I need to post something here, but I don’t really have anything substantial just now. So what I am going to do is post some character sketches for a story I’m writing.
Ulysses Juvenal Schumacher - Known to his friends as ‘Juvie’. He was an astounding athlete growing up and was simultaneously drafted by the Green Bay Packers, New York Yankees, Boston Celtics, Montreal Canadiens, and NASA. But for all his athletic prowess, Ulysses is really a shy poet who has filled dozens of marble notebooks with verse to make the gods weep. He spends most of his free time alone, sheepishly reading his books. You see, Ulysses is an unmatched genius and multi-disciplinary savant. He runs faster than Bobby Fischer and plays chess better than Carl Lewis. He paints like a rock star and he invented egg rolls. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a J.D., Ed.D., and a Ph.D. in polymathematics in just three years. He listens to music so underground, you’ve never heard of it, and he is physically incapable of hearing popular music of any kind due to a tragic, character-defining disease. His favorite musical act is the definemecore band, Schopenhauer’s Curse, a group so fucking underground that he made them up. They sound like a command from God to kill yourself. Congress has scheduled hearings.
Dulcinea Cooper - Dulcinea was the girl next door – literally – to Ulysses. He was smitten from the day she moved in when she was twelve. Ulysses was twenty-three, but that’s not fucked up and creepy because this is literature and Ulysses is both very sensitive and an extraordinary character...like you run into all the time. Dulcinea is incredibly beautiful, but in a way that only people who read this book would get. As big box stores have begun moving into Ulysses’s hometown, it has becomes his life’s mission to help to try and preserve the town’s landmarks – particularly Dulcinea’s favorite places. This is either a tragic waste, or the most noble use, of Ulysses’s talents. This will be left up to the reader.
Joey Persico - Joey is Ulysses best friend. He’s extremely normal and ordinary. His favorite band is Led Zeppelin and he works at some kind of a factory. His friendship with Ulysses shows how Ulysses can connect with regular people, even though he is so much more awesome than them. Joey is always playing with a really old yo-yo that his grandfather gave him shortly before he died because I can’t be bothered to develop his character; so this will have to suffice.
Mr. LaFleur - Ulysses’s high school English teacher. He was the only teacher who saw that Ulysses was more than a lunkhead athlete. (His other teachers were huge morons who didn’t realize that his good grades meant he was intelligent.) Ulysses has maintained a friendship with Mr. LaFleur since high school and the two often drink copious amounts of whiskey and visit the graves of dead writers. LaFleur is also one of the few people who understands Ulysses’s love for Dulcinea as he himself fucks a lot of high school students – but only over the age of sixteen – but it’s cool and all because of something about the ancient Greeks and the eroticism of teaching. It’s all artsy fartsy, highly intelligent and cultured shit, and not at all a rationalization. Mr. LaFleur and Ulysses are composing America’s first Epic Poem based on the constant beatings they receive from the uncultured fathers of sixteen year old girls they try to pick up after they get smashed on whiskey. Ulysses and Mr. LaFleur once accidentally killed a foreign diplomat with a faulty washing machine. They sold the body to a secret medical school for people who belong to the organization that secretly runs the world. This is Ulysses's one regret, and may prove his undoing.
Bob Bob Bobby Bob - Was the high school bully where Ulysses grew up and bullied the fuck out of him (even though he is this amazing athlete who could have kicked Bob’s ass...but he’s all sensitive and shit, so he gets beat up). Bob is now Ulysses’s boss somehow...even though Ulysses works for a non-profit he started...and continues to bully Ulysses as an adult. Bob represents death.
Tuesday
Thursday
Saskatchewan
Ok, this one was written for Flash Fiction Friday. Check it out. It's a good idea.
“Why aren’t shoes ever abandoned in pairs?”
Valerie’s tiny legs double-stepped forward – almost of their own accord – in order not to risk uncoupling from her mother’s hand. (Valerie had visited the city once before in her six years, but that time she had traveled by car straight from her home straight into a parking garage, never setting foot in the intimidating urban landscape that passed by in her window.) All these adults running on automatic pilot and not another kid to be seen, Valerie was scared that if she let go of her mother’s hand for even a second, she would be swallowed up in this evil land. But her mother’s offhand, rhetorical comment increased the passing interest she herself had upon seeing the single loafer sitting on top of the corner mailbox, and she paused just long enough to feel her arm pulled along by her mother’s. “Maybe it’s like Cinderella,” she said.
“That was a man’s shoe, honey,” her mother said.
“It could be a boy Cinderella.”
“Yes,” her mother said, “it could be.”
“Elves make shoes.”
“Yes they do, honey.”
“Maybe the elves take old shoes for parts to fix other shoes.”
“Why would they only take one shoe?”
“The elves are tiny. The shoes are heavy for them. So they only take one at a time.”
“Hmm,” her mother said. “Maybe we should see what daddy says.”
Valerie stared up at the endless buildings, rising up as far as she could see in some cases. She squeezed her mother’s hand harder whenever she looked up. None of the evil, impersonal, foreign things in the city could get her as long as she held her mother’s hand. A bus passed and Valerie felt herself pushed forward in its wake. She grabbed her mother’s hand with both of hers. “It’s ok, honey, it’s just a bus,” her mother said.
A garbled voice came over the intercom in front of the building. A buzzing sound sustained itself until the door was already closing behind Valerie and her mother. Valerie looked at the narrow, wooden stairway in front of them. Her mother gently pulled her forward and to her left side now, placing herself between Valerie and the center banister. The stairs creaked under their footsteps. Valerie’s friend Carol had a deck in her backyard. The third step there creaked too. But it was part of the optimistic personality of the backyard playground. It’s creak was almost fun. The creaks in the city’s building were sickly, seemed a part of the decrepit foreboding of the evil place. And they all creaked.
They exited the staircase through a door and entered a hallway with mint green floors which were pebbled with black and white rocks of some kind. They turned into a seating area and Valerie’s mother spoke to a woman through a sliding glass window. When they were finished talking, the woman in the window smiled at Valerie and offered her a lollipop. Valerie took it and she and her mother sat down. Valerie just held the lollipop, not opening it, still holding her mother’s hand.
After a few minutes, another woman came into the waiting area and called Valerie’s mother’s name. “Ok, sweetie, mommy has to go for a few minutes.” Adrenaline shot through Valerie and her mother could see it in her eyes. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have brought you, but there was no one to watch you today. You’ll be fine for a few minutes. I’ll be right next door.” Valerie’s mother slid her hand out from Valerie’s and kissed her on the cheek. “The nice lady with the lollipops will keep an eye on you.” Valerie looked over to the window where the woman in the window smiled. It was a very friendly, comforting smile, but it was coming from a stranger. And worse yet, a denizen of the evil place. Valerie let her mother go more because she was afraid that making a scene would make the place aware of her. So far it seemed indifferent. Except for the woman in the window.
Valerie was ushered out of the house before she could ask her father about the shoes. Carol and her mother were waiting in Valerie’s backyard. Carol was jumping up and down intermittently. Valerie didn’t know why. Carol’s mother sat on the back stoop and kept an eye on things. “There’s Val,” Carol’s mother said.
Valerie and Carol wandered the yard, bored, unsure what to do with themselves. This was planned. By parents. You can’t plan to have fun, you just do it. It’s spontaneous.
Valerie’s property line ended at the edge of the woods, and her father had put up a fence when she was born for fear she’d wander off. Valerie and Carol stood on their toes and tried to look over the fence, but succeeded only in looking through the chain-links a little higher up.
“What’s in there,” Carol asked.
“Butler monkeys.”
“What?”
“Monkeys that bring you food and stuff. They live in there and there is a little school where people train them.”
“There’s a school in there?”
“It’s way in the back.” Valerie pointed into the woods. “My dad showed me it, but you need binoculars.”
“Oh . . .”
“They’re a special kind of monkey,” Valerie said. “They only live in Saskatchewan.”
“What’s Sekchuwan?”
Valerie pointed into the woods.
“Have you seen any of the monkeys,” Carol asked.
“No,” Valerie said. “I’m not allowed in Saskatchewan.”
“We should go see the school.”
“I’m not allowed!”
“You can sneak.”
Valerie considered this for a moment. “Ok, but I’ll have to ask my mom.”
Valerie began walking towards the house. Carol grabbed her arm and stopped her. “You don’t ask permission when you sneak. You just go.” She bit her lip. “But, we’ll do it on Saturday, ok?”
Valerie’s father had a whole bunch of papers spread out all over the dining room table when she entered. His forehead rested on the index finger and thumb of his right hand. His glasses dangled from between the index and middle finger of the same hand. The room had gotten dark, and he hadn’t turned the lights up higher as he normally would after sundown.
“Daddy?”
“One second, pumpkin.” Valerie’s father simply breathed in and out several times. He put on his glasses and then slowly raised his head. “What is it, Val?”
“Do the elves take the abandoned shoes?”
“What, sweetheart?”
“You know, for spare parts. Do the elves take the shoes that people leave in the street?”
Her father chuckled. “Why are you asking me this?”
“Me and mommy . . .”
“Mommy and I, Val”
“Ok, mommy and I saw a shoe in the city. Just one. I thought maybe it was because the elves are too small to carry two shoes.”
“Oh,” her father said. He smiled and sat up in his chair. “Come on over here.” Valerie ran over and jumped up on her father’s lap. “The elves can only carry one shoe at a time. But they have special forklifts. They can take both shoes when they see them. And they do. But when you only see one shoe, that’s not because of the elves.”
“Oh,” Valerie said. She looked down at her father’s shoes, puzzling out the mystery again. “A boy Cinderella?”
Valerie’s father chuckled again. “No, not a boy Cinderella.” He curled his lip on the right side of his mouth for a moment. “There’s this guy. A soothsayer.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone who can tell the future,” her father said. “And he rides around on a flying pig.”
“How come I haven’t seen him?”
“He flies very high. You can’t see him without a telescope.”
“What’s his name?”
“It’s Toby,” her father said. “Toby the Shoedropper.”
“Does the pig have a name?”
“Of course. The pig’s name is Pigasus.” Valerie’s father adjusted his glasses slightly on his face. “And when Toby needs to warn people that something is going to happen, he drops a shoe on the spot where the thing is going to happen.”
“But why?”
“Have you ever heard anyone say ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’?”
