All posts by rexmerritt

Tales Out of School

Bring Back That Sunny Day

After the most coincidental of chance encounters, Lesley and Trevor, lovers from decades ago, have bridged the ages and recoupled intimately. Revelations and observations between them are as naked as their post-coital state.

The phrase “By all rights …” stumbled through Trevor’s mind. By all rights no way dumb luck ought’ve reconnected him with Lesley.

By all rights they never should’ve plunged headlong into a merely sex-drenched, well, what was it? Couldn’t even refer to their much younger indulgence as a “relationship.” More like frequent interludes in which they willingly surrendered to that most earthly delight, fleshy pleasures. That was until gorging on so much candy either diluted satisfaction derived or exhausted his taste for, um, her sweets.

The thrill had gone. Those couplings quickly had become so common his desire for Lesley weakened. Worse than ordinary, the sex between them had become obligatory. And back for a youthful Trevor that defined a rut. Continue reading Bring Back That Sunny Day →

Tales Out of School

Promiscuous, Not Careless

Okay. Trevor and Lesley, two key figures in the following excerpt, might’ve been seen as “friends with benefits” decades before pc society manufactured the term. Between themselves both one-time college classmates might’ve done away with sweetening semantics and labeled the other a “fuck buddy.”

Already individually disposed towards random, unattached, unsentimental banging, fortuitous class scheduling let them connive numerous carnal opportunities during their two semesters of sex on demand. Generally speaking, each interval satisfied and gratified each participant. Well, except for their last youthful commingling. That one ended all exchanges on every level imaginable.

Only a chance meeting a lifetime later produced an immediate thaw and even faster reconnection. Reconnection. Not reconciliation. Promiscuous, Not Careless, picks up these past lovers newly post-coital.

During their initial fervor, Trevor overlooked the linen. The twist of sheets, indents in the pillows escaped his perception. He only fixed on Lesley, the hot brown sex streak sharing his bed. Continue reading Promiscuous, Not Careless →

Dim Neon, Poky Town

Refined Painted Ladies

Night improves Las Vegas.

Hot neon, sharp jumbo LEDs, and happy drunks loudly snaking along sidewalks and across the Strip present running tableaux of infectious merriment. This is a much preferable image to what morning reveals. Despite rosy fingers of dawn heralding the day, sunrise skies above the Strip are iron gray.

The vault above matches the streets below.

Crowds have vanished. Traffic has evaporated. Evening’s dazzling illuminations have faded into visual irritants.

Derelicts who’ve been shooed to Las Vegas’ darkest peripheries return to beg, maunder or impose their schizoid existences on daytime visitors strolling Las Vegas Boulevard. After the previous night’s glad-rag promenade and procession of gaiety, hollow-eyed, matted haired, filth encrusted, flesh and blood specters are the gaudy way’s jarring contrast.

During this transition from night into day, a less acknowledged though certainly more alluring segment of the Las Vegas mosaic begins crossing other thresholds. Continue reading Refined Painted Ladies →

Dim Neon, Poky Town

Within Reach, Beyond Grasp

Happy New Year!

At the airport, ran into a woman who confided in me about the obscene amounts of ready cash coursing around Las Vegas. She didn’t bother swearing me to double-dog secrecy either. Guess I must wear an honest face.

Indeed the promiscuous currency swirling here between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City causes loss of senses, self-esteem and propriety. Not that any of those attributes were firmly tethered in the first place.

Better than watching them make water run uphill is seeing how plentiful dollars in every denomination can torque human bodies and the consciences into cartoon shapes. Forget 5 o’clock. The possibility of a worthwhile tip rouses the dead quicker. Continue reading Within Reach, Beyond Grasp →

Observed

Dreadful People

It’s a displeasure crossing paths with certain kinds of ex-Metropolitans in Las Vegas. Not those who’ve self-exiled themselves to Nevada rather than Florida from the Bronx or Brooklyn after careers in the trades, lifelong housewives in tow, both of whom lovingly lament forsaking “their New York City,” yet on a dime can recite chapter and verse complaints about how the modern boroughs now resemble strange worlds populated by aliens.

