On the Specificity of Robert Ludlum

For a man, sleeping with a woman is satisfying. But sleeping with a beautiful woman is even more satisfying. Most satisfying of all, however, is killing a man in Marseille after he makes you a passport, then stealing a boat, kidnapping a tourist, later getting shot while saving her life, and sleeping with that beautiful woman.

Resolutions

A new year is a beautiful thing, like a new friend with a new face. I am not sure if it is really good to be alive because I am getting older and my face looks worse than it did last year and many of the things I tried to accomplish this year turned out not to work. I also drink too much and I destroyed a perfectly good relationship because I don’t like being criticized. But so many people tell me that it is good to be alive and they have convinced me that I should resolve to think less about myself. You should think more about the world and less about yourself, they say. It is nice to have friends who are happy to be alive, who tell you that you should be happy because there is more to the world than just your own old face and your own crippling shame from whence you know not. I am happy to have old friends, but I resolve also to have new thoughts which will be like new friends with new faces.

Home

He realized that it was time to go. When he was at home the hours and days and weeks drifted away. He spent all day doing he remembered not what. It would exhaust him and at night he would find out who was where and go out drinking, and stay out late, until four or five in the morning, until he was sober again, and he could make the long drive home. He loved being home; he imagined he was suffering a terminal disease. The disease made everything easier because there was no hope. It was the kind of suffering that he knew he would long for again the moment it came to an end, like an orgasm. He knew it had to end, which made the suffering stop, but then he wouldn’t leave, which made the suffering go on.

John Hanson's Doubles

John Hanson liked to think of himself as doubled. When he had been a boy at the Minaki lodge he and his brother played a videogame called Kung Fu, in which two fighters moves across a two dimensional plane and produce sudden, deadly kicks or punches, as well as acrobatic leaps, which had to be expertly timed by moving two joysticks in different combinations. John thought endlessly about the game when he wasn’t playing it: pulling the joysticks apart made the fighter do a spinning roundhouse, tapping the left up and the right down then the left down and the right up did a flipping topspin kick. The moves in Kung Fu defined gravity and all logic. What thrilled him equally was the silence before the first blow, as the two warriors advanced and retreated, jumped forward or over their opponents, waiting for the right moment to strike. The matches were often over with only one move, which is why it had to be perfectly executed. Much preparation and deliberation were required. Executing a blow and failing to kill one’s opponent outright opened oneself up for an easy loss. The fact that there were two joysticks instead of the regular joystick and two buttons like most other games made him feel like he was playing two games at once, and the fact that the movements had to be combined in secret (and to his mind, infinite) ways meant that there was a mystic exponential growth of sophistication and technique involved in the doubling of anything. At night he would imagine what incredible spectacles he could make if he had another version of himself. He would perform incredible shows on stage, where he and his double would move in perfect synchronization, speak at exactly the same time, and then begin a battle to the death, in which almost an hour of silence would be concluded with one, deadly blow. Then it occurred to John that these spectacles would be dangerous, for if he was still in synchronization with his double, were he not able to control his two selves in different ways, he would be in danger of killing both versions of himself outright, meaning that there would be no more John Hanson at all. This fear coincided nicely with early puberty, when he began to think more of sex than of kung fu. He decided that a double of himself would also be ideal for giving and receiving sexual pleasure. In the act of love no one dies. But it would be a controversial thing to put on stage.

New Man

He woke up one morning feeling like a new man. People had described this feeling to him before, that feeling as if there was nothing in the world he could not do. He had no idea what he was going to do, or what it meant, or what he wanted in life. He didn’t really want to do anything, he was happy, but he felt as though if there was something he wanted to do, nothing could stop him from doing it.

