I’ve something to tell you. Like a game of show and tell, I’ve a subject in my bag, or an object if you prefer, whichever, in my sack and I’d like to try and share it with you. It is a sack by the by, not a bag. There’s a difference, but we’ll get there later. The Object or Subject is kind of a bag-kind-of-sack-thing, too. Kind of. But it’s more than just that - - it’s filled with so many things of one shape or another, color, feel, size, appearance, and all, you couldn’t quite put your finger on any one thing in it for too long lest it change and you’d be holding something completely different. It’s just that sort of sack. So, instead of dwelling on trying to catch the little pop rocks that skitter around so meta-morphically, undauntlessly, and what not, let’s just watch the outside of the sack for a while and see what it is all about. When you’re accustomed to pursuit of the fleeting lightning bugs inside, watching them all fly around in one bundle seems pointless at first (which is exactly my point!) but after a bit of redirecting, no bullying intended, disturbing the sack - - fracturing its delicate shuffle of chaotic birth - - may appear less warranted, less necessary, less inevitable. And now you want results. I’ve told you I had something, been kind of mystic about it at that, and now you want to see it. Understandable. Totally logical. After all, we all speak and read English here, and logical is the way English-thinking people find resolve for their day to day confrontations with, excuse the cliche, “Life”. Yes, the word “Life” has become, among other things, like cereal, a word bludgeoned, nearly fatally, by the language from whence it bore. When the Subject (or Object) of Life finds its way to the bent of the conversation, people are often given to long, indulgent slurps of beer, extended drags off their cigarettes, distant and intense studies of the lights from the pinball machine across the room. People are bored by the pursuit of Life. People fear the individual pursuit of Life. I can hear the hackles raising. “Fear Life? Me? As I walk this Earth I fear no man, beast or storm. Why, give me an automatic assault rifle and a few clips of ammunition and I’ll take on any nigger who’d say otherwise. Yeah. And fuck the rifle, even, just give me by trusty Bowie knife and I’ll show them lizards a thing or two about skinning. Fear? Get off my barstool, Mac, your taking up my breathin’ space.” Exactly. Fear of spiders, snakes, spacemen, psychos, ghosts, Yettis, sharks, water, air, fire, nuclear power, squirrels, rats, birds, and on and on. So much fear, in fact, we enlarge our pensises with guns and knives. And when you boil off all the powder-cake make-up, artificial and natural flavors, tastes, feels and colors, the skin that comes off with the swinging ladle is fear of Death, hence the fear of the pursuit of Life because that particular pursuit involves more than one toe-to-toe, mental and physical bouts with Death’s best boy in the world of mortals: Hypocrisy. Let me say now that I am a Hypocrite and am not to be taken seriously, even for a moment. So if you believe that you cannot read further without not taking me seriously, please put this down right now. I’ll wait. . . . . . . . . Are they gone? Ah, I feel like a giddy three-year-old running through the mechanical wilderness of an amazonian jungle-park, complete with safari rides and elephant baths. Just listening to the daisy-wheel find the script and strike the page: Tink, tink, tink-alink-link, whirrrrr, zip tink-a-tink. Pardon my typewriterterical dancing, it’s just that I’m in a good mood. Hypocritical harmonious bliss. Yes, we’re all English-speaking hypocrites, too. And anyone who denies the concept, the inherent characteristic, if you will, then you should have stopped reading six paragraphs ago. I don’t want to make this a lugubrious chat, so allow me the folly, or lack of folly, to merely come out and say this: Taking seriously, or trying to understand via serious means, that is to say casuistic, or, simply question and answer-oriented processes, in an unserious world, or that is to say, a world that has the ability to laugh at its own shortcomings is, pun intended, a serious mistake. Sitting at the table with Death during the same conversation, the euphemism might be “a grave error.” Same thing. Death has a sense of humor, too. And at that point the table could become what it really is, which is harnessed energy, turn to light and you with it and before you know it you and Death are humming, side by side, at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. The table might be there too, somewhere. Things would have changed, but the bag, the sack, might only ripple, enchanted, like flaccid water on a breezeless summer morning. The sun would come up and glow brazen orange in the upper-left hand corner of the sack, then the lower right. As I said, things change quite often in this sack within a sack. I mean, only a few lines ago we were sitting at a table have a seriously comical conversation with the reaper swinger of self, the next moment we’re moving with the fucking sunbeams. How do you figure? Things, the little things, change quickly in this dog-a-day Universe. De do de surely do. Here, have an analogy: I am a mouse. I have an amazing sense of smell, can whiff out a mouse-size hunk o’ food with my pink flaps of mouse ears, which hear quite well by the way, covering my dark, bee-bee mouse eyes. I am designed to eat the scraps left over by the wasteful omnivores, am designed to produce more of my kind under almost any circumstances. I am of the clan of the Condor, Racoon and so on. In short, I’m a garbage eater. I run along the duct work and make the best of all the crannies and crevices this three-dimensional world creates. It is three? I don’t know any difference. After all, I’m only a mouse. My brain is not much larger than a sunflower seed. I don’t like sunflower seeds, by the way, but if that is all there is to eat, by rat’s nest I’ll eat them. I eat to fuck. Pardon my vulgarity, but there again saying fuck, in your opinion I imagine, is far less vulgar than finding me hard at work on a take-out box of maggots and rice you so carelessly left out for three weeks. But that’s beside the point. I’m not trying to correct your domestic irresponsibility. Though I don’t see it as wholly irresponsible. I see it as more of a mutual offering. I mean, I don’t dislike you, we could be friends, in fact. See? This is kind of you, in a way. You’ve left me food and you know I’ll eat it . . . it’s what I’m supposed to do. But I know what this is. Don’t think for a second that I can’t smell the blood of my dead mother. You forget my Schnoz? This is a riddle. Phrased dainty as a nickel balanced on the edge of a razor. And watch, now, as I ever so cautiously lick at the Life-extending morsel. “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” some mortal spoke once and carved in effigy, probably after killing a thief who tried to take his pocket watch. Time, by the by, used to be kept in people’s pockets . . . this has since been revised. Time now holds all and for everyone to be held, time wraps wrists . . . anyway; yep, living by this sword, which you so viciously stuck under my starving nose - - booby-trapped food from an angelic Judas. AND WHACK! End of analogy. Sorry, Mr. Mouse is now moving with the speed of sunbeams - - a feat which requires total concentration. Now, I’m not trying to place any certain blame on any one party. For the time, Death will take us on. And, for Death, Time will show us the way.
In the shadowed alleyways of creativity, where the echoes of typewriter keys mingle with the distant hum of synthesizers, Kevin M. Cowan weaves his narrative web. His words, like smoke curling in a dimly lit jazz club, linger in the mind, haunting and elusive. As a writer, he crafts stories that dance on the edge of reality, inviting readers to lose themselves in the chiaroscuro of his imagination. As a musician, his compositions are the soundtrack to a world where the past and future collide, each note a ghostly whisper of forgotten dreams. And as a technologist, he stands at the crossroads of innovation and nostalgia, a digital alchemist transforming the ephemeral into the eternal. In the noir-zine of
Kevin M. Cowan is a writer, technologist, and artist whose work spans novels, AI development, drumming, and filmmaking. From his fiction roots in Nebraska to experimental media projects and cutting-edge AI, Kevin blends storytelling, sound, and code into one creative continuum. Explore his world — one story, rhythm, and idea at a time.
Music. Video. Visuals arts. All composed or curated by Kevin.
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