking through the twilight on the dusty white beach by herself,
following the foot steps of her only daughter—each print fading away as the easterly
wind erased the trail behind her eager pacing.
In the distance she saw a silhouette of her beloved only daughter’s hoodie against
the orange shimmer of a galactic sunset. Without looking back she ran toward the beacon
of life she was burdened to bring into the world.
With a single reassuring gesture Mere placed her left hand on her mother’s
shoulder. “It’s okay mom. You know I belong with them.” She drew her right hand
upward, directing Sara’s gaze at the shimmer in the distance. Three fins slightly offset;
these sine waves mildly out of phase emerged from the orange-cold water.
Three years earlier, I woke up in a bathtub, neck crooked, embraced by the
lesbian. I had to take the S.A.T. Exams in two hours. I followed a Passat to the testing
center in Englewood the entire way. My score went up this time. I had spend the night
before listening to angry Tenacious D Songs played by a bleach-blonde anarchist on an
acoustic guitar. That futon he sat on and fifty empty plastic bottles of booze were the only
furnishings. I think his anarchist girlfriend got pregnant that summer.
Chapter 2:
Shitake
“Drop it in my eye.” I flinched. I had just picked up a girl with the cutest face the
trailer-park gods could have fashioned.
“Drop what in your eye?” I exclaimed while the tendons in my throat going to my
shoulder were flaring. At this point, her mother was still within eyeshot. Despite the
glossy veil of an Acid addict (new to me, too) she noticed like a staring at ghosts in the
hallway my fixation on her mother’s glare through the blinds. She shook my arm, “Hey!
Drop it in my eye.” I sat and listened to the misfiring grind of my car’s poor pistons.
Perplexed, I turned my head toward her nymph face, splotched with th4 shadows of
raindrops from my windshield. The light oscillated at a modest 60 Hz.
“What the fuck about your eye?” I was denying myself the apparent reality. She
wanted me to drop LSD, suspended in the breath freshener Sweet Breath in her eye. I
imagined whipping out a bottle of Vic’s Vapor Rub and slathering my eyeball, because
that is how she looked as she cried tears of otherworldly pain at me two minutes later.
She was sobbing as I drove around the block to not look suspicious just idling there. The
smile on her face was like nothing known to Philosopher Kings. Plato woulda been like,
“Gimme whatever she had!” Before he stoically shoved his face into the spokes of a
mechanical giraffe with speakers for legs and head made of peiso-electric conductive
It seemed as if she was caught in an infinite for loop. Her memory had filled up—
Stack overflow. There was nothing even a remote debugger could do about that. I was
about to slap her as a real-world force-quit gesture, when she looked me dead in the eye
with pupils so large they looked like mine. “Okay, let me out.” I shrugged and hit the
power locks and watched her return to her mother. She called me every week that
summer. Well, she paged me. The phone I called her back with has now lost the diode
pixels in the handset. All my mother can read when people call is _=|--F
The placard on my Oak desk reads “Chuck M. Flopese.” I hate my name. I just
finished reading a rather boring application for a patent. Te expository paragraph’s
A Magic wand made of electrical circuitry that makes objects in the environment
respond, as if “by magic” to the wand’s presence.
I rejected this application. I’m pretty sure a better use of an electronic wand is going to
come by my desk. If the valve keeps up like this, I’m not sure my hand will ever be
This dream came to me last night. My grandmother is still alive. I was in her
house. I heard a deafening noise, worse than a dumptruck tailgate slamming next to my
dome. I could feel it in my body, one hundred and ninety decibels in my cranium
reverberating off my spine and past my phalanx. I rushed outside past the Japanese-style
yard lantern surrounded by marigolds where I used to torture bees. Between the
whitewashed Mondrian Grid of porch trellis I could see a puffy white cloud. The
mushroom had little specks of black moving from west to east, from the Mountains over
I squinted to make out the dots. It took a while, the cloud had doubled in size by
the time I realized they were helicopters. Instinctively I started to Run Backwards. I
spend enough time here to feel my way back without looking, transfixed on a point of