Pebble and Clod

He was mysterious to her. It was partly because he earned over half a million a year and she was sure that no one could earn that much without having a mysterious and exciting job full of conflict and expensive lunches and beautiful secretaries. When he came to pick her up after a long day at work he smelled good and was clean and even the Land Rover always looked like it can just come from the car wash. She was glad that she was young and looked good because that’s what she had going for her. He had money and she was beautiful, she could put on blue jeans and an old T-shirt and her skin would just glow. He worshipped every part of her. She reminded him of the kinds of women he had wanted as a child, like the girls on his older sister’s field hockey team, young and strong and sweaty and stronger than the boys, girls who would never love him unless he drove a beautiful car one day and showered them with luxury. In fact, he was a heart surgeon, which required hours and hours of painstaking and difficult work, 6am mornings, 30 minute lunches, stress pills and two personal trailers, caffeine pills or Adderall to work, and valium to sleep. It was worth it. He had two hours of happiness a day. Ten minutes of that was when the nurses looked at him in admiration after a difficult operation, or when a patient thanked him for saving his life. The other hour and fifty minutes was time spent with her each night, when he picked her up, and she kissed him and over an expensive meal complained about her dad’s business and her difficult sister, then the thirty minutes of lovemaking they had in his apartment on the thirtieth floor the size of two tennis courts with windows for walls. He was always asleep by 1045pm, and she stayed up until 1am, watching old movies, drinking brandy, and chatting with brother in LA on the phone.

A girl and a bear

I remember her. She was a bit of a bitch back then but I heard she’s a lot nicer now. She lost her looks, some acne scarring or whatever, and then she started to care about people. That’s a good thing. It makes her a lot more attractive in my book. I think of her now with a baby bear, you know, pulling some fishing line out of its lungs, making sure the bear is OK and making the bear feel comfortable. In fact, to be honest, I like to think of her and I and that baby bear getting it on together in the woods. I mean, the bear is just watching: her and I are the ones getting it on. I’m kissing her and she’s got her hands all over me and the bear is just watching. The bear doesn’t leave because she pulled the fishing line out of its lungs, and the two of them are, like, best friends. Which means that if I do get with her I have to be aware that I’m getting with the bear – I mean, metaphorically – that the bear and her are a package. Anyway, I’m going to give her a call.

Cancer

She never thought cancer would change her life. It didn’t in any of the ways she would have expected. She didn’t find that she loved her husband or her kids more; she didn’t realize that life was short and to take better care of her parents; she didn’t feel a sense of solidarity with others suffering from cancer or others who had been through the same radiation treatments as her. Rather, she discovered an interest in pornographic literature and bowling. The former because she befriended and old woman there who had written many famous pornographic novels and had no shame about dying and would feel herself up at night while talking dirty. The latter because the whole time she was in the cancer ward she just wanted to buy a machine gun and kill people and run away and die somewhere and she told herself that if she ever got out of this fucking mess and got another chance to live she would go bowling and sleep with a bowler because bowlers, she always thought, were happy and uncomplicated and didn’t own machine guns and would appreciate pornographic literature.

Guilty Beauty

Oh this is exhausting, she said. Everywhere we go the air is clean and it is beautiful all around me. I can’t think about work, and then I only begin to resent you for dragging me here and showing me what I’ve been missing. Even when they later make love by the fire, and went swimming off the dock naked and felt it all around them, and looked up at the Milky Way on their back, she said, – No, this is ridiculous. The next day he took her out in a boat and they climbed up a shelf of rock and saw an elk in the bushes and then a startled garter snake slithered and then a bald eagle soared by, and she said, – You’ve got to be kidding me. I want to go home. This is just distracting and depressing. – Give me one more night, he told her. And that night he went out and bought a twelve pack of Lucky Lager and he went over to his friend’s house and bought a gram of cocaine and a quarter ounce of pot. It rained that night and they stayed in and played gin rummy with a deck missing a card and drank five Luckies each. He made rocks of crack from the cocaine by heating it up with baking soda and they smoked those and lots of pot and then went out for a walk in the rain. Her head felt light and buzzing and everything seemed terrifying and dangerous, and they ate pizzas from the oven and laughed talked about popular movies and watched a classic porn film called Sensations and fucked twice. – So this is what you do, she said, and he nodded. He knew she meant that this is what a person does in Canada to make that guilty beauty go away. – But you don’t want to stay here more than a few weeks.

That girl

I remember that girl. I used to call her and try to get her to come out. I knew when she was out and if she smoked enough pot she would be happy and as long as I said the right thing she would sleep with me. And sometimes she would even look over at me and say my name like she was happy to be with me. I think I really loved that girl. When I hear her voice now I can’t take it: I still love that girl.