“No.”
“It means that something has happened and that people know something else is also going to happen because of the first thing. And the second thing is usually bad. Well, the phrase comes from Toby dropping his shoes. He drops the first one to warn people that the second one is coming. And then he drops the second one when the second thing happens. Since he does this at different times, and sometimes at different places, you usually only see one shoe.”
“Why doesn’t he just tell people something bad is going to happen and what it is?”
“It’s against the rules.”
“Who made the rules?”
“Vince Lombardi.”
Valerie’s father stood and lifted her up. “It’s about time for bed.”
Valerie’s father tucked her into bed and said goodnight. “I want to say goodnight to mommy.”
“Mommy went to bed. She was very tired, sweetheart.”
Valerie stared out her bedroom window on the second floor. She searched for Carol approaching the house. Valerie had decided Friday night not to go to Saskatchewan with Carol, but had changed her mind Saturday morning. Her father had been quiet all morning and kept pacing all over the house. He did make French toast and eggs and sausage and bacon and English muffins. Valerie only ate one piece of French toast and a strip of bacon. Usually her parents would force her to sit at the table until she ate more, but her father didn’t say anything.
Valerie ran downstairs and out the back door when she finally saw Carol. She had expected it to be more difficult to get outside without her father noticing, but he was engrossed in a phone call when she came down the stairs. Carol had worn denim overalls, almost identical to the ones Valerie was wearing. She had also brought a green, plastic stepping stool from her house. The two girls walked quickly towards the fence.
“Did you have any trouble sneaking out,” Carol asked.
“No. My dad is on the phone. He didn’t see me.”
“What about your mom?”
“She had to sleep at the doctor’s. She has a broken gomenzingowma.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s next to her humperdinck.” Carol narrowed her eyes at Valerie. “It’s not a big deal, people break their gomenzingowmas all the time. My dad says they just have to give her some special medicine and fix it with a gomenzingowma wrench. We’re going to visit her later on.”
When they reached the fence, they took a quick look back towards the house and then began. Carol went first. She stepped up on the stool and then jumped up, swinging one leg over the fence. She got the other leg over and then dropped to the ground and fell on her backside. Valerie stood on the stool and surveyed the situation. She couldn’t figure out how to get over the fence the same way Carol had. She decided on jumping and leaning forward. She began tipping over. Hanging upside down now, she twisted her body and her legs came over together and she fell flat on her back. She felt a slight buzz in her head for a moment, then she stood quickly and she and Carol headed off in the direction of the monkey butler school.
The deciduous jungle before Valerie felt empty and quiet. Every sound she and Carol made echoed, seemed amplified in contrast. One of the wild monkeys scurried up a tree, but was invisible, rustling in the leaves by the time the girls looked up. Carol picked an acorn up off the ground and threw it into the leaves, but it went straight through a single leaf, tearing a piece off, instigating nothing else.
“There’s no banana trees in here,” Carol said.
“My dad says butler monkeys eat acorns,” Valerie said.
“I never heard of monkeys eating acorns . . .”
Carol screeched and jumped in the air, kicking her right foot. A garter snake flew up and off of her shoe and made a high arc right back at the girls. Carol ran to her right and Valerie began jumping and spinning, wildly smacking and wiping herself with her hands. The confused snake landed between them and slithered away.
“There are no monkeys in here,” Carol said. “Let’s go back.”
“There are so monkeys in here. We saw one.”
“That was probably a squirrel.”
“My dad says some of the butler monkeys have bushy tails.” Valerie began walking again, leaving Carol standing behind her. “You’ll see when we get to the school. They’ll have them in there so you can look close at them.” Carol let Valerie get another ten feet or so before running after her.
“Wait,” Carol yelled. Valerie stopped and picked up a pair of maple seeds. She tore them apart and split open the end of one side and stuck in on the end of her nose. The other she threw up in the air and watched as it helicoptered to the ground.
“The monkeys like this,” Valerie said. She grabbed a few more seeds and began throwing them in all directions, watching the helicopter motion all around her. Nothing else stirred. She continued with this behavior until she saw the school maybe two hundred yards away. “There it is!” The girls ran towards it and Valerie threw the rest of her seeds in glee.
The school was in a large clearing, maybe two acres, and there was fencing behind it and to its right. The fencing was just so overgrown with foliage that it couldn’t be discerned unless one was up close. The building was made of rotting wood and was only about five feet by five feet. Inside there were only shelves, a couple of rods, and what looked like some kind of nest and a plethora of animal droppings.
“I found them!” Valerie was awakened from her disappointment by the sound of her father’s voice. She turned and saw him running towards her. Carol’s mother was walking towards them from a different angle. “Val, honey, you scared the heck out of me. You know you’re not allowed in the woods.” Valerie stared at her father dumbly while he grabbed her up and hugged her. Her father turned to Carol’s mother. “I want to hurry back. You ok finding your way back?” She nodded.
He carried Valerie as he walked, a noticeable limp in his gait. “Come on, we have to go see mommy.”
Valerie looked down as her father walked. “Daddy, what happened to your shoe?”
“I lost it in the mud somewhere. I didn’t have time to dig it out.”
Carol and her mother walked slowly so as not to catch up to Valerie and her father. “I made her do it,” Carol said. “I don’t want her to get in trouble. Tell him I made her do it.”
“No one’s in trouble, baby. Not today.”
“Why aren’t shoes ever abandoned in pairs?”
Valerie’s tiny legs double-stepped forward – almost of their own accord – in order not to risk uncoupling from her mother’s hand. (Valerie had visited the city once before in her six years, but that time she had traveled by car straight from her home straight into a parking garage, never setting foot in the intimidating urban landscape that passed by in her window.) All these adults running on automatic pilot and not another kid to be seen, Valerie was scared that if she let go of her mother’s hand for even a second, she would be swallowed up in this evil land. But her mother’s offhand, rhetorical comment increased the passing interest she herself had upon seeing the single loafer sitting on top of the corner mailbox, and she paused just long enough to feel her arm pulled along by her mother’s. “Maybe it’s like Cinderella,” she said.
“That was a man’s shoe, honey,” her mother said.
“It could be a boy Cinderella.”
“Yes,” her mother said, “it could be.”
“Elves make shoes.”
“Yes they do, honey.”
“Maybe the elves take old shoes for parts to fix other shoes.”
“Why would they only take one shoe?”
“The elves are tiny. The shoes are heavy for them. So they only take one at a time.”
“Hmm,” her mother said. “Maybe we should see what daddy says.”
Valerie stared up at the endless buildings, rising up as far as she could see in some cases. She squeezed her mother’s hand harder whenever she looked up. None of the evil, impersonal, foreign things in the city could get her as long as she held her mother’s hand. A bus passed and Valerie felt herself pushed forward in its wake. She grabbed her mother’s hand with both of hers. “It’s ok, honey, it’s just a bus,” her mother said.
A garbled voice came over the intercom in front of the building. A buzzing sound sustained itself until the door was already closing behind Valerie and her mother. Valerie looked at the narrow, wooden stairway in front of them. Her mother gently pulled her forward and to her left side now, placing herself between Valerie and the center banister. The stairs creaked under their footsteps. Valerie’s friend Carol had a deck in her backyard. The third step there creaked too. But it was part of the optimistic personality of the backyard playground. It’s creak was almost fun. The creaks in the city’s building were sickly, seemed a part of the decrepit foreboding of the evil place. And they all creaked.
They exited the staircase through a door and entered a hallway with mint green floors which were pebbled with black and white rocks of some kind. They turned into a seating area and Valerie’s mother spoke to a woman through a sliding glass window. When they were finished talking, the woman in the window smiled at Valerie and offered her a lollipop. Valerie took it and she and her mother sat down. Valerie just held the lollipop, not opening it, still holding her mother’s hand.
After a few minutes, another woman came into the waiting area and called Valerie’s mother’s name. “Ok, sweetie, mommy has to go for a few minutes.” Adrenaline shot through Valerie and her mother could see it in her eyes. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have brought you, but there was no one to watch you today. You’ll be fine for a few minutes. I’ll be right next door.” Valerie’s mother slid her hand out from Valerie’s and kissed her on the cheek. “The nice lady with the lollipops will keep an eye on you.” Valerie looked over to the window where the woman in the window smiled. It was a very friendly, comforting smile, but it was coming from a stranger. And worse yet, a denizen of the evil place. Valerie let her mother go more because she was afraid that making a scene would make the place aware of her. So far it seemed indifferent. Except for the woman in the window.
* * *
Valerie was ushered out of the house before she could ask her father about the shoes. Carol and her mother were waiting in Valerie’s backyard. Carol was jumping up and down intermittently. Valerie didn’t know why. Carol’s mother sat on the back stoop and kept an eye on things. “There’s Val,” Carol’s mother said.
Valerie and Carol wandered the yard, bored, unsure what to do with themselves. This was planned. By parents. You can’t plan to have fun, you just do it. It’s spontaneous.
Valerie’s property line ended at the edge of the woods, and her father had put up a fence when she was born for fear she’d wander off. Valerie and Carol stood on their toes and tried to look over the fence, but succeeded only in looking through the chain-links a little higher up.
“What’s in there,” Carol asked.
“Butler monkeys.”
“What?”
“Monkeys that bring you food and stuff. They live in there and there is a little school where people train them.”
“There’s a school in there?”
“It’s way in the back.” Valerie pointed into the woods. “My dad showed me it, but you need binoculars.”
“Oh . . .”
“They’re a special kind of monkey,” Valerie said. “They only live in Saskatchewan.”
“What’s Sekchuwan?”
Valerie pointed into the woods.
“Have you seen any of the monkeys,” Carol asked.
“No,” Valerie said. “I’m not allowed in Saskatchewan.”
“We should go see the school.”
“I’m not allowed!”
“You can sneak.”
Valerie considered this for a moment. “Ok, but I’ll have to ask my mom.”
Valerie began walking towards the house. Carol grabbed her arm and stopped her. “You don’t ask permission when you sneak. You just go.” She bit her lip. “But, we’ll do it on Saturday, ok?”
* * *
Valerie’s father had a whole bunch of papers spread out all over the dining room table when she entered. His forehead rested on the index finger and thumb of his right hand. His glasses dangled from between the index and middle finger of the same hand. The room had gotten dark, and he hadn’t turned the lights up higher as he normally would after sundown.