No.

That group has earned its loud plaid pants, white shoes and belts, as well as teased-to-giggling blue rinse coifs. The vast majority of them are to be revered. Their generation raised mine.

Pampered as we growing Boomers were, especially compared to parents who endured the Depression then won World War II, they also gave birth to the consumer society by indulging us their children. Nonetheless what gift can replace any nurturing parent? Continue reading Dreadful People →

Pop Culture

Starpower

What to make of Bill Cosby’s recent aggrieved actresses/dilapidated models eruptions? Yeah, against him they’ve certainly stacked the preponderance of remarkable similarities. Nonetheless thanks to presumption of innocence, the accusations alone are insufficient proof of guilt. Otherwise it would be a Salem redux regarding one of America’s former “dads.”

Which is why in the United States one’s proven guilty instead of simply condemned of witchcraft after being spied upon dancing in forest clearings. Continue reading Starpower →

Observed, Quarropas

Less Thanks

Thanksgiving is the perfect American holiday. It involves no organized religion and doesn’t commemorate any national event. Pretty much a civil feast day, Thanksgiving allows Americans to enjoy our one singular unifying trait – mindless gorging.

Strange how diet gurus quit hibernating and emerge en masse to inform and warn Americans about the perils of overeating on this single day. Really. Setting aside one day of the year for sanctioned mouth-stuffing won’t lard on that much tonnage, will it? A month? Yeah. One day? Please. Continue reading Less Thanks →

Agitprop/Propaganda, Observed

Clearer Accounting

Is the just concluded 2014 election a mid-term referendum on President Barack Obama’s policies? Or can it be seen as a misdiagnosed post-mortem which resulted in skewed totals from an aging, last-gasp, old and misinformed yet motivated right-leaning electorate further abetted by an otherwise apathetic populace?

Hearing and reading the unsupported scorn against the president, a casual observer might believe he’s led the nation into dire straits rather than from them. By all tangible measures the United States sits in a far superior position than upon his ascension at 12:01 p.m., on January 21st, 2009. Period. Continue reading Clearer Accounting →

Observed, Pop Culture

Ooh! Scary! Ooh!

Congregants whose services demand sacrificial rites just might look for pointers at how cinema has steeped modern Halloween in blood and gore.

Until fairly recently wasn’t Halloween a simple holiday? One, which for the vast majority of us had lost its pagan purposes. Hadn’t it become candy mania for children and tomfoolery for adults? At best, an occasion for bingeing on movies that scared using moody atmosphere, lucid dialogue and vivid supporting characters?

When did trick or treat entertainments become so ominous? How did The Uninvited become the rebooted version of, what else, Nightmare on Elm Street?

For that matter, how has any producer neglected inserting Ministry’s Everyday Is Halloween into his or her movie?
What happened to the witches and ghosts? The improbable monsters? How did single-minded mass murders and asocial autonomes crowd out our familiar bump-in-the-night terrors? Haven’t these new manifestations of our subconscious, now news cycle regulars, coarsened more than the society they’re intended to reflect? Continue reading Ooh! Scary! Ooh! →

Tales Out of School

Phantom

The previous post, Sweet Spot, reveled in life before responsibility. Not to be read as a continuance or sequel, Phantom serves as aftermath.

Sixteen years after that hi-ho halcyon night, three of us bent elbows in Amsterdam. Kewpie, Warren and I converged in the Lowlands. On a late autumn evening, we treacherous three tippled somewhere near the Leidseplein.

Earlier in the shortened day, angry North Sea gusts twisted clouds deserving van Ruisdael’s brushstrokes. Although conditions failed compelling Amsterdam burghers to tighten their scarves or fully button coats, it certainly quickened our paces … right into a warm Brazilian themed bar. Continue reading Phantom →