STORY – On the Shore

February 11th, 2013

Waterfall

I found myself by some ancient trees standing next to a cold waterfall. Someone had melted animal fat all over my feet. The word discovery had been penned on my right palm. In blue ink. I moved an inch and felt the swift movement of a tail behind me, something attached, and this was wholly new to me. On my left palm there was no writing. I returned slowly to my original inch. A violative vessel appeared from beneath the waterfall, many fierce black ancient muscled beasts thrusting from the bow, primed to gnaw. Elegant waves were raised up in the water by the emergent prow. These waves undulated toward me who stood on the shore fixed and immobile except for the occasional imprudent inch of movement. The vessel’s size increased as more of it emerged from the heavy never-ending fall of water. The waves it had created in the distance now finally reached the shore where I stood. They lapped up over the land, heading for my feet covered in animal fat. Hungry, acidic waves. I ran away not an inch.

Greetings for 2013

January 14th, 2013

My short video of greetings for the year 2013.

CLICK HERE TO SEE IT.

– Vincent

My Inner Child is a Brat (T-shirt Design from hidden people)

December 19th, 2012



A Quickie Video (45 seconds!).

Some nasty new age inner child stuff.

Your grumpy, bratty inner child finally exposed!

Make one where you are….

EUROPE.

USA

BELGIUM

UNITED KINGDOM

GERMANY & THE NETHERLANDS


FRANCE

SWEDEN

You can access other countries once you are on any of these pages by clicking on the FLAG ICON at the top right of the page….

Go on.

THE NICE GUY (novel) : the author reads a bit of it….

December 17th, 2012

My novel, THE NICE GUY, came out in the summer of 2012. It got some nice comments, sold a bit.

I’m recording the audio version, and here’s the first four minutes. Via this little video link right here.

Here’s where to go to read some sample chapters, buy, etc. hidden people : The Nice Guy

And some nice readers said some nice thinks on Amazon about THE NICE GUY. Read ’em here: Some reviews – you will need to scroll down some after clicking this link. Geez, maybe this would even become a last minute present….

That’s that for this. – Thanks for coming by. Vincent

Polite babies are going to be nice to you (T-shirts and stuff!)

December 13th, 2012


Promises made, promises kept.

I worked with graphic artist/cartoonist Jean-Louis Lejeune, who took my ideas about nice babies (being ridiculously good) and created a series of illustrations of these various ideas that can fit on t-shirts and fabrics and accessories. hidden people calls them “Polite Babies”.

These are babies who are very polite – to one another, their parents, themselves. They are comic, fun.

I put together a short video telling what they are like, how to get them, how to make your very own t-shirts just as you want (or want to give to a young ‘un you know). That’s it. For yourself, a kid, a friend, relatives….

To order (and view) if you are in Europe (and Asia) you can go here:
EUROPE!

If you live somewhere in the Americas (and Asia?) you can go here:
AMERICAS!

But to see the 90 seconds video first to get an idea, click here:
SEE THE VIDEO.

Happy Polite Baby Days.

Polite Babies STILL coming for Christmas 2012!

November 29th, 2012

A while back I told about how I had been working with a number of designers on designs for a line of fabrics (T-shirts stuff, really).

The series for this Christmas is nearly ready and they are called the “Polite Babies” series.

Here’s a few more samples you can expect







Where you can order them coming soon, real soon. — Thanks! V+

The Cortland Review Publishes my story “SHOULDER”

November 27th, 2012



An original story of mine was recently published by the well-known and reputable online publication The Cortland Review.

It is called “Shoulder” and is part of my story collection Intimate Dialogues.

It’s available for reading, and just just click anywhere here if you want to read it.

Hope you like, and thanks for dropping by. – Vincent

Story – Baggage.

November 19th, 2012



They had lived together for ten months, with the first month being pure bliss and the following nine consisting of discussions evolving into disagreements, which acquired the dimensions of arguments, one after the other. They had both brought quite a bit of baggage with them into their relationship and it was showing up all the time.