“Daddy?”
“One second, pumpkin.” Valerie’s father simply breathed in and out several times. He put on his glasses and then slowly raised his head. “What is it, Val?”
“Do the elves take the abandoned shoes?”
“What, sweetheart?”
“You know, for spare parts. Do the elves take the shoes that people leave in the street?”
Her father chuckled. “Why are you asking me this?”
“Me and mommy . . .”
“Mommy and I, Val”
“Ok, mommy and I saw a shoe in the city. Just one. I thought maybe it was because the elves are too small to carry two shoes.”
“Oh,” her father said. He smiled and sat up in his chair. “Come on over here.” Valerie ran over and jumped up on her father’s lap. “The elves can only carry one shoe at a time. But they have special forklifts. They can take both shoes when they see them. And they do. But when you only see one shoe, that’s not because of the elves.”
“Oh,” Valerie said. She looked down at her father’s shoes, puzzling out the mystery again. “A boy Cinderella?”
Valerie’s father chuckled again. “No, not a boy Cinderella.” He curled his lip on the right side of his mouth for a moment. “There’s this guy. A soothsayer.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone who can tell the future,” her father said. “And he rides around on a flying pig.”
“How come I haven’t seen him?”
“He flies very high. You can’t see him without a telescope.”
“What’s his name?”
“It’s Toby,” her father said. “Toby the Shoedropper.”
“Does the pig have a name?”
“Of course. The pig’s name is Pigasus.” Valerie’s father adjusted his glasses slightly on his face. “And when Toby needs to warn people that something is going to happen, he drops a shoe on the spot where the thing is going to happen.”
“But why?”
“Have you ever heard anyone say ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’?”
“No.”
“It means that something has happened and that people know something else is also going to happen because of the first thing. And the second thing is usually bad. Well, the phrase comes from Toby dropping his shoes. He drops the first one to warn people that the second one is coming. And then he drops the second one when the second thing happens. Since he does this at different times, and sometimes at different places, you usually only see one shoe.”
“Why doesn’t he just tell people something bad is going to happen and what it is?”
“It’s against the rules.”
“Who made the rules?”
“Vince Lombardi.”
Valerie’s father stood and lifted her up. “It’s about time for bed.”
Valerie’s father tucked her into bed and said goodnight. “I want to say goodnight to mommy.”
“Mommy went to bed. She was very tired, sweetheart.”
* * *
Valerie stared out her bedroom window on the second floor. She searched for Carol approaching the house. Valerie had decided Friday night not to go to Saskatchewan with Carol, but had changed her mind Saturday morning. Her father had been quiet all morning and kept pacing all over the house. He did make French toast and eggs and sausage and bacon and English muffins. Valerie only ate one piece of French toast and a strip of bacon. Usually her parents would force her to sit at the table until she ate more, but her father didn’t say anything.
Valerie ran downstairs and out the back door when she finally saw Carol. She had expected it to be more difficult to get outside without her father noticing, but he was engrossed in a phone call when she came down the stairs. Carol had worn denim overalls, almost identical to the ones Valerie was wearing. She had also brought a green, plastic stepping stool from her house. The two girls walked quickly towards the fence.
“Did you have any trouble sneaking out,” Carol asked.
“No. My dad is on the phone. He didn’t see me.”
“What about your mom?”
“She had to sleep at the doctor’s. She has a broken gomenzingowma.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s next to her humperdinck.” Carol narrowed her eyes at Valerie. “It’s not a big deal, people break their gomenzingowmas all the time. My dad says they just have to give her some special medicine and fix it with a gomenzingowma wrench. We’re going to visit her later on.”
When they reached the fence, they took a quick look back towards the house and then began. Carol went first. She stepped up on the stool and then jumped up, swinging one leg over the fence. She got the other leg over and then dropped to the ground and fell on her backside. Valerie stood on the stool and surveyed the situation. She couldn’t figure out how to get over the fence the same way Carol had. She decided on jumping and leaning forward. She began tipping over. Hanging upside down now, she twisted her body and her legs came over together and she fell flat on her back. She felt a slight buzz in her head for a moment, then she stood quickly and she and Carol headed off in the direction of the monkey butler school.
The deciduous jungle before Valerie felt empty and quiet. Every sound she and Carol made echoed, seemed amplified in contrast. One of the wild monkeys scurried up a tree, but was invisible, rustling in the leaves by the time the girls looked up. Carol picked an acorn up off the ground and threw it into the leaves, but it went straight through a single leaf, tearing a piece off, instigating nothing else.
“There’s no banana trees in here,” Carol said.
“My dad says butler monkeys eat acorns,” Valerie said.
“I never heard of monkeys eating acorns . . .”
Carol screeched and jumped in the air, kicking her right foot. A garter snake flew up and off of her shoe and made a high arc right back at the girls. Carol ran to her right and Valerie began jumping and spinning, wildly smacking and wiping herself with her hands. The confused snake landed between them and slithered away.
“There are no monkeys in here,” Carol said. “Let’s go back.”
“There are so monkeys in here. We saw one.”
“That was probably a squirrel.”
“My dad says some of the butler monkeys have bushy tails.” Valerie began walking again, leaving Carol standing behind her. “You’ll see when we get to the school. They’ll have them in there so you can look close at them.” Carol let Valerie get another ten feet or so before running after her.
“Wait,” Carol yelled. Valerie stopped and picked up a pair of maple seeds. She tore them apart and split open the end of one side and stuck in on the end of her nose. The other she threw up in the air and watched as it helicoptered to the ground.
“The monkeys like this,” Valerie said. She grabbed a few more seeds and began throwing them in all directions, watching the helicopter motion all around her. Nothing else stirred. She continued with this behavior until she saw the school maybe two hundred yards away. “There it is!” The girls ran towards it and Valerie threw the rest of her seeds in glee.
The school was in a large clearing, maybe two acres, and there was fencing behind it and to its right. The fencing was just so overgrown with foliage that it couldn’t be discerned unless one was up close. The building was made of rotting wood and was only about five feet by five feet. Inside there were only shelves, a couple of rods, and what looked like some kind of nest and a plethora of animal droppings.
“I found them!” Valerie was awakened from her disappointment by the sound of her father’s voice. She turned and saw him running towards her. Carol’s mother was walking towards them from a different angle. “Val, honey, you scared the heck out of me. You know you’re not allowed in the woods.” Valerie stared at her father dumbly while he grabbed her up and hugged her. Her father turned to Carol’s mother. “I want to hurry back. You ok finding your way back?” She nodded.
He carried Valerie as he walked, a noticeable limp in his gait. “Come on, we have to go see mommy.”
Valerie looked down as her father walked. “Daddy, what happened to your shoe?”
“I lost it in the mud somewhere. I didn’t have time to dig it out.”
Carol and her mother walked slowly so as not to catch up to Valerie and her father. “I made her do it,” Carol said. “I don’t want her to get in trouble. Tell him I made her do it.”
“No one’s in trouble, baby. Not today.”
Saturday
The Pretty Hands
So, I wrote this for a contest on another blog.
Augie tripped over two people on his way out of the apartment. Or he may have tripped over the same person twice; he couldn’t be sure. The result in either case was a sharp jab to his calf, accompanied by an indolent “dick!” Augie jumped, startled at the shot, and knocked a few empties over. Looking over his shoulder to the three humps on his carpet – and one more on his couch – he found no further motion. The guys had come in with Curtis after Augie had gone to bed. The Pretty Hands Augie vaguely recalled. Charlie’s newest band. Curtis had played a couple of tracks they had uploaded on their site. Augie thought they were fine, but nothing to worm its way into your brain. They’d be crashing on floors for a few more months (maybe a year) and then be knee-deep in the bullshit with the rest of us, Augie thought.
The line at the bagel shop was out the door and Augie had only thrown on a sweat shirt for the quick trip. He rubbed his biceps and tried to figure out which one or ones of the guys he had tripped over while he waited. Who had punched him. There was Ed. Or at least that’s the name Augie thought he’d heard, but Ed was a chick. Whatever her name, drowsy as it was the ‘dick’ had not been a woman’s voice. The drummer went simply by the sobriquet T. That Augie remembered for sure because he had thought it was on the borderline of idiotic. Dumb, but not so dumb he would refuse to call the person by the name. Not like the one who had wanted Augie to call him Cracker Jack. Cracker Jack was met with shrieking laughter upon introducing himself. The name was so ridiculous that Augie never heard the boy’s proper name. So Augie had been calling him CJ the rest of the night, partly as taunt, partly as dodge. Charlie Augie had known for a while now. He was an old friend of Curtis’s. Charlie wouldn’t have punched him. Not even in inebriated half-slumber. He actually had the talent to go somewhere, just not the personality. It was depressing in a way. Ed played sax – probably better than bass – but she had never been able to convince the band to incorporate it. Charlie could play bass well enough to take up duties on the occasional song, but he felt awkward on anything but a six string. On top of that, CJ wouldn’t have it. He had very specific ideas of what a rock band should be, and saxophone had no place there. CJ could be good if he ever took some time away from his showmanship lunacy. The Pretty Hands had picked him up after he was tossed out of his old band for lighting his pants on fire in the middle of a set. Augie had to admit to himself, however, that that flirted with genius from just inside the insanity side of the line. T was shit. And a shitty drummer is the ruination of a band.
Augie called out as he walked down the hallway to his apartment door. “A’right, get up. I’m not hiding in my room all morning. I bought bagels so you can’t bitch about it.” When he looked down to guide the key into the lock, he saw a small parcel. A plain white box two inches by twelve inches by eighteen inches. He scooped it up in one smooth motion while he pushed the door open. “So what the hell is this?”
“Plain package?” CJ had lifted his head up to look at the invading light from the hallway. “Must be another one of your dildos.”
“Yeah CJ, you don’t know me well enough to crack that joke.”
“Who said it was a joke?”
Augie reached into the bag and pulled out one of the bagels and threw it into the corner of the room where it rolled through some gray dust collected there. “That one’s yours.”
“Like I give a shit.” CJ stood slowly and went over to the corner to retrieve the bagel. He wiped it off on his shirt and took a large bite.
