Giving your coworkers coffee cups filled with molasses is a funny practical joke, but I’ve been told that having sex with their spouses in front of a webcam is not.
John Grisham claims elves living in the medicine cabinet of his second floor bathroom wrote most of The Firm.
I have met many people; I know none of them.
Mao Tse-Tung never existed. A General Electric executive spoke of a nightmare about a Chinese tyrant and the CIA clandestinely spread the story to further American Cold War interests. Unbeknownst to most Westerners, contemporary China is a relatively undeveloped agrarian wonderland benignly ruled by the immortal emperor Chu Yüan-chang.
Turning my head for a moment, but meandering in the same direction, I might ask whether or not the trellis of a Queen Anne provides a telling snapshot of the Victorian Era. Is it a DNA sampling of a moment in time, a double helix of Industrialism?
In the coming decades, an Egyptian woman will shit several pounds of nutrient-rich cheese puffs every day at noon for approximately one year. The daily miracle will go unnoticed except by a band of invisible gnomes who will alter the course of human civilization when they subliminally persuade a future U.S. President to colonize Mexico and most of Central America, excluding only Honduras and Costa Rica for reasons that will always remain mysterious.
Doubts about the meanings of these words will cripple society.
Endless shibboleths, darkness and decay, misery and shame, not meted or feted, but bandied, ransacked, made raw, too hasty for generalizations, too slow for specifics, a night lost in the armor of self-loathing and pitied by an endless cast of hypocritical well-wishers and slanderous gossip whisperers. No vice too wicked, no virtue too pious, all matters ending and beginning again for no apparent reason other than the recycling of experience. Sitting still is as meaningful as running around, loafing as worthwhile as laboring, and starving as fulfilling as supping. The point then is what you make of it.
But doesn’t that also mean killing can be as honorable as caring? If our minds determine right or wrong rather than innate universal morals or ethics then peace must oppress those who long for violence as much as violence oppresses those who long for peace. Is ours a sick world or is this what a healthy civilization is like? Can there be anything but replays of domination and submission? When you’re checkmated, what happens next?
It is almost impossible to be too soft, to open a hand wide enough. Tenderness is a generous gift. If received genuinely it is love; if it is ridiculed it becomes a vice. What is a vice? A vice is a grip, a clamp around the heart that squeezes harder the more one struggles to be free. Blood drains until there is nothing. Your hopes, dreams, and aspirations? Gone. Fears, frustrations, angers, suspicions? Manifestations of the absence of love. Manic laughter? A burst of excitement in the form of giggles, but ultimately unsustainable. Then comes the crash, the sensation of burning, of suffering without end … except that it changes again.
Wisps of willow snap at you in a hail storm making you wince, exposing the crud caked on your teeth, disfiguring your appearance even though you insist that it isn’t representative of who you are or what you really look like when the lights are dim and you’ve had a few drinks.
Whatever else I may be I am a way of generating events in the world.
When I’m sprinting down a hill, not too steep but adequately inclined, I start to lose track of my body. One moment, my consciousness is a foot or so ahead of me, the next it’s fallen behind a step or two. In these moments I want to give in to the thought that I can just let my body keep going down the hill while I explore the rest of the universe, escape time and space to discover what’s really worth knowing. But the moment I think that I lose speed, make a misstep, and my mind throttles back into my head. I’m jarred, disoriented, suddenly uncoordinated and heavy. For a few moments I’m more trapped than before, trapped in a moment of time in a particular location within my body yet unable to dictate the little things that I usually handle well. In this fashion I have discovered what it is to be a conscious invalid. It’s horrifying and, yet, there’s also a part of me awed by being rag-dolled into physical helplessness with such ease. Just when I think I’m hopelessly confined, the possibilities extend by contracting even further. I eventually regain my step and suddenly I’m alive again, feeling as if I am god-like in my control of my body.
I interpret the energy from my surrounding environment as the intentions others have for my movements. I believe my body movements are controlled by others and that thoughts and feelings are implanted in my mind without my consent. These interpretations and beliefs, I have been told, are delusions.
I morphed into an abalone and was dipped in absinthe before being plopped into the mouth of a displaced Palestinian farmer. I was nourishment for a generation of forgotten Cossacks. I didn’t think it was important until I started having nightmares about driveways covered with silk and bananas. Feelings of nausea would subside only to be replaced by a Sombrero. No one ever dreads moments of happiness. At least, they never mention it in my living room when they’re admiring the plants. What I don’t want to do is stop listening to your reasons for loving me. Underlining words that designate sounds is a habit I’d like to break. Compound sentences are not always necessary, but I like to use them at times. I need to clear my head right now and think about where I am.