Ask Nice

– Everyone is here, her mom tells her. Your uncle John is back from Portland. Your aunt Amy and your uncle Derek and your cousin Sarah from Seattle are here. Even the puppy is ready. Come into the living room. We’re trying to take a group picture. – No, she says. I am playing Lego. – It really is unfair, her mom says. – It’s OK, her father says. – No, she says. I am just fed up. She acts like a brat whenever the whole family is around. – It’s really OK, her dad says. But he knows she’s had a bit of white wine, and she’s exhausted, and she is worried that the whole family is comparing the way she raises her daughter to the way aunt Amy raises her daughter. – I’ll talk to her, her dad says. – Oh relax mommy, she says. I was only trying to get you to ask nice.

The heater

She stands by the heater. She turns it on. – I want to stand here, mommy. – You can, her mom says. I know you’re cold. – I’m cold. – Yes. But you have to brush your teeth. She doesn’t want to brush her teeth. She wants to go to bed. She says nothing. But then, after a moment, she turns the heater off. And then she gets up off the warm pillow and walks to the cold bathroom, where there is an electric toothbrush, which she can feel spin on her gums.

Cologne

His father called him at the office. He was not used to hearing his father’s voice, especially at the office. – Dad. I only have a few minutes. What is it? – Your mother is sick, his father said. – I know she’s sick, he said. I know that. What do you mean? – Well I wanted you to know, his father said. – What is it? I know mom is sick. I really have just a few minutes. I can call you back. – No, you can’t call me back, his father said. Do you remember how you told me once that I was a weak father? – Oh God, his son said. I said a lot of things back then. I was angry. Do we have to do this now? – Do you think I’m a weak father? – Weak how? His son said. Of course not. I don’t think you’re weak. I said it a long time ago. I really can’t talk now. – Just tell me, his father said. I can’t talk later either. – What do you mean? Why? – I’m going on a trip. It doesn’t matter. – Where? – Just tell me. – You tell me. – You said you couldn’t talk now. – Tell me where. – I’m going to Cologne. – Cologne? In France? – No. It’s in Germany. – Why? His son barked, almost exasperated. There was a secretary making motions to him through a glass door. – I’ve always wanted to see Cologne. – There’s nothing to see in Cologne, his son snapped. He was surprised that he had an opinion about Cologne. Why are you calling me now, at the worst time, and telling me about mom, and asking me things, and taking a trip? – There’s no better time to take a trip, his father responded. We’ll talk later. Go to your meeting. I love you. And then his father was gone.

Liquid End

The river dries up, Coke is drunk up, and true love dies.

Authority and Urine

– To be a man is a very complex thing, their boss said. – I’ll show you. He took out his penis, began to wag it back and forth at everyone in the conference room. – Women can’t do that! he said. – That’s your fist lesson. He began to urinate on the desk. – Women urinate behind them. It leaks all over the place! Many of the fellows in the firm jumped up, aware of their boss’s eccentricities. This was just one of his games, they told themselves, which had nothing to do with sex at all. But the clerks did nothing. The urine made its way toward them; it leaked onto their papers and into their laps.

Bank Horse

You should never look a gift horse in the mouth. But if a bank gives you a horse, you should cut out its liver and look for spots. (The Romans did this to verify that a sacrifice was not polluted.)

Mode de vie

There are many oppressive things about living in wealthy European countries than can only be recognized by leaving them.

Starbucks

Starbucks recently created a goat cheese blend of coffee. Goat cheese is added to the beans as they are being roasted. Now we can have a cup of coffee that tastes like goat cheese.

The second house

My wife told me one day after what I thought was a lovely vacation that she was feeling “confused” and speaking to her “inner self” and used a whole pile of confusing words learned from self-help books and popular songs and a meditation cult she had recently joined. I became upset, and told her that she was just confused, and that she needed to see a psychiatrist. She refused. I told her that if she wouldn’t see a psychiatrist I would construct a second house for her, one that would look just like this one, and have all the same things inside, but it would be for her alone. She asked me why I didn’t just go away for a while. I told her that I always wanted to try the experiment anyway. She said that it was an idiotic idea, but that she would try it for a week. She went on a meditation retreat to the Bahamas while I constructed the house. She came to her home and tried it for a week. When the week was up, she rang the doorbell to my house. She said that she was just sitting there (pointing to my kitchen table) thinking about how stupid this idea of mine was to build a second house. After one week, she had also realized that it was the things in our life rather than me that had made her want to end the relationship. I was ecstatic, and told her that she should come back home and we would build a new house. But she said that being without me in the new house had made her feel like I was also the problem. She had tried so many times to speak to me and I just refused to respond. Se concluded by saying that she was just dropping by to collect some of her things, and then abruptly left my house.