No one else had so much as stirred yet, so Augie flicked on the ceiling lights and pulled opened the blinds. The light tore the balance of The Pretty Hands from their preferred biorhythms. It also exposed the modest, though well-maintained state of the apartment Augie and Curtis shared. Creaking hardwood floors stained deep brown, off white walls with yellow molding, and a hideous red, yellow, and orange carpet the roommates had picked up at a yard sale. It prevented splinters when walking barefoot in the room. But it certainly did not pull the room together. The television was . . .
“Claire in the bathroom?” Ed’s voice came unexpectedly
“Who?”
“Claire,” Ed answered as she rubbed her eyes. “Charlie’s latest girlfriend.” The end of the sentence was almost yelped as Ed stretched. Her shirt lifted just above her waistline and was the first evidence Augie had that she had hips. He had been a little mad at her for failing to intrigue him the night before, proactively dressed down in drab, shapeless clothes. He forgave her now.
“Did I meet her last night?”
“You’d remember,” Ed said.
“That’s a big bitch,” CJ bellowed.
“Watch that shit.” Augie turned to see Charlie coming out from the kitchen. He hadn’t noticed Charlie’s absence. “Those bagels?” Charlie reached his hand out for the bag and Augie handed them over and nodded. “Thanks.” Charlie headed back for the kitchen, removing an everything bagel as he did. “What’s with the box?”
“Don’t know,” Augie said.
“Break her open then,” Charlie said.
“Where is this bum,” CJ said, making a beeline for Curtis’s door. Augie placed the box up on the kitchen counter and pulled his keys out of his pocket. CJ banged on Curtis’s door. “Get your ass up.” Augie tore the tape on the box with one of his keys. CJ went into Curtis’s room and then came barreling out to the kitchen. “He’s not in there,” he said..
“Maybe he went out for coffee,” Augie said as he opened the box.
“You’re just gonna open that,” CJ asked, reaching meaninglessly for the package.
After peering into the box, Augie turned to Charlie and said: “I think this is for you.” Charlie looked into the box. Inside were two CDs, demos that Charlie’s first band The Mugwumps had made almost eight years ago. Charlie inspected the CDs. One was titled, “Ludic Slaves”. The other was, “Mainlining on Exile St”.
“What the . . ?” Charlie looked into the box for any further information. It appeared empty. Charlie felt his hand around the inside of the box. He felt something, a piece of paper, under one of the bottom flaps. He pulled out a wallet-sized photograph of himself. It was fairly recent. A shot that Claire carried with her. Charlie puzzled over the photograph for a moment and turned it over. “Squatters’ Paradise” was scrawled on the back in near-chicken-scratch.
Squatters’ Paradise was the one attempt The Mugwumps had made at a properly produced album. They had pooled every dime they had and sunk it into the disc. They labored over each detail of the album, including the cover photo. They went through hell lugging Curtis’s sofa down to their old squat. The photo was of the band plopped on the couch while Curtis served them fast food, using a hubcap for a platter. It even seemed like there was some industry interest for half a minute. With nowhere left to build to, the band soon broke up. The album’s absence from the box now felt conspicuous.
“Shit.” Charlie slipped the photo into his pocket and stormed towards the front door.
“Where we going,” CJ asked as he threw his jacket on and followed Charlie. Charlie made no objection. Augie stared at the front door for a minute, and then grabbed his coat and followed. He didn’t know what was going on, but he was concerned CJ might aggravate whatever it was.
Augie had closed the gap to just under a block when he saw Charlie and CJ walk into the decrepit building. Augie wasn’t used to this kind of setting and approached with caution. He had come this far, he might as well see what was going on.
He found a window, painted over in black, with a corner of glass missing. Inside, dust-infested beams of light revealed a sickly gray scene. The bottom floor had been pretty well gutted. Charlie and CJ stood facing a third man Augie hadn’t seen before. Or rather, Augie hadn’t seen before in person. It took a moment, but Augie recognized the face, although it was less gaunt than it had been in the photographs. Joe was one of Curtis’s oldest friends, but Augie had never seen him until today. He did know that Curtis had met Charlie through Joe when Joe was drumming for The Mugwumps.
“Where’s Claire,” Charlie asked.
“Who the hell do you think you are,” asked Joe. “I don’t have to tell you where she is.”
“You took her?” Charlie showed the photo.
“Took her?” Joe stared at Charlie studiously. “Shit, you really don’t remember.” Joe laughed.
“Fuck you laughing at?”
“You, asshole. Claire’s my sister. You met her way back. I mean, she was only fifteen then, but shit.”
“So, wait . . .” Charlie seemed to search the floor for something. “What is this? I mean, are Mark and Pete . . . what is this?”
“Mark’s dead,” Joe said. “Pete’s gone. Fried. Institutionalized.” Charlie just stared at Joe. “You’d know this if you were a friend.”
“So that’s what this is about? I abandoned you guys?”
“No.” The voice came from somewhere outside the window’s view range. Also apparently from outside of Charlie’s view, Augie thought. Augie watched as the Amazonian figure of Claire came into view.
“That’s a big bitch,” CJ bellowed. Augie noted that she was big, but not in the way he had expected. She was six foot two, and curved just right, but not with any excess. Attractive if viewed in a forced perspective.
“Fuck you, CJ,” Claire said. She walked over to Charlie and handed him a what looked like a slim coffee table book.. “It’s about this.”
Charlie studied the cover for a minute. Then he opened it and looked at something inside. “Where did you get this?”
“Fuck you is where,” Joe said. “You were a private school kid. You scammed us.”
“It shouldn’t matter if my dad had money.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s the deception. You used to disappear every few weeks. Show up again out of nowhere at one of our squats. We never knew what you were up to, but hey, none of our business. Turns out you were just ending one of your vacations.”
“So what? You could have gone home too, you were just too cool.”
“No, we couldn’t have.” Joe pointed an accusatory finger at Charlie. “That’s what you don’t get. This wasn’t a game for us. Play street urchin. Claire and me, we couldn’t go home. Same for Mark and Pete.”
“I slept in the same holes as you. Begged in the same places.”
“You’re still not getting it. You can’t fake the experience. You don’t know what it’s like if you have a fallback position. None of us had a net. You were a fucking tourist!”
“I was trying . . .”
“Fuck you, man. Any of us would have given anything to have your life. You go live your little poetic fantasy. Try to get some material for your songs. There’s nothing wrong with being a normal person. Now, being an asshole is another story.”
“Hey.”
“You didn’t even recognize me when you saw me again last month,” Claire said. “We were going to let you off if you did, you know.”
“Let me off?”
Charlie turned to look at CJ. “We’re outta here.”
“There’s no we.” Charlie looked at CJ in utter confusion. “You’re a fucked up individual. You can’t mess with people like that. Explains the shitty ‘evolution’ of your lyrics though. The Pretty Hands are going on as a trio. T’s out. Joe’s in. We’ll move Ed over to vocals. Chick singer stands out. That, a little money, and a phone call to an industry connection . . .”
Charlie waved off the group as he headed for the door. “Not going anywhere, Charlie.” The voice came from a man just entering the building. He wore a silk shirt and pressed pants, and Augie could see some kind of handgun conspicuously displayed at his waist.
“You remember Tout Suite?”
Augie tried to will himself to an act of heroic intervention. They won’t do anything if I’m in the room, he thought. But he watched, frozen, as Tout Suite handed a stack of bills to Joe. “Twenty grand was the agreement?” Joe nodded.
“And a meeting with your music friend,” CJ said. Tout Suite nodded.
“I only owed you eight,” Charlie said.
“I’m a bitter man. Find out you could have paid me anytime you wanted. What kind of person that make you? Maybe you could have even saved poor Mark.”
Augie watched, his mind screaming for him to both rescue Charlie and to run away. The resulting paralysis made him hate himself a little. Charlie pleaded as Joe, Claire, and CJ began leaving. “Joe, come on, man.”
“Joe can’t do anything now if he wanted to,” Tout Suite said before he knocked a molar out of Charlie’s mouth with a right hook. Augie watched the blood begin to trickle down Charlie’s horror-stricken face and his paralysis broke in shame.
Augie was still running when he got into the apartment and went to check on Curtis. He found him asleep in his room, out cold, nine empties on his floor.
In the living room, the band was already gone. The only evidence they had been there was a copy of their demo. Augie looked at the package. The contact information for the band was Ed’s. Augie put the CD in the junk drawer. He would try to decide whether or not to call Ed when his thoughts weren’t dominated by Charlie screaming.
“Joe! Joe! Joe!”
Augie tripped over two people on his way out of the apartment. Or he may have tripped over the same person twice; he couldn’t be sure. The result in either case was a sharp jab to his calf, accompanied by an indolent “dick!” Augie jumped, startled at the shot, and knocked a few empties over. Looking over his shoulder to the three humps on his carpet – and one more on his couch – he found no further motion. The guys had come in with Curtis after Augie had gone to bed. The Pretty Hands Augie vaguely recalled. Charlie’s newest band. Curtis had played a couple of tracks they had uploaded on their site. Augie thought they were fine, but nothing to worm its way into your brain. They’d be crashing on floors for a few more months (maybe a year) and then be knee-deep in the bullshit with the rest of us, Augie thought.
The line at the bagel shop was out the door and Augie had only thrown on a sweat shirt for the quick trip. He rubbed his biceps and tried to figure out which one or ones of the guys he had tripped over while he waited. Who had punched him. There was Ed. Or at least that’s the name Augie thought he’d heard, but Ed was a chick. Whatever her name, drowsy as it was the ‘dick’ had not been a woman’s voice. The drummer went simply by the sobriquet T. That Augie remembered for sure because he had thought it was on the borderline of idiotic. Dumb, but not so dumb he would refuse to call the person by the name. Not like the one who had wanted Augie to call him Cracker Jack. Cracker Jack was met with shrieking laughter upon introducing himself. The name was so ridiculous that Augie never heard the boy’s proper name. So Augie had been calling him CJ the rest of the night, partly as taunt, partly as dodge. Charlie Augie had known for a while now. He was an old friend of Curtis’s. Charlie wouldn’t have punched him. Not even in inebriated half-slumber. He actually had the talent to go somewhere, just not the personality. It was depressing in a way. Ed played sax – probably better than bass – but she had never been able to convince the band to incorporate it. Charlie could play bass well enough to take up duties on the occasional song, but he felt awkward on anything but a six string. On top of that, CJ wouldn’t have it. He had very specific ideas of what a rock band should be, and saxophone had no place there. CJ could be good if he ever took some time away from his showmanship lunacy. The Pretty Hands had picked him up after he was tossed out of his old band for lighting his pants on fire in the middle of a set. Augie had to admit to himself, however, that that flirted with genius from just inside the insanity side of the line. T was shit. And a shitty drummer is the ruination of a band.