I’m in the dining room of a spaceship. I intend to eat the chocolate pudding on the table. But first I’ll take a sip of the Diet Coke I’m holding in my hand. I am a member of a crew of seven NASA scientists delivering five hundred evangelical Christians to a space station orbiting Venus. Why? To colonize the gaseous planet with settlers and to spread the word of God in case there are any intelligent life forms there. I think the mission is absurd, impossible, and suicidal, but I've wanted to die for years and this voyage seemed like a fitting exit from this life.
Is the creation of artificial competition necessary in a world which has always provided a natural competitive challenge requiring humans to collaborate to survive?
I can split fingers and shape rocks with my eyelids, fart knuckles of shame into your skull, eat pages of the Talmud and spit fire into your loins, conjure a cloud of hate to rain pellets of blood onto the ashes of Chechnya, raise the mezzanine another level and transport floating chalices of sputum into the hands of neuroscientists lounging at sidewalk cafés in Brussels, gasp inaudibly at the sight of Burger King executives, share glances with an unpublished novelist at a book fair in Toronto, sing like an angel during the seventh inning stretch at a minor league baseball game in Florida, and eat sand-filled crab cakes at cocktail parties for excommunicated Jesuits.
I was reading a book on writing and it mentioned something about maturity, something about how exploring deep, complex, intimate relationships was a sign of “depth” in fiction. But then what of the voice of the discarded, the alienated, the freakish, and excluded, those who cannot maintain or even begin intimate relationships? Not just because they or others are incapable, but perhaps because no one finds them desirable. That seems like a sign of “depth” in fiction, to explore this lack. The idea of putting limits at all seems absurd. Not just in fiction, either. But also in someone else’s apartment, their fishbowl, their Grapenuts, their dresser drawers, and even their toilet. None of those things should be limited to just their thisness or thatness. Instead, they should be allowed the possibility of containing an entire history, living organisms capable of change and misinterpretation, made into malleable stories and distorted narratives, perhaps a truth located on the list of Daily Recommended Allowances or forgotten in the back of a cupboard, a love that used to forget to flush, a mix of sad songs left in your stereo to tell you she’s left for good.
The categorization of thoughts arising from memories makes possible a functional interaction with the environment while disabling the possibility of self-realization.
When the phone rings just once late at night, does it leave you in a panic, wondering if someone you care for is being attacked and in an act of desperation hit his or her speed dial just a moment before the burglar/rapist/murderer snatched the phone from his or her hand and smashed it against the wall? Dear God, it’s three in the morning, should I just go back to sleep or call my loved ones to make sure they’re okay? I can’t move, paralyzed from the fear that they’re pleading with a serial killer for a mercy that doesn’t exist. My eyes flash from side to side, I see shadows creeping up the wall, the ceiling presses down on me, and a flower blooming in my neighbor’s garden is fucking a bee. I’m slipping into my mind again and I don’t want to come back out. Please let me lie underneath the selflessness of my aborted awareness and under-exist while willing my thoughts into oblivion. I’m burdened, though, with the painful knowledge that will itself is the culprit preventing my dissolution.
“Horror” may be a contextual aspect of my emotional experience but if so the formulaic definition of horror disrupts the endlessly spiraling coil of emotional pi I uniquely experience as a pathway through life that is utterly random while simultaneously perceptually predictable through the application of compartmentalization.
Interests I’m cultivating: defecating while humming; gargling urine; killing flies; burning sandpaper; eating hummus; chewing on bark; placing haikus in empty beer bottles and throwing them at concrete embankments near seldom traveled interstate underpasses; reading the backs of cereal boxes; caressing my inner thighs with thistles; burping during funeral eulogies; smearing soiled underwear on my windows; writing down my interests; driving into telephone poles; sitting on the sidewalk; laughing at my reflection in the mirror; pretending to listen to other people who talk to me; saying things I don’t mean; examining the origins of language; creating shadow puppets with my penis; interrogating denizens of coffee shops; staring wickedly at restaurateurs.
Ah, shit. We’re dead. The universe began when God took a dump. Human consciousness is cosmic exudate. Death is our hope to end the stink of existence.
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