“You think it’s easy being me?” With a furious face, Lorraine pulled a suitcase from under the bed. “Do you? Well, listen to this!”
Lorraine popped open the suitcase laying on the floor, the lid flew open, and her mother rose straight up out of it, finger already waggling.
“You’re a bad girl. Your math scores are low, you hang around with the wrong crowd, and when was the last time you helped in the kitchen? You are never going to amount to anything. Never ever.”
Lorraine pointed to her mother and yelled at her boyfriend Arthur. “See!”
Arthur shook his head in a combination of pity and superiority. “Oh…you think you’ve had it so bad? Take a look at what I had when I was eight.”
Arthur pulled a bag of his own down from the top shelf of the closet and opened it. A cute little doggie jumped out of it and ran around on the floor barking playfully. Suddenly a train came barreling through the bathroom door and ran over the dog, cutting it in half, then thirds, then mincemeat, and then shot out the window just a suddenly.
“See!” Arthur pointed at the bits of his scattered, dead childhood pet. “How am I just supposed to get over that?”
Lorraine stared open-mouthed at her boyfriend’s puppy’s body parts…but she had what she thought was even worse.

She walked over to her dressing table and yanked open her usually locked top drawer. Out of this arose a life-size pelt of of her skin when she was five. It was covered in welts. “This is what my father did to me when I was five. At five years old! One doesn’t easily forget such things.”
“Exactly!” Arthur shouted as he jumped toward his gym bag, ripped open the main zipper of the bag so his father’s head like a bowling ball could emerge to sneer at his son, “You think you’re a man? You’re lousy at sports, you always hide in your room with your games and books, say boo and you pee in your pants. Be a man. Come on, throw a punch? Think you’re tougher than your old man? Huh? Do you? I said, Do You?

Lorraine opened her rather overlarge handbag and out came three giggling teenage friends who just pointed at her shoes and laughed and laughed.
Arthur popped open his mobile phone and out came thirty of his so-called university friends , each staring at their own mobile phones, Arthur’s number glowing on it, and not dialing.

Lorraine and Arthur pulled out of their separate overnight bags twenty-seven pairs of lips, which flapped crazily around the room like manic butterflies, each mouthing off different parts of their past conversations, endlessly analyzing their relationship from different possible angles, over and over and over. The combined emotional noise was frantic and piercing.

Lorraine whipped out from a hidden compartment in her baggage her seven month old self, wailing in fear and tears. Arthur did the same from his own hidden compartment, yanking out his nine month old self, wailing, teary, waving his helpless arms about feverishly. Lorraine pulled out her thirty month old self, followed by herself at eight, eighteen and twenty-one, always crying and wounded, internally more than externally. Arthur matched her with his own self at fifteen months, eight, seventeen, and twenty-eight years of age, weeping and afraid and alone. There were different scenes being yanked out of different baggage of being fired from jobs for no good reasons or refusals of employment, again for no good reason, other partners turning away from them, siblings or cruel cousins teasing them mercilessly, their parents continually appearing in different guises from different times with fuller, fresher curses to hurl at them. The couple showed off the times when they scrapped their knees at five or were slapped at seventeen.

Meanwhile, the train kept charging out of the bathroom and running over the newly revived happy pet dog over and over again, while the mother berated the daughter and the father taunted the son and many teenage friends and recent business colleagues endlessly betrayed and tormented them. And their lips talked and talked and complained and wished the other would change, change, change for the better.

Then both suddenly stared at the various traumas that pulsed and moaned all around their apartment, and they ran into each other’s arms, wanting to shout, Save me! and Love me! and Help me! and I didn’t know! and Oh my God! And in the end they always said, each time, I love you.

And the baggage zipped back up and went quiet, for a while.

Traveling once in the USA, I saw this by the side of the road….

October 23rd, 2012

Once, driving through a part of New England in the USA, where everything was rural and green and generally bucolic, I most unexpectedly came upon this:

Clicking here will bring you to a 1 minute video on what I saw there.

Thanks for dropping by. -Vincent

STORY – Drunk at the Crossroads

October 10th, 2012



Late one night, driving out of the center of Brussels toward home, I arrived at a notoriously chaotic crossroads where impatient automobile traffic piled in from ten different aggressive directions. Truly, ten streets dumping cars onto one large oblong area where everyone wanted to get to the other side first. A place where all concerned needed to keep their wits about them, especially late, late at night, with too much liquid merriment in the veins.