Augie called out as he walked down the hallway to his apartment door. “A’right, get up. I’m not hiding in my room all morning. I bought bagels so you can’t bitch about it.” When he looked down to guide the key into the lock, he saw a small parcel. A plain white box two inches by twelve inches by eighteen inches. He scooped it up in one smooth motion while he pushed the door open. “So what the hell is this?”
“Plain package?” CJ had lifted his head up to look at the invading light from the hallway. “Must be another one of your dildos.”
“Yeah CJ, you don’t know me well enough to crack that joke.”
“Who said it was a joke?”
Augie reached into the bag and pulled out one of the bagels and threw it into the corner of the room where it rolled through some gray dust collected there. “That one’s yours.”
“Like I give a shit.” CJ stood slowly and went over to the corner to retrieve the bagel. He wiped it off on his shirt and took a large bite.
No one else had so much as stirred yet, so Augie flicked on the ceiling lights and pulled opened the blinds. The light tore the balance of The Pretty Hands from their preferred biorhythms. It also exposed the modest, though well-maintained state of the apartment Augie and Curtis shared. Creaking hardwood floors stained deep brown, off white walls with yellow molding, and a hideous red, yellow, and orange carpet the roommates had picked up at a yard sale. It prevented splinters when walking barefoot in the room. But it certainly did not pull the room together. The television was . . .
“Claire in the bathroom?” Ed’s voice came unexpectedly
“Who?”
“Claire,” Ed answered as she rubbed her eyes. “Charlie’s latest girlfriend.” The end of the sentence was almost yelped as Ed stretched. Her shirt lifted just above her waistline and was the first evidence Augie had that she had hips. He had been a little mad at her for failing to intrigue him the night before, proactively dressed down in drab, shapeless clothes. He forgave her now.
“Did I meet her last night?”
“You’d remember,” Ed said.
“That’s a big bitch,” CJ bellowed.
“Watch that shit.” Augie turned to see Charlie coming out from the kitchen. He hadn’t noticed Charlie’s absence. “Those bagels?” Charlie reached his hand out for the bag and Augie handed them over and nodded. “Thanks.” Charlie headed back for the kitchen, removing an everything bagel as he did. “What’s with the box?”
“Don’t know,” Augie said.
“Break her open then,” Charlie said.
“Where is this bum,” CJ said, making a beeline for Curtis’s door. Augie placed the box up on the kitchen counter and pulled his keys out of his pocket. CJ banged on Curtis’s door. “Get your ass up.” Augie tore the tape on the box with one of his keys. CJ went into Curtis’s room and then came barreling out to the kitchen. “He’s not in there,” he said..
“Maybe he went out for coffee,” Augie said as he opened the box.
“You’re just gonna open that,” CJ asked, reaching meaninglessly for the package.
After peering into the box, Augie turned to Charlie and said: “I think this is for you.” Charlie looked into the box. Inside were two CDs, demos that Charlie’s first band The Mugwumps had made almost eight years ago. Charlie inspected the CDs. One was titled, “Ludic Slaves”. The other was, “Mainlining on Exile St”.
“What the . . ?” Charlie looked into the box for any further information. It appeared empty. Charlie felt his hand around the inside of the box. He felt something, a piece of paper, under one of the bottom flaps. He pulled out a wallet-sized photograph of himself. It was fairly recent. A shot that Claire carried with her. Charlie puzzled over the photograph for a moment and turned it over. “Squatters’ Paradise” was scrawled on the back in near-chicken-scratch.
Squatters’ Paradise was the one attempt The Mugwumps had made at a properly produced album. They had pooled every dime they had and sunk it into the disc. They labored over each detail of the album, including the cover photo. They went through hell lugging Curtis’s sofa down to their old squat. The photo was of the band plopped on the couch while Curtis served them fast food, using a hubcap for a platter. It even seemed like there was some industry interest for half a minute. With nowhere left to build to, the band soon broke up. The album’s absence from the box now felt conspicuous.
“Shit.” Charlie slipped the photo into his pocket and stormed towards the front door.
“Where we going,” CJ asked as he threw his jacket on and followed Charlie. Charlie made no objection. Augie stared at the front door for a minute, and then grabbed his coat and followed. He didn’t know what was going on, but he was concerned CJ might aggravate whatever it was.
* * *
Augie had closed the gap to just under a block when he saw Charlie and CJ walk into the decrepit building. Augie wasn’t used to this kind of setting and approached with caution. He had come this far, he might as well see what was going on.
He found a window, painted over in black, with a corner of glass missing. Inside, dust-infested beams of light revealed a sickly gray scene. The bottom floor had been pretty well gutted. Charlie and CJ stood facing a third man Augie hadn’t seen before. Or rather, Augie hadn’t seen before in person. It took a moment, but Augie recognized the face, although it was less gaunt than it had been in the photographs. Joe was one of Curtis’s oldest friends, but Augie had never seen him until today. He did know that Curtis had met Charlie through Joe when Joe was drumming for The Mugwumps.
“Where’s Claire,” Charlie asked.
“Who the hell do you think you are,” asked Joe. “I don’t have to tell you where she is.”
“You took her?” Charlie showed the photo.
“Took her?” Joe stared at Charlie studiously. “Shit, you really don’t remember.” Joe laughed.
“Fuck you laughing at?”
“You, asshole. Claire’s my sister. You met her way back. I mean, she was only fifteen then, but shit.”
“So, wait . . .” Charlie seemed to search the floor for something. “What is this? I mean, are Mark and Pete . . . what is this?”
“Mark’s dead,” Joe said. “Pete’s gone. Fried. Institutionalized.” Charlie just stared at Joe. “You’d know this if you were a friend.”
“So that’s what this is about? I abandoned you guys?”
“No.” The voice came from somewhere outside the window’s view range. Also apparently from outside of Charlie’s view, Augie thought. Augie watched as the Amazonian figure of Claire came into view.
“That’s a big bitch,” CJ bellowed. Augie noted that she was big, but not in the way he had expected. She was six foot two, and curved just right, but not with any excess. Attractive if viewed in a forced perspective.
“Fuck you, CJ,” Claire said. She walked over to Charlie and handed him a what looked like a slim coffee table book.. “It’s about this.”
Charlie studied the cover for a minute. Then he opened it and looked at something inside. “Where did you get this?”
“Fuck you is where,” Joe said. “You were a private school kid. You scammed us.”
“It shouldn’t matter if my dad had money.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s the deception. You used to disappear every few weeks. Show up again out of nowhere at one of our squats. We never knew what you were up to, but hey, none of our business. Turns out you were just ending one of your vacations.”
“So what? You could have gone home too, you were just too cool.”
“No, we couldn’t have.” Joe pointed an accusatory finger at Charlie. “That’s what you don’t get. This wasn’t a game for us. Play street urchin. Claire and me, we couldn’t go home. Same for Mark and Pete.”
“I slept in the same holes as you. Begged in the same places.”
“You’re still not getting it. You can’t fake the experience. You don’t know what it’s like if you have a fallback position. None of us had a net. You were a fucking tourist!”
“I was trying . . .”
“Fuck you, man. Any of us would have given anything to have your life. You go live your little poetic fantasy. Try to get some material for your songs. There’s nothing wrong with being a normal person. Now, being an asshole is another story.”
“Hey.”
“You didn’t even recognize me when you saw me again last month,” Claire said. “We were going to let you off if you did, you know.”
“Let me off?”
Charlie turned to look at CJ. “We’re outta here.”
“There’s no we.” Charlie looked at CJ in utter confusion. “You’re a fucked up individual. You can’t mess with people like that. Explains the shitty ‘evolution’ of your lyrics though. The Pretty Hands are going on as a trio. T’s out. Joe’s in. We’ll move Ed over to vocals. Chick singer stands out. That, a little money, and a phone call to an industry connection . . .”
Charlie waved off the group as he headed for the door. “Not going anywhere, Charlie.” The voice came from a man just entering the building. He wore a silk shirt and pressed pants, and Augie could see some kind of handgun conspicuously displayed at his waist.
“You remember Tout Suite?”
Augie tried to will himself to an act of heroic intervention. They won’t do anything if I’m in the room, he thought. But he watched, frozen, as Tout Suite handed a stack of bills to Joe. “Twenty grand was the agreement?” Joe nodded.
“And a meeting with your music friend,” CJ said. Tout Suite nodded.
“I only owed you eight,” Charlie said.
“I’m a bitter man. Find out you could have paid me anytime you wanted. What kind of person that make you? Maybe you could have even saved poor Mark.”
Augie watched, his mind screaming for him to both rescue Charlie and to run away. The resulting paralysis made him hate himself a little. Charlie pleaded as Joe, Claire, and CJ began leaving. “Joe, come on, man.”
“Joe can’t do anything now if he wanted to,” Tout Suite said before he knocked a molar out of Charlie’s mouth with a right hook. Augie watched the blood begin to trickle down Charlie’s horror-stricken face and his paralysis broke in shame.
Augie was still running when he got into the apartment and went to check on Curtis. He found him asleep in his room, out cold, nine empties on his floor.
In the living room, the band was already gone. The only evidence they had been there was a copy of their demo. Augie looked at the package. The contact information for the band was Ed’s. Augie put the CD in the junk drawer. He would try to decide whether or not to call Ed when his thoughts weren’t dominated by Charlie screaming.
“Joe! Joe! Joe!”
Wednesday
Otto and Space Shuttle Girl
Otto pressed down on the pedal that makes the car go faster with the corrugated sole of his fancy shoes from that one store. As the car careened and swerved both rightward and leftwise, Otto thought back to the store where he had bought the car. It was a blue car and it came with a spare tire and windows. The store was open in the middle of the desert when Charlie worked there by unlocking the display case. Wantonly businessing morrow and gloaming. He found it misplaced in the candy aisle behind a pack of Hubba Bubba. He brought to Charlie the ticket and said, “I want this. Blue is my favorite color please.”
