Chicago cleanswept by coldpulse wind, lakewater exhaling as the morning sun emerges from an undulating oilslick, pregnant with possibility.
Pitterpatter what's the matter? Typists in flatwarped windows, offices a-twitter, assistants in war-torn nylons, legs crossed so demurely.
Methane Man despondent, rising higher, floating on ticklish crosscurrents peppered with ambient signalwash from TV towers blurping popnews.
More to it than this his brain fervently hoping more to it than oh come on more to it more as Mitch receded, the beachstrip now pencil thin.
Lobsters tapping on glass tables, the hungry logic of morse code, consuming megawatts, messages pipelined through glass fiberlines embedded.
Steely Dan vibe as Methane Man's fevered cranium bounces off the Caves of Altamira. Polychrome rockpaintings, wild mammals, human hands.
A series of twisting passages and chambers, paintings damaged by the carbon dioxide in the breath of redfaced visitors toting digicameras.
Picasso echo expressed his sentiment: "After Altamira, all is decadence." Before the fall, when they wrote it the wall, for you and me.
When there wasn't even any Hollywood they heard the call and they wrote it on the wall, and we understood. A boy on the beach, just a boy.
Looking up from the sand, white desert sand, peering through decades, standing in the presence of bombwave particles, nuclear fizzfrisson.
Kindred the Kid sees a red balloon rising, heliocentric helicopter. Shockwave bombslave, facebook faceburnt wetslick, blood river of tears.
Blinking once per day, clicking eyelids marking time, weeks and months eroded by westwind sadsongs, lutes and piano, keys tapping typishly.
The kid sees his father floating toward heaven, bombmaker scientist killed by his own creation, his spirit fastforwarding, pressurebent.
Doc Kindred, man of science, striding through time like a pop psych Doc Savage man of bronze with golddust slowdancing in eyes of spun gold.
Evolving into an evanescent gasbag, soul ascendant, a madman of methane drifting to meet his maker, trapped in a hot Michigan slipstream.
Methane Man, essence leaking, still sentient enough to see his son Kindred running along the shoreline, willing himself airborne, no use.
The kid looks up as sheep look up, as we all look up, googling with googly eyes, searching for meaning in an inverse universe, me first.
He sees Methane Man as a red balloon spiraling outta sight baby, hallucinatory dreamscape, Philip K Dickish proportions, bulbishly bopping.
Red balloon becomes a red dot in the sky, a red dot in PKD's eye, a bloodvessel pinprick aneurysm bursting star Fourth of July extravaganza.
Red dot pulsing, heartbeat city here we come, angels crying twitterly tears, pinpoint dissolving Joy Motel in the malevolence of God's eye.
THE END
A twitter novel
The Boston Phoenix says: "Joy Motel is a microblogging book worth scrolling upward for."
Joy Motel is an unconventional sci-fi narrative that was written in real time in 140 character bursts on Twitter, the Internet's fastest-growing social networking platform.
It takes its freeform, disconnected style from the randomness of the Twitterstream itself.
This is a novel for the 21st century, captured in quick bytes by a 5-time Bram Stoker Award Finalist and a Gold Award winning adman, who are transcribing the 'brainstream' flowing inside the neural net of its lead character, Kindred.
He has unknowingly purchased an untested, corrupt brainstream from a black market uploader, which has become an uneraseable part of Kindred's persona as he grapples with an ever-shifting sense of reality, dreams that twist into nightmares, and unreliable perceptions of time and space.
At the center of his struggle, a psychiatrist he calls Psychdaddy is attempting to resolve Kindred's repressed childhood memories of the 1945 Trinity nuclear blast in New Mexico and decode his father's role in a radical collective of bomb-worshippers called the 12 Disciples.