Lines spoken by Dolph Lundgren

Well your team sucks. You will lose. Hell sucked! We are back! If he dies, he dies. If you’re guilty, you’re dead. I must break you. All men are killers; he just made me a good one. To the end. Just out of bullets. He is no human; he is a piece of iron. Does your mouth have an off switch? I turned away from Jesus.

Double Penetration

Somewhere today in the free world there is a woman asserting her right to be paid the same wages as a man at the workplace and demanding that more women be hired into positions like hers. Somewhere else there is a woman demanding paid maternity leave for a whole year. And still, somewhere else there is a woman doing both at the same time, which is known, at least to some feminists, as a “double penetration.”

Private Joke

A novelist once took up a creative writing post at a small but revered American college after sales of his second book did much more poorly than the first, though a handful of critics declared it to be a more accomplished work of art. Sometimes during class, he would single out one student, take up his or her story and read the first two paragraphs aloud, then stop abruptly and declare, “This may well be a work of genius, but I never trust myself. I’ll take it to my second reader and she what she thinks.” That night, at home, he would put the story before the face of his one-year-old daughter, who would look absently at the sheets of paper, perhaps even clutch them, then abandon them and get back to something more interesting, like pressing the buttons on the cordless telephone. The next day in class the author would announce that his second reader had rejected the story, and that because she knew more about this kind of writing than he did, he would defer to her opinion. A few months later, in an interview published online alongside the first few chapters of his new work in progress, the author related this little joke that he said served to expel “the myth of genius.” Some of his former students read the interview and complained to the dean, who then called the author into his office and dismissed him. As the dean later explained it, he knew full well that the author thought that the “teaching” of writing was impossible, and expected him to teach in a way that reflected that. But he found fault in the fact that the author chose to keep his joke private, and hence had not taught anything at all.

Best Bet

Before the invention of a special valve, the most popular way to kill oneself in London before 1960 was to stick one’s head in the gas stove and turn it on. Before adding one foot to the railing on the Golden Gate Bridge in 1983, it was the most popular suicide destination in the world. With these simple technologies, man has proved time and time again that he is the best at preventing himself from getting the better of himself.

It has been said

The wisest Chinese man in the world wasn’t even Chinese.

Mangoes

There is a place on the other side of the world where people eat mangoes, and they imagine they are eating apples, the kinds of apples we can eat whenever we want.

On Hope

There was an important lecture at the College de France by an eminent philosopher, though his ideas and methods had fallen out of favor in the past few years, called, enigmatically, “On Hope.” On the day when the lecture was supposed to take place, a letter went out and notices were put up that the lecture would be postponed for an indefinite amount of time. Many thought it was a joke, and that there was no lecture at all, that the postponement itself “was” the lecture. But after a few weeks, a notice went out stating that the lecture had been rescheduled for the following week. This time only a few showed up, the rest assuming that another notice of postponement would arrive at the eleventh hour, so to speak, and the performance of deferred “On Hope” continue. But the philosopher was indeed there, and not perceiving the way his lecture was received, was so depressed by the meager turnout that he decided to postpone his own lecture indefinitely, and only spoke a few words about the personal tragedies that had afflicted his life in the past years, which had not only postponed the lecture scheduled for the previous month but had caused his silence over the last few years, which undoubtedly, he concluded, is why he has fallen into such unpopularity by the academy.

A vague sort of prison

Here is your bed, the warden said to the criminal. And this will probably be your bed for quite some time. – May I ask a question, said the criminal. – I suppose it’s up to you to know the answer to that question, the warden said. – Why are there no chains on this bed, the criminal asked. Why are there no locks on these doors? Why are there no walls surrounding this prison? – I don’t think there is any need, the warden said. Nothing keeps a criminal here but that he made a kind of confession, the kind of which you more or less made, and by doing so, he commits himself to a half-hearted acceptance to this prison, where no chains are necessary. – But what is to stop a person from escaping? – The criminal cannot escape his imprisonment here any more than I can escape my role as warden, the warden said, though without much conviction in what he said. Seeing the prisoner looked confused, the warden reluctantly added, - You see, this is a vague sort of prison. You were never sure what crime you committed, and neither are we. All you see is that the punishment matches the crime. I do not know whether you can escape, but I know that no one has ever left this prison. – Thank you, the criminal said, and sat on the bed though he really had no desire to. – Cheer up, the warden said, having nowhere else to do, but standing in the doorway as though leaving all the same. There are lots of women here.