Charlie looked at Otto and thought him quickly an Otto, then briefly a Lamont, then thirdly and finally – correctly as well – an Otto, palindromicity streaming from his eyelids. “It is many and many dollars,” Charlie said.
“Poor I am not,” spake Otto. “Many and many dollars I have, and then more enough still for cupcakes a week.”
“Very good,” said Charlie.
“I am very good,” said Otto. “I went to school in Orange County in the great state of California, where they make movies and surfboards. Also, the ocean is on the wrong side and sometimes people are weird. My school was on a schooner and we water skied for gym class, counting assholes for math class, and reading books about plumbing. I grew there and my father was a mechanic. For the space shuttle. My mother invented a type of cookie and sold it to a foodstuffs conglomerate, but they only bought it as a secret weapon for post-apocalyptic rich people orgies. But my mother has made them and I have had them. Until it is that the attorneys sent her a restraining order to not make them. But still I have known what it is to be rich. I met a girl in the eighth grade. She lived on my father’s space shuttle and she gave me a kiss and three string cheeses. So we had to get married. And now I need a car. My favorite color is blue.”
“I ain’t got no receipts,” Charlie said.
Otto had put the key in the turner onner and turned it and the car went on. He drove it with the pedal that makes the car go under his fancy shoes. He parked the car by pressing down on the pedal that makes the car stop and he opened the door that lets you get out of the car so you don’t have to live there until you starve to death and smell bad.
Space Shuttle Girl was wearing clothes when he got home and Otto thought they didn’t look stupid. Space Shuttle Girl was six feet three from living in space. On a shuttle, as a girl. She learned how to wear clothes that didn't look stupid in outer space from absorbing radiation. She had brown hair and two eyes and one mouth, even though she grew up in outer space, even if up is meaningless without a reference point. For this reason, her height was legally considered irrelevant and she was able to ride roller coasters even when she was only three feet tall. This caused the baseball strike, and also the Miracle on Ice through a tachyon cascade.
Otto was five foot ten and had two arms and two legs. But just the one head. This made Otto sad, except for times he saw a blue car or Space Shuttle Girl in clothes that didn’t look stupid. He also wore clothes and they also didn’t look stupid, but his clothes were a different size and shape from Space Shuttle Girl’s.
Otto also enjoyed his job. He was a cosmologist and thought about how the universe existed and if there was enough soap for the Third World to stop having AIDS so much. This involved a lot of math and also lye. But when Space Shuttle Girl wore clothes that didn’t not look stupid, the math fell out of his head and he was only able to write literary critiques for obscure publications read by people with inferiority complexes.
Otto and Space Shuttle Girl had a daughter named Belinda. They were going to name her Lillian after she was born, but until then after it the mail came for Belinda. So Belinda was often found at school when she wasn’t not being born and she would write down answers – on occasion – to problems mathematical and socially scientific, ranging from fractions and long division to Abraham Lincoln and the atriums and ventricles. (Although Lincoln had atriums and ventricles and sometimes used and understood fractions and long division, these were never mingled in the school classes because there could be an explosion.) Belinda once wrote an answer so beautiful that her teacher tried to adopt her and Space Shuttle Girl had to talk to the principal about the teacher’s shitty attitude.
Otto released the pressing on the pedal that makes the car go faster because he was dying from the explosion because Abraham Lincoln discovered irrational numbers and made mad Pythagorus. Otto flew out of his car, and he was dead, and he fell on the grass that was there near where he was had been driving and he landed on it. And it was green grass. A lot of people died in the Civil War because of irrational numbers and then they made a movie about the Dukes in Hazzard because a Nazi Muslim Socialist with cooties robbed the White House and invented a new cabinet position – with his super Nazi Muslim powers (Socialists don’t have super powers) – for his Sommelier and then burned all the white lightning with a machete.
Otto got up on his feet, which were wearing the fancy shoes that also had soles on them, and he walked over to his burning car and blew it out with his mouth. He turned the car back over, with his hands that are for dexterous manipulation of objects (but not his penis, that’s bad) and he climbed back in through the back windshield because it wasn’t there anymore because of Abraham Lincoln. And also because of the Jews probably, but the TV hadn’t told him that yet, so it might not be true until Tuesday.
Space Shuttle Girl cried when Otto told her he died and landed on the grass, which was green. And also not on fire like the blue car. “Otto,” she said. “I am a simple space shuttle girl who only knows how to be from outer space and how to raise a little girl we get to name after the mail is forwarded from my uterus. And also I have a Juris Doctorate.”
“From outer space!” Otto added enthusiastically, with a blue car.
“My only hope now is to sell ideas to people who only have beliefs. And I will have to have a blue car also to get to places to transact this businessing. And then or Belinda by then Lillian after before now will have to become rich with her answering prowess, earning at least fourteen or fifteen dollars. No higher than that though, because of Abraham Lincoln.”
“I can give you my blue car!” Otto said enthusiastically, with a blue car still for now until then. “Also,” he said, “I want Belinda to have my fancy shoes.”
“I’d rather them for Lillian,” Space Shuttle Girl said, “so that I will be crying less. And also will have sold some ideas so we can have cupcakes.”
“I feel.”
“Yes. People do that. And also they call them things. Sometimes it overlaps, mostly it doesn’t. Probably because of Abraham Lincoln. He loved tall hats.”
“I read that in a movie once,” said Otto. “He was also an avid beardist and inventor of basketball. Because of his tall hat and also his tall body, that was shot near its top with a bullet I heard in that book I saw in the window.”
“Yes. Also.”
“I am a very unhappy person after I am dead,” mused Otto. “I don’t think I like it. If I shake the Scrabble board, I might be able to be before after I am dead and resee if I am not unhappy as I am after it. I enjoyed football and riding my bike growing up, though I could not feel mitosis, so it may have been painful in miniature or else like a massage, but without the structure . . . I will throw out the literary critiques and cram all the math back in and I will not mix long division and the Civil War because of my bitchin’ blue car. Also the atriums. But I think we may be safe with the ventricles. Also, I didn’t like that one book written by the guy with the arcane vocabulary and also masking simplicity in a series of phonetic noises where no one knows about cosmology. But I understand that I had played basketball with only three people when we did it in the schoolyard where the sun was in the middle of the ceiling, though not exactly of course. We hurled the basketball at the basketball hoop in attempts both vain and successful at field goals, worth one point less than in the football we didn’t play in the schoolyard because of no uprights. And also no kickers really and Mississippi and cutting the ribbon because of not eleven guys and the guy near the schoolyard had a rake he threw at the mice, but also sometimes at the gridironers and baseballers or even the kids throwing dog shit at each other because it is funny if it’s not happening to you when it happens to someone and they don’t make you smell them because you are dead because your car has no doors so you can’t get out and you hope it explodes because of Abraham Lincoln. So I have an idea.”
“How much does it cost?”
“Dollars and dollars,” Otto said. “But we can also have cupcakes for days.”
“Belinda can stop making money after twelve dollars. Huzzah!” Space Shuttle Girl jumped twelve feet in the air and a dollar fell from her semi-fancy shoes each foot she climbed under her feet in the shoes that were not as fancy as Otto’s, but only because of her clothes that didn’t look stupid. The dollars wafted down to the ground and wondered why the fuck you were still reading this. Holy shit!
Otto ran away, careful not to scuff his fancy shoes.
Lillian skipped home from school, unadopted one day more through sheer wiliness and a deftness at quoting case law. But not in verse, because that could cause an explosion. She hurdled the cars that weren’t blue and lunged over the pavement, leaping as a turtle might. With a paint marker, she added Esperanto translations to street signs, and so her commute was lengthy. She was four feet and several inches as well and she wore clothes that were not stupid, but the way in which they lacked stupidity was divergent from her parents both as blue cars and silver cars. And also red cars and gold cars and black cars and white cars. But not green cars. Or Cadillacs. Unless they are convertibles. But also she had four dollars, and this made her nervous. But not so nervous as quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes in verse. But she also didn’t know who Oliver Wendell Holmes was, so she never spoke in verse because she assumed he must have said “may I have a banana split” at some point. And also other mundane things like “I hate The Scarlet Letter, that book sucks and is boring also”.
Belillian von Scooter Ottoshuttle hated her name, though she loved her parents. And not just because their clothes were largely not stupid, as were her own, just in a different way that has something to do with cars and why the fuck are you still reading this?
A very loud noise hurt Lillian’s ears and when she got home she saw that a space shuttle was landed in front of her house, which was also where her parents both lived and also kept their clothes that weren’t stupid and their shoes that were fancy and partly fancy. She looked in shock, and also she was stunned and unsure of how to react, as her father drop kicked out of the front door and did nine somersaults to the curb and announced, “I traded in my blue car for a space shuttle so your mother can be from outer space again instead of selling ideas that might cause Lincolnian explosions that kill her husband, and also people who don’t have fancy shoes and also who may or may not wear clothes that aren’t not stupid".
The blue car drove up to the house. Chapwood got out and screamed.
And also, The End
Charlie looked at Otto and thought him quickly an Otto, then briefly a Lamont, then thirdly and finally – correctly as well – an Otto, palindromicity streaming from his eyelids. “It is many and many dollars,” Charlie said.
“Poor I am not,” spake Otto. “Many and many dollars I have, and then more enough still for cupcakes a week.”
“Very good,” said Charlie.
“I am very good,” said Otto. “I went to school in Orange County in the great state of California, where they make movies and surfboards. Also, the ocean is on the wrong side and sometimes people are weird. My school was on a schooner and we water skied for gym class, counting assholes for math class, and reading books about plumbing. I grew there and my father was a mechanic. For the space shuttle. My mother invented a type of cookie and sold it to a foodstuffs conglomerate, but they only bought it as a secret weapon for post-apocalyptic rich people orgies. But my mother has made them and I have had them. Until it is that the attorneys sent her a restraining order to not make them. But still I have known what it is to be rich. I met a girl in the eighth grade. She lived on my father’s space shuttle and she gave me a kiss and three string cheeses. So we had to get married. And now I need a car. My favorite color is blue.”
“I ain’t got no receipts,” Charlie said.
Otto had put the key in the turner onner and turned it and the car went on. He drove it with the pedal that makes the car go under his fancy shoes. He parked the car by pressing down on the pedal that makes the car stop and he opened the door that lets you get out of the car so you don’t have to live there until you starve to death and smell bad.
