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UNCANNY FAMILY VALUES
Uncanny Family Values is a hybrid work of prose and poetry that follows four brothers whose lives unfold in parallel, merging and diverging as they attempt to cope with hedonism, memory, and the instability of identity. It is not so much about what they did, but how they went about it.
The manuscript presents an evolution of deterioration across multiple forms—fragmented lyric, narrative prose, and encoded language—where each voice operates as a distinct mode of perception while contributing to a larger collective structure. Through these shifting perspectives, the work examines how identity is constructed, distorted, and ultimately destabilized within the framework of the American family.
Drawing from traditions of collage and nonconformance, the text employs humor, the uncanny, and formal disruption as a response to contemporary cultural conditions. Meaning is not fixed but accumulates through fragmentation, repetition, and misalignment. What remains is not resolution, but sensation.
MATLOCK’S THEME
PREFACE:
Childree was at The Club having the usual Old Fashion just the old not fashioned up– as he was never into the fancy fluff and stuff, he just liked to get stuffed, when Bedell walked with in a gun in his waist higher than outer space. Matlock, being the most undetectable suspect up until that point, grabbed Bedell’s gun and aimed it at Childree and said this was for mother, but the audience got it all wrong because mother was actually the name of the dog Childree put down that Bedell had wept over in the river where he fished with cousin as he set it away on a bed of fire. The bartender slammed a glass down and said not on my shift and she left her post to smoke a cigarette. Troubled as they were, they loved each other– after all, they were brothers. How they came to be brothers was a whole can of worms that you do not want to go into but I just bought a new can opener and I am looking forward to using it and oh look a can and what is in it has yet to be fully examined by a trained psychologist which I am not of any sort but I will take my crack at it like father used to crack his belt at the boys when they acted sour towards mother, real mother, not like father was any different when it came time to love he loved with his weapon. Who is to say what love is to us is what love is to you. We come from dust and to dust we shall return– the boys soon came to realize this as their bones got pulverized by the steam roller in their collective dream incited by the sounds of the actual bulldozer mother was using to scoop up father’s whores when they over stayed their welcome. Time to leave is now. Time to repent is now. Time to sin better than ever is now. And now the family sinned every Sunday after service as per usual to replenish the soul of evil after a purge of the devil. On occasion one will purge evil in the presence of good and vise versa, yet the dog was known to eat its own vomit and like the dogs that they were– Childree, Bedell and Matlock ate up the shit was fed to them through television and radio and advertisements and propaganda and porn and film and dance and music and art and all the contraptions of the devil. Then howled the Lonewolf that broke up the thoughts of pureness and replaced them with the voices of sex and drugs and fun and babies and money and cars and homes with mortgages and college funds and braces and milk and pork. Feast upon your sloth said the Lonewolf that devoured the prey, pray for your family.
Bedell lost partial vision and could only see color. This he thought was a sign of Jesus Christ and he had to paint the heavens in the form of auras. He became a vessel for transportation– he was a prophet. Matlock had a song stuck in his head that was constantly interrupted by a voice that disfigured his thoughts. He could no longer think unless thinking everything at once– he was a genius. Childree lost his voice from severeliver failure and well he passed soon after The Club altercation. But what was found in his archive were ghosts of people he collected from the 1920s, nearly one point thirty-five centuries ago– he was a time traveler. The Lonewolf came last and left first but he always left a bite mark– he was a giver.