Neither Misery nor Company

It was only when she discovered he had cheated on her for almost two years, and he finally admitted that he had never forgiven her for aborting his child, and they went back and forth saying the most hurtful things to one another, that he saw her again as though for the first time, and thought, What a beautiful woman that is, so unknown to me, and what a perfect wife she would make, and she thought, What a strange man he is, hardly a man I could ever imagine myself loving, and yet I know I will think about him all night tonight and all day tomorrow.

What I heard

I was surprised when she told everyone there that she had killed herself. It must have been a turn of phrase.

One Death

She clutched her mother’s hand. Her mother said that she was dying and that she was thirsty. She brought her mother a glass of water and said that she (her mother) was old but maybe she wasn’t dying just yet. Her mother told her daughter that she was going to die any moment and that they should say their goodbyes now. Her daughter didn’t know what to say, so she asked her mother to begin by saying goodbye. Her mother told her daughter that she had lived a long life and that she had had a happy life and that she (her daughter) was always been her favorite. They laughed and her daughter told her mother to be serious, but half-seriously. Her mother asked her daughter what she (her daughter, or anyone) says when saying goodbye. Her daughter told her mother that she (her daughter) usually just says something like, “I will see you later.” Her mother said that that doesn’t apply in this case, because death is final and yet at the same time she (her mother) is not really going anywhere. Her daughter said that perhaps it could be shortened to something like, “I will see you.” Her mother said that that still implied something like, “I will see you later,” and that a dying person was better off saying something like, “I will” They laughed at this and she (her daughter) said, “I will what?” Her mother said that she didn’t know, maybe she meant something like, “I will die.” Her daughter said that that was stupid: no one tells a person they will die as a form of saying goodbye. “That’s a way to end goodbyes,” she continued. “Yes,” her mother said. “Maybe one should just say, ‘I.’” Her daughter asked her mother what “I” meant in that sense. Her mother said that a person should say “I” as much as they can before they die in order to understand who they have been and what they are about to lose. “It’s an identity that will no longer be,” she (her mother) said. Her daughter agreed that this was true but that that was hardly a way of saying goodbye, but rather that was more of a philosophical point. She (her mother) told her daughter that she was right, that death had very little to do with saying goodbye, and that – if anything – death was more like saying hello. “Hello to whom?” Her daughter asked. “Hello to one’s self,” her mother said. “Or ‘oneself’” her daughter said. Her mother didn’t understand that. But then her mother (she)

Sleep

You sleep, you sleep, you sleep. You dream of sleep. You sleep and sleep in your sleep.

I own a gun

I own a big gun.

Spam Generating Spam

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Let Me Die

The writer of historical fiction does not just turn history into fiction, for historians already do that. The writer of historical fiction turns the history of fiction into fiction.

Medieval Date

During a blind date I met a woman at an Irish bar and we drank a lot of beer. She was tall and loud. I was lonely. We went to her apartment and had awkward sex. She was very sweaty and kept choking me. Her sweat fell down on my face and she screamed and screamed. Then she fell asleep. I went to the bathroom to clean up. I was going to sneak out, but I found some prescription drugs that I had heard were a good ride. I took four pills and lay back on her bed. An hour later the bedroom was filled with light and a golden chain covered with precious gems descended from the ceiling. Then I heard a kind of yawning sound from the floor. A putrid stench filled the room. Corpses with rotting flesh hanging from them were reaching up to the golden chain. They were in extreme pain. But their arms were always too short. The woman then shot up like a bolt in bed. She was looking right at me. The vision disappeared. I asked her if she saw that. She nodded. I asked her what it meant. – First you must find the golden crown located on the isle of Abundance to the west of this land, she said. There are treacherous narrows through which you must pass. A tricky lion guards the door of the castle. Then you must fight a terrible dragon. The crown is in the belly of that dragon. When you return the golden crown to me, I will then tell you the significance of the golden chain and the grave that opened up and the corpses of the dead who could not reach the golden chain. Well, how could I say no? She was certainly the most interesting woman I had dated.