Space Shuttle Girl was wearing clothes when he got home and Otto thought they didn’t look stupid. Space Shuttle Girl was six feet three from living in space. On a shuttle, as a girl. She learned how to wear clothes that didn't look stupid in outer space from absorbing radiation. She had brown hair and two eyes and one mouth, even though she grew up in outer space, even if up is meaningless without a reference point. For this reason, her height was legally considered irrelevant and she was able to ride roller coasters even when she was only three feet tall. This caused the baseball strike, and also the Miracle on Ice through a tachyon cascade.
Otto was five foot ten and had two arms and two legs. But just the one head. This made Otto sad, except for times he saw a blue car or Space Shuttle Girl in clothes that didn’t look stupid. He also wore clothes and they also didn’t look stupid, but his clothes were a different size and shape from Space Shuttle Girl’s.
Otto also enjoyed his job. He was a cosmologist and thought about how the universe existed and if there was enough soap for the Third World to stop having AIDS so much. This involved a lot of math and also lye. But when Space Shuttle Girl wore clothes that didn’t not look stupid, the math fell out of his head and he was only able to write literary critiques for obscure publications read by people with inferiority complexes.
Otto and Space Shuttle Girl had a daughter named Belinda. They were going to name her Lillian after she was born, but until then after it the mail came for Belinda. So Belinda was often found at school when she wasn’t not being born and she would write down answers – on occasion – to problems mathematical and socially scientific, ranging from fractions and long division to Abraham Lincoln and the atriums and ventricles. (Although Lincoln had atriums and ventricles and sometimes used and understood fractions and long division, these were never mingled in the school classes because there could be an explosion.) Belinda once wrote an answer so beautiful that her teacher tried to adopt her and Space Shuttle Girl had to talk to the principal about the teacher’s shitty attitude.
Otto released the pressing on the pedal that makes the car go faster because he was dying from the explosion because Abraham Lincoln discovered irrational numbers and made mad Pythagorus. Otto flew out of his car, and he was dead, and he fell on the grass that was there near where he was had been driving and he landed on it. And it was green grass. A lot of people died in the Civil War because of irrational numbers and then they made a movie about the Dukes in Hazzard because a Nazi Muslim Socialist with cooties robbed the White House and invented a new cabinet position – with his super Nazi Muslim powers (Socialists don’t have super powers) – for his Sommelier and then burned all the white lightning with a machete.
Otto got up on his feet, which were wearing the fancy shoes that also had soles on them, and he walked over to his burning car and blew it out with his mouth. He turned the car back over, with his hands that are for dexterous manipulation of objects (but not his penis, that’s bad) and he climbed back in through the back windshield because it wasn’t there anymore because of Abraham Lincoln. And also because of the Jews probably, but the TV hadn’t told him that yet, so it might not be true until Tuesday.
Space Shuttle Girl cried when Otto told her he died and landed on the grass, which was green. And also not on fire like the blue car. “Otto,” she said. “I am a simple space shuttle girl who only knows how to be from outer space and how to raise a little girl we get to name after the mail is forwarded from my uterus. And also I have a Juris Doctorate.”
“From outer space!” Otto added enthusiastically, with a blue car.
“My only hope now is to sell ideas to people who only have beliefs. And I will have to have a blue car also to get to places to transact this businessing. And then or Belinda by then Lillian after before now will have to become rich with her answering prowess, earning at least fourteen or fifteen dollars. No higher than that though, because of Abraham Lincoln.”
“I can give you my blue car!” Otto said enthusiastically, with a blue car still for now until then. “Also,” he said, “I want Belinda to have my fancy shoes.”
“I’d rather them for Lillian,” Space Shuttle Girl said, “so that I will be crying less. And also will have sold some ideas so we can have cupcakes.”
“I feel.”
“Yes. People do that. And also they call them things. Sometimes it overlaps, mostly it doesn’t. Probably because of Abraham Lincoln. He loved tall hats.”
“I read that in a movie once,” said Otto. “He was also an avid beardist and inventor of basketball. Because of his tall hat and also his tall body, that was shot near its top with a bullet I heard in that book I saw in the window.”
“Yes. Also.”
“I am a very unhappy person after I am dead,” mused Otto. “I don’t think I like it. If I shake the Scrabble board, I might be able to be before after I am dead and resee if I am not unhappy as I am after it. I enjoyed football and riding my bike growing up, though I could not feel mitosis, so it may have been painful in miniature or else like a massage, but without the structure . . . I will throw out the literary critiques and cram all the math back in and I will not mix long division and the Civil War because of my bitchin’ blue car. Also the atriums. But I think we may be safe with the ventricles. Also, I didn’t like that one book written by the guy with the arcane vocabulary and also masking simplicity in a series of phonetic noises where no one knows about cosmology. But I understand that I had played basketball with only three people when we did it in the schoolyard where the sun was in the middle of the ceiling, though not exactly of course. We hurled the basketball at the basketball hoop in attempts both vain and successful at field goals, worth one point less than in the football we didn’t play in the schoolyard because of no uprights. And also no kickers really and Mississippi and cutting the ribbon because of not eleven guys and the guy near the schoolyard had a rake he threw at the mice, but also sometimes at the gridironers and baseballers or even the kids throwing dog shit at each other because it is funny if it’s not happening to you when it happens to someone and they don’t make you smell them because you are dead because your car has no doors so you can’t get out and you hope it explodes because of Abraham Lincoln. So I have an idea.”
“How much does it cost?”
“Dollars and dollars,” Otto said. “But we can also have cupcakes for days.”
“Belinda can stop making money after twelve dollars. Huzzah!” Space Shuttle Girl jumped twelve feet in the air and a dollar fell from her semi-fancy shoes each foot she climbed under her feet in the shoes that were not as fancy as Otto’s, but only because of her clothes that didn’t look stupid. The dollars wafted down to the ground and wondered why the fuck you were still reading this. Holy shit!
Otto ran away, careful not to scuff his fancy shoes.
Lillian skipped home from school, unadopted one day more through sheer wiliness and a deftness at quoting case law. But not in verse, because that could cause an explosion. She hurdled the cars that weren’t blue and lunged over the pavement, leaping as a turtle might. With a paint marker, she added Esperanto translations to street signs, and so her commute was lengthy. She was four feet and several inches as well and she wore clothes that were not stupid, but the way in which they lacked stupidity was divergent from her parents both as blue cars and silver cars. And also red cars and gold cars and black cars and white cars. But not green cars. Or Cadillacs. Unless they are convertibles. But also she had four dollars, and this made her nervous. But not so nervous as quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes in verse. But she also didn’t know who Oliver Wendell Holmes was, so she never spoke in verse because she assumed he must have said “may I have a banana split” at some point. And also other mundane things like “I hate The Scarlet Letter, that book sucks and is boring also”.
Belillian von Scooter Ottoshuttle hated her name, though she loved her parents. And not just because their clothes were largely not stupid, as were her own, just in a different way that has something to do with cars and why the fuck are you still reading this?
A very loud noise hurt Lillian’s ears and when she got home she saw that a space shuttle was landed in front of her house, which was also where her parents both lived and also kept their clothes that weren’t stupid and their shoes that were fancy and partly fancy. She looked in shock, and also she was stunned and unsure of how to react, as her father drop kicked out of the front door and did nine somersaults to the curb and announced, “I traded in my blue car for a space shuttle so your mother can be from outer space again instead of selling ideas that might cause Lincolnian explosions that kill her husband, and also people who don’t have fancy shoes and also who may or may not wear clothes that aren’t not stupid".
The blue car drove up to the house. Chapwood got out and screamed.
And also, The End
Saturday
The Ethical Dilemma of Intentional Chaos
I’m a moron, and this is my wife. She’s frosting a cake with a paper knife. - Frank Zappa
The Nazi medical experiments – even taking into consideration the lack of scientific rigor – have produced data that researchers have considered valuable, and potentially useful in helping mankind. Creating a good from an evil. There has been much debate about whether or not using the data, even if it helps people, is ethical. Even if we condemn the methods by which the data was gained, using it could potentially be seen by some future comic-book-supervillain-type as license to sacrifice some of his fellow human beings – and even condemn himself to the status of villain by history – in order to fulfill some messianic role he envisions for himself (whether or not a reasonable observer would consider that delusional).
I have an erection. That's a good sign. I'm ready to go to trial. Lock and load. - Denny Crane
Computers and cell phones are an inextricable part of modern life. If you live in the industrialized world, you cannot really get by without at least having some access to these, even if you yourself do not own them. In order to affect, in any way, the world where these items are utilized and, in truth, from which much of the world is controlled, directly or indirectly, you must make use of these items. However, the coltan that is used to produce these items comes to us in essentially the same way blood diamonds (and a good deal of gold) comes to us. Is it ok to use these items, helping to rape and murder fellow human beings in Africa, if somehow the items are part of a push to change the very policies that allow and encourage these behaviors? If that/those goal(s) is/are achieved, will it condone the next comic-book-supervillain-type, before the fact, to “advance” mankind by being monstrous to portions of it?
I don't patronize bunny rabbits. - Veronica's Dad
Colonialism never ended. It went from Britain to America, and is now essentially carried out through the policies of organizations like the WTO and the IMF. These organizations, forged in the hubristic certainty of the ontological truths behind Anglophone philosophical traditions, force these “objective” truths down the throats of a variant world of myriad differing and contingent thought traditions. We’ve gone from Enlightenment thinking to Jamesian Pragmatism to some kind of post-Reagan-Revolution ontological certainty. And we’ve wielded it like a brutal club. America is the Utility Monster.