Coming from my own direction, one of the thinner streets to disgorge traffic, I waited like a good cautious boy, watching the traffic light, anticipating when it would switch from red to green telling me I could now go go go. For the moment it was telling me to stay (…stay…stay…). I sat and stayed seeing no change of colors, no switch from red to green, not even yellow was making a surprise appearance. I just kept staring, waiting for something to happen, when I finally entertained the thought — horror of horrors — that I was staring at a dead-eyed red light. It was not going away, not changing to anything but remaining dedicated to staying true to its red self for the foreseeable future. Somebody honked behind me. Then somebody else honked behind him. Restlessness was building behind me.

I examined at the crossroads once more, weighing my chances of making it without wreckage and death. Numerous cars were busting through their own dead red lights from other streets roaring toward the cluttered center of the crossing, most zooming round, switching gears, feinting left, swerving right, being fearsome and belligerent, absolutely indifferent to possible dents, whether to body or brain. It was every car for itself way past midnight with my home sweet home somewhere on the other side this killer span of blacktop. I daringly moved my car two inches forward, then halted to check how my progress was going, sweeping my eyeballs left and right, checking incoming threats. More insistent honks piled up behind me.

Continuous blurry headlights swung by from different directions with different speeds. Prodded by honks, I continued inching cautiously toward the main mass and mess of the intersection. Growling Alpha cars missed my front fender by micro inches. My eyes weaved in and out of the cars before me, measuring the “what was to come” when and if I did actually get out there where the world raged on, and during this look I thought I spotted some wobbly gesturing scarecrow improbably in the middle of all this.

I moved a full couple of bold yards forward and saw that this vaguely human form was as a shirtless male staggering about, pointing at zigzagging cars with one hand, waving his shirt in the air with the other. I stared at this death-defying sight while the cars behind me honked more insistently until my brain clicked that this man’s gestures were a crude imitation of someone in authority trying to direct a traffic jam.

Startled people behind the wheels of hostile vehicles slowed, also baffled by the man in the middle of this, stumbling to the left, then to the right, like a man on the deck of a ship caught in a massive storm, all the whole pointing here, pointing there, doing an impression of handling traffic with a slick, efficient diligence. Other cars, less impressed, buzzed past, nearly clipping his hip. A few, like mine, waited for something deadly to happen, such as a sloppy car in a fierce hurry smacking him and sending him twirling limp and lithe high through the air, a pinwheel human in an fantastical airy dance.

This man, full of drunken confidence, weaved toward my car, pointing at polite, timid me, indicating that I should now come on through, drive, drive. He held his flat just-you-wait other hand toward an angry driver racing from the right. This driver screeched his wheels briefly, insisted he wanted through with his front bumper, as though threatening that he was more than willing to run over the drunk if he did not give ground immediately. The drunk guy gave nary an inch, the hand continuing its authoritative no!

Once convinced his authority had been stamped and that the angry driver had been tamed, and ignoring all other dozens of cars coming and speeding by and honking horns, the guy returned his full attention to me. He waved me on with the surety and arrogance of one drink too many. At this the angry driver on his right took his chance, revving and swerving behind the drunk, who caught this disobedience, twirled round, waving his shirt at the driver to stop, stop! right where he was and allow calm passage of my car. But the guy was good and gone.

Once more waved on, I dutifully drove steadily and gently across the intersection, keeping a lookout in every direction while the drunk assured me with his gestures that my way was paved with gold and to prove it he was going to accompany me, so to speak, all the way across, perhaps since I was one of the few cars actually obeying him. Cars kept honking, continuing to zip past, and those pent-up cars once behind me flew in another blur right past me and my guide. Finally seemingly safe on the other side, I drove on, started inhaling again while the traffic continued its aggression and honking behind me.

I glimpsed in my rear view mirror the drunk returning right to the middle of the crossroads, energetically waving his shirt anew, pointing at naughty drivers, determined to keep everything orderly and tidy according to a plan not fully evident to those embroiled in his project, as he weaved, and automobiles weaved, and I turned my eyes away and my car left into a side street and drove on, drove home.