John Cage & Marcel Duchamp walk into a bar. It is an empty bar. No furniture. No bartenders. Cage blares silence on a boombox that belonged to Basquiat. Duchamp stares out one of many windows. The room spins. Outside is blurred stationary moments of beauty.

Wolfbear stands in the middle of the room. He got in the room using his imagination. The artists hunt Wolfbear. They argue over who will use the spear because they both want the net.

Burning lavender against orange, the sunset shadows the bridge black. Figures coagulate with open faces. Silence blocks Wolfbear's path. Open mouths scream like teenage rockstar fans. Silence. They're faces say horror or joy.
 
The water beneath is a bubbling flourescent rapid flowing mess.

Lotus petals with fleshy thick skin tossed shredding in glass fragments and a bed of bloated cigarette butts.

Lining the eroding shore, massive unearthed worms chew the bleeding exposed roots of coconut trees. The gaping faces close in.  Wolfbear leaps over the bridge's ornate wood railing. And wakes up.

A dream.

He is pale, emaciated, and naked.  In a massive stone coffin. On his back, he sees he has breasts. A vagina bleeds from between his legs, lining the coffin. He tries to clamber from his mess. Long weak fingers find the lip.

"The difference between sympathy and empathy " is etched in the gold leafed ceiling over him, mimicking a loose panicked handwriting.

- this chapter was contributed by Jeff Dahlgren aka eggtooth

"I've got something for you," he said and curled his pointer finger in a follow me motion. Intrigued, I follow across the gallery space to the front by the windows where he pulls a plastic grocery bag from the other canvas bag he brought in earlier. Crouched down on the floor he pulls a brand new woman's black boot out of the bag and places it on the floor, gently... deliberately, as if it were Cinderella's own god damn glass slipper and looks at me for approval. "Nice." I say. He reaches for the other plastic bag and pulls out the jacket to a women's business suit circa 1985 and holds it up for display. "I don't wear business suits."

The front door opens. Thinking, another 7$ dollars the Bobby Conn. But no, it's Formica the ruthless resident from upstairs and he's upset. He's really sorry but its 12:30 and the music needs to be turned down. He needs to get up at 5:30am to go to work. He doesn't care if we play music till 8:00 in the morning on the weekend, but its Tuesday and he really needs to get some sleep.

"He really needs to turn it down," says the guy who moved into a downtown loft above a music venue. He. He. Why does he keep saying 'he' when there is obviously a full band playing downstairs. As if I can go downstairs and tell one guy. Hey! Could you turn it down! There is a guy upstairs who wants to sleep. He, Who is this he? Bobby Conn. I guess that is a he. Hey Bobby, could you turn it down?

An hour later Formica comes down again and this time he's insane. This guy was tortured with every violin noise and guitar lick that Bobby Conn birthed into a wave. He's Enraged, and yet composed. I tell him emphatically, seriously, compassionately, "I'll drive you to work." Apologies, apologies. And yes, I'll tell Him to stop. We are an hour and a half over the noise ordinance time and the "whole building" is up. He lives on the third floor and it is fucking loud. He's telling the owner of a gallery that has no owner. "This has got to stop! This has got to stop! I don't want to call the police but I will if I have to. So he did. And Greg, the scarecrow homeless guy who lives under the bridge up the street and self proclaimed cleaner of the gallery who was trying to sell me the shoes and grey pinstripe suit is now trying to get another 5 dollars off me. So I give it to him after he takes the trash out, not knowing that Alicia had already given him $5 and Bill gave him $2. That's $12 he made for picking up some cups and taking out 3 bags of trash.

None of us had a key to the closet, which Bobby Conn locked of course, because all of their stuff was in the closet, aka their dressing room where they changed into jogging outfits. At around 2:15ish we each take turns trying to break into the closet. Hopefull attempts to slide thru the crack at the top of the door didn't work. The violin player laments, "But all of our clothes are in there." And I get a nice visual of her having to go out, in public, in the fuscha satiny jogging suit pants. I retire to the bar to wait it out and Greg walks up to the closet door and opens it with a screwdriver in a matter of seconds, then asks for $5.

meanwhile for scenes from outside.

The bath water dropped over a foot casting a rim of white soap scum stuck to the inner walls of the tub as the demon emerged..  She twittered her fans earlier about the bubble bath she would take, hoping to conjure images of hot popping bubbles, her boobs fat and floating, the dim light of candles camouflaging countenance. A bubble bath is a sexy thing to do according to the article in Italian Vogue, she read on break from her job at the department store. Light some candles to set the mood for sex too, it read, though for her, sex always ended up a quick handy, or, if she was lucky, a blow job.

A plastic runner she picked up from the home improvement section at work secured the bath matt, and the new shower curtain still smelled like a blow up pool float. She made a mental note of how wonderful that smell is and how happy she was with her new job selling makeup at the Loreal counter at the mall.  Pretty soon, the house too would look just like a fabulous post-modern furniture store, with cool lamps and chairs.  She toweled around her stomach bulge, and lifted one tit at a time to get to all the wandering water and wondered why her boyfriend of 5 years had never once been over to visit her wonderful home, never once took a shower in her bath palace, never sat in her styling living room.

She shot a hot load of white moisturizer onto the palm of her hand out a small blue-black tube of perfumed lotion she lifted from a sample box at Trader Joes, and spread it into her posterior and rubbed the lotion into the dimples of her thighs hoping to remove some of the cellulite, a tip she read from an ad that popped up on facebook, and thought about what to wear that night to the club. Lost in thought, a pocket of gas slipped out of her ass and her flanks flapped with the force of the fart, cheeks clapping at about 120 beats per minute and about a cup of diarrhea escaped but she caught it with her hand. It was the Taco Bell from the night before, the pills she scored from some dude, and from holding in her farts all night and morning while she slept at her boyfriends’ house.

 She never farted in front of him. Instead, she’d pull her ass cheeks apart with her hands and let it slip out quietly, off the side of the bed and into the room. The sound didn’t matter as much as the smell, because he was a bit deaf in both ears, which worked out well for her.  She was a loud talker. She had developed a high volume of speaking over the years to make up for the fact that no one would really listen to her. The only way to get people to listen, was to talk louder. There’s a direct correlation between loud talkers and low intelligence, so she’d bark loudly to get attention and to make her points in public.  She’d say something like, “ I’m hungry”. Or, “This is so boring” while she was farting to cover up the sound he couldn’t really hear, but just in case. A lady never farts in front of her man, another tip from a list in a grocery store magazine.

She blew the candle out and reminded herself to bring another slow burner over to bf’s apt so she could set the mood for fucking, but mostly so he could only see her in the half light. They never have sex during the day, only in the early morning hours after a long night of partying, She started to confuse the word “fucking” with “blow job” as years went by. Like a masseuse who brings their own table, she’d bring the mood-light, the teen smile, some fast food if he was lucky, and a happy ending. It was all so romantic.

She cleaned the shit squirt off her ass while composing thoughts on a review of the Mykki Blanko she jammed earlier in the car on the way to the mall. She’s a music critic on the social media sites. She sends her fans a the same cell phone band shot that prooves how awseome and cool she it, with thoughtfully crafted sentence like, “IT RULES .” Or, “SO GOOD.” “SLAYING!!” OR “KILLING IT.”

Eyes lined smoky for blue eyes, skin powdered white to contrast with the frame of dark hair she dries straight with a tight grip on the round brush, the smell of a burning hair caught in the motor. She thinks, “I look like a model.” Then takes a bathroom mirror selfie, sends it to her boyfriend, then later adds soft focus filter then updates her facebook profile picture with it, satisfied and totally hot.