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a Communist.- Hélder Câmara
Which brings us to charity. How good should a person feel about giving to charity if that excess income is predicated on a predatory system? Even if the individual functioning inside of our industrialized society has earned his salary in an insulated manner, say selling home grown food at a farmer’s market, he still operates inside of a system (and inevitably benefits from it) which has predatory sections. None of these can be fully removed from the whole equation. In addition to the externalizing elements from a national standpoint, there are externalizing elements from a class standpoint. If the purchasing habits of consumers in the country seek out the lowest prices, driving them down through competition, then wages in those industries will be driven down, placing other consumers in a position of having less money to put into the economy. Now the entropy is locked inside our own subsystem. So, the externalization goes from even smaller subsystems inside our subsystem to other smaller subsystems inside our subsystem, and we whittle our way down to an eventual aristocracy. In propping up and even to some extent constructing this situation, even if unintentionally, can we really feel as if we have done something moral by giving charity to the very people we have placed in the position of need that necessitates that charity? If we neither support their wages through a willingness to pay a fair price for a good or through any kind of functional social safety net or equitable tax system, are we not engaging in Munchausen by Proxy when we “help” these people out? And as for charity even remotely replacing social welfare, let me quote the following sentiment which seems far more in line with human behavior than that suggested by “volunteerists”.
I'm not that much of a moralist. If I were I would be donating my salary then to school teachers. I admit that. If the man came to me and said, "well, we're gonna levy a tax and we're gonna raise school teachers salaries to $750 a week," I would approve of it and pay the tax like that. - Lenny Bruce
[Dash Dash Dash]
“The Market” is functionally illiterate. - Major General Mortimer Swarthington III *
Unfortunately, you might need to learn Mandarin soon. We ignore the subjective, contingent, era-specific nature of our social and economic behaviors. And China experiments: taking the segments of our thought that they find to have efficacy and discarding the rest, and interweaving their own thoughts. Whatever one would like to say about the human rights violations of China (and rightfully so), we cannot ignore the question of efficacy here. By backing away from stringent ideology, the Chinese have made leaps and bounds. Even if we bracket out the ethical questions, still, instead of seeing this for the success of pragmatism and experimentation it is, we take it as vindication of our superior knowledge of objective truths because China has moved somewhat in our direction.
The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. - Albert Einstein
We have mingled ethics and economics and hammered them together where they did not wish to join. This is particularly problematic in libertarian thinking, where a stringently means-based ethics has been applied to the inherently ends-based study of economics. By manipulating the inevitably induction-derived axioms upon which their philosophy is derived, they write into its origins the ends which they already seek, and they do it through strict accordance with deductive logic. Thusly, they dupe themselves into false beliefs, but false beliefs that are comforting in that their parts fit nicely together. The idea that human thought and understanding might be inelegant cannot be considered, tolerated, or condoned. So, they massage reality in a way that will not take. Their words may follow one to the next, but they cannot separate the origins of their thought from the epistemic approaches they oppose. And this is why a libertarian can say something so naive and schizophrenic as he is against imperialism and for unfettered markets. The latter leads to the former. The former is often used to enforce the latter. Of course, it is at this point that things devolve into logomachy and a series of No True Scotsman arguments.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes. - Obi-Wan Kenobi
Back to efficacy, the viability of the “free market” – to whatever degree it actually has functioned and benefitted us – has always been contingent on palming off the harmful by-products of its implementation. Free markets work inside a subsystem that is able to dump its entropy into another subsystem. Free white men in early America dumped their entropy on slaves and the indigenous populations. After the Reconstruction, it was dumped on the poor and immigrants. Then it was dumped on what are essentially our new stand-ins for slaves, cheap labor in the third world, through globalization. And now we have nowhere left for it to go but to come back to rest on the middle class here in America (and really the first world). Bad news.
The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes. - Aristotle
We’ve worshiped perversions of the concept of freedom for decades (really centuries) to the detriment of democracy. And a liberal democracy (a democracy constrained by a constitution) is the only form of practicable freedom we have thus far formulated in this world. And we spit on it in the name of false liberty over and over again as our world slips into a feudal structure and we scream in the name of “slavery is freedom” that the opposing viewpoints are just that. Accusing the other side of what we ourselves are doing. Unable to separate Orwell’s warnings from the specific philosophy utilized for illustration in his books, we forget that Orwell was himself a socialist. Just one willing to criticize the excesses and problems of his own field of thought.
Can I confess something? I tell you this as an artist, I think you'll understand. Sometimes when I'm driving... on the road at night... I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The... flames rising out of the flowing gasoline. - Christopher Walken
So, the question is, is it ok to keep throwing our hands up in the air saying it’s no one’s fault how the world is because not having any sense of (conscious) economic hierarchy at all is ingrained in our heads as morally superior, even in light of its implementation being plainly destructive and poisonous to human freedom and dignity? The fact is that where we build no hierarchy, one will be built by whatever forces are allowed to. We abdicate our democratic right to self-determination, and therefore we abdicate our right to the only practicable form of freedom. And so our chocolate, our coffee, our sneakers, all kinds of products come to us in ways we have to seek out to learn. And when we do, most of us don’t like it. But we let it go that way and then “vote” with our meager wallets. Why do we allow the behavior to crop up in the first place? Because we allow things to work out with minimal interference. And this is what we get. This is not freedom.
"Baby! Up your butt with a coconut!" I think he was prepared to do it! Except I saw no coconut. He, uh, he had no coconut to my knowledge. - Grimm (Quick Change)
China’s going to take over eventually because it is unlikely we will make the adaptive changes necessary to remain relevant (well, at least as relevant) in the world. And they will not make things better, only move us forward again (unless, as is always possible, we are headed for the last stop for mankind). The irony that a type of global-scale nation-based Social Darwinism will likely destroy the lingering, perverted vestiges of the more classically understood concept of Social Darwinism would be delicious if it weren’t galactically tragic.
Pride comes before a fall. Holy Hell, does it!
Who knows what will happen? We look at the past, the present, and we conjecture. Who knows?
The choice is for us to say
Completely change or fade away. - Blues Traveller
* Ok, I made that one up.
Tuesday
Made For (Cable) TV Movies
Here's a list of ideas for movies I'm going to pitch to cable TV.
- Wild Turkeys Fly South
- The Canadian Nickel
- Broken Rickshaws
- Do They Make Donuts in Vermont?
- The Toilet Bible
- Destiny Kills My Dog
- Cookies for Cameron
- Only Heroes Bake Pies
- The Reading Lamp
- Earthquake at the North Pole
- The Baby That Fell from the Sky
- Peas, Carrots, and Deception
- God Helps Those Who Fill out the Proper Paperwork
- The Flat Tire
- Hello, My Name is Love
- The Sofa Miracle
- Rumple Phil Quinn
- Grandma's Hat
- The Gift Pelican
- Hurricane Dad
- The Ice-Creamist
- Vow of the Shoemaker
- A Jaywalking in a Small Town
- Governor Mom
- Mail Order Kismet
- Jackie Collins Presents: Finnegans Wake
Thursday
I Believe in Unicorns
With great power comes great responsibility - Ben ParkerUnicorns!
They’re dangerous. They carry disease and they hold anti-American values, like joules, and I read on the internet that they’re planning to overthrow the government and impose pagan law. This threat must be stopped no matter if it costs trillions of dollars.
Freedom of speech is a right. Rights exist in relation to duties. Your right to the fruits of your labor imposes upon me a duty not to steal from you. Your right to live means I have a duty not to kill you. Your right to privacy means that the government has a duty not to spy on you. These rights tell other people they cannot do certain things. They dictate behavior. (Sorry, but they do.)
But your right to free speech is a little different. It merely requires that you are allowed to believe what you choose to and that you can express those beliefs without the government interfering. The duty it imposes is on the government not to stop you, not to incarcerate you. That is all. There is no obligation to treat it as important, correct, or anything but the crazed utterances of a free individual. Neither the government nor I (really no one) has the responsibility to accept your beliefs, nurture them, or even not to laugh at them. This is different than the rights mentioned above. I have to respect your right to your possessions and not interfere. I do not have to respect your beliefs and can interfere by arguing with you. I am under no obligation to leave you alone to believe what you believe. I can try to change your mind. In fact, I'd say I have the duty where the truth is being denied or ignored. I’m not sure people really feel that under the surface, however.
I would like to suggest that each of us has a duty to freedom and posterity to not be actively full of shit. All the Howard W. Campbell, Jr.s out there create a snowball effect over time, and cumulatively threaten freedom and democracy. Reality doesn’t care about our fever dreams. If, for example, global warming is as grave a threat as some of the more severe predictions (becoming more and more mainstream), then compiling a narrative to the contrary creates a situation where the harsh physical realities to come will very likely dissolve any concept of freedom or democracy. Raw power will become the instrument of resource disbursement, and therefore the primary (if not sole) determiner of survival. The more likely scenario, however, is that other places more engaged with this reality will leave us behind economically as the global economy adjusts to these changes and we cling with religious fervor to behaviors that will no longer garner us even a tiny share of the world’s wealth. And there is also the possibility that groups from the parts of the world where the effects of global warming are most severe today will enact violence against the Unites States in retaliation. These subservient and/or defensive positions can only strain the ability of our government to concern itself with the rights of its people . . . which is its primary purpose for existence.
In short, the abuse of free speech will ultimately lead to its loss. Humans, first and foremost, are survivors. If that survival requires acquiescence to a powerful autocracy or oligarchy and the surrender of rights, it will happen. “Give me liberty or give me death” is the pampered tough guy talk of someone who has never feared starvation, in the face of mere meddling with local affairs. Starving people want food, not the right to vote.
What’s abuse of free speech? I’m a free speech absolutist. I even defend Fred Phelps right to be the biggest douche bag on Earth. Abuse is knowingly fostering plainly false information. Obviously, this is tricky, since the entire point of free speech is to take into account the limitations of human knowledge, particularly a given individual’s. And I suggest no action taken to prevent it other than more speech. Appeal to people. My point is that if you put forward the notion that unicorns are a threat, and that becomes a widely held “truth”, then the behaviors of society, its citizens, and its government will be to take actions requisite to the deadly unicorn threat. If we proactively divorce ourselves from reality, reality will kick our fuckin’ asses when we’re looking the other way – you know, at the unicorns.
So, I suggest that each of us has a duty to at the very least believe what we spew out into the world. Words do have power. Otherwise advertising and propaganda (is there a difference?) would have no effect on us. I’d suggest (but do not expect) that people take upon themselves a duty to vet their information and beliefs constantly. In all the often empty rhetoric about individual responsibility, let me suggest that this also goes to how we use our freedom of speech. If enough of us abuse it enough of the time, we’ll be a nation of dullards ill-equipped to take on reality and ripe for take over and domination.
Free speech + intellectual indolence = disaster
Oh fuck! Unicorn.
DUCK!
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