Alarm

Don’t be alarmed, but I love you, I said. We were in a speeding car. That was a bad year.

Famously Rude

A very famous man was sitting in a room at a party and absolutely no one was talking to him. I introduced myself. He shook my hand and sneered at me. – I’m James, I told him. – I’ve never heard of you, he replied. – Well why would you? I replied. And that’s a strange way to respond to an introduction. – You bore me, he said. – I wasn’t trying to entertain you, I said. I only wanted to meet you. He stood up abruptly. – This seat is uncomfortable, he said, a look of annoyance on his face. – Well, you’re certainly a lot of fun to talk to, I said. I see what makes you so popular. I was hoping that some humor might cheer him up and get him to stop acting like a prick. He smiled and opened his mouth as though about to say something clever. Then he unzipped his pants. The room went quiet. He began urinating on my shoes. I was so shocked I just stood there, until I felt his urine seeping through my Converse sneakers. Everyone in the room stared, waiting for my reaction. – You’re incredibly rude, famous or not, I finally said, and walked upstairs to wash my shoes and socks in the bathtub. Later, the hostess knocked on the door. She apologized to me for his behavior and then handed me a sealed envelope. – He wanted me to tell you to call him, sometime. He said that you were the only person who talked to him all night and that he liked you. Confused, I opened the envelope. It was a blank business card with nothing but the words “YOU BORE ME” written on it in a ballpoint pen. I stomped downstairs, hoping to catch him as he was leaving. But he had not left. He was sitting in the same hard-backed chair, talking to no one, waiting for me. He stood up, and unzipped his pants. The room went quiet. I unzipped my pants. – It’s about time you started to play by my rules, he said.

The Lover's Complaint

I loved a man once. He used to be in the military. One day he went bonkers when he thought I was looking at another man. He killed my dog and then stabbed me right outside my mother’s house. He’s in prison now, making dangerous connections. Every week he sends me a letter in which he says he’s going to kill me because I am a whore. He gets out in three weeks. The police won’t help me because when I was seventeen I was arrested for prostitution. Oh love! What labor it is to lose the thing we had not; what witchcraft lies in the orb of a woman’s particular tear; etc. etc.

Allegory of Scientology

On a bridge leading to a castle covered in snow I met a man who introduced himself as a Scientologist. – You certainly don’t look like a Scientologist, I told him. He was wrapped in thick furs, and had a weather-beaten face. – This is the Castle of Hope, he said, drawing a thin piece of wire from his coat. If you try to go on, I will slip this wire around your neck and strangle you. – Well then I’ll leave, I told him. – No, he said. If you turn around and leave I have been instructed to do the same thing. – So what am I to do? I asked. – That’s your choice, he said. It was hardly a choice at all, I thought, until I hit upon a simple solution. I must walk backwards, always keeping my eyes on the man. I stepped back, cautiously at first, then growing more and more confident as his eyes that returned my gaze began to disappear in the fog. Then he and the castle had disappeared, and I was on my way again. But why did I not think to step around him, and walk backwards towards the Castle of Hope?

Child Photography

A man at a party was once introduced to me as a world-famous photographer. He was handsome, in his mid-forties, with long dark hair. Later in the evening, I was sitting with him beside a roaring fire. I asked if I could see some of his work. He shrugged his shoulders like he really couldn’t be bothered, but then reached behind him and pulled out a giant black binder, handing it to me. I opened it and found giant glossy photos of a young girl, who couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve, sleeping half-naked on a bunk bed. The covers had been pulled off and she wore only a pair of panties. In another picture, the girl had rolled over, and her panties had been pulled down. Another picture was a close up shot, with a flash, of her genitals. I snapped the album shut. The artist was smoking a cigarette now, his eyes fixed to mine. – This is child pornography, I said. – Yes, he said, nodding intently. That is one of the interpretations. Yes.

Spleen

There was once a great movement to overcome the “curse of Platonism” on the imagination. Plato made us believe in beauty, love, and the soul: abstract essences that originated in a higher power. So when we banished God as an impotent idea we also impoverished our world. We lost beauty, love, and the soul, because our language still adhered to these abstractions. Today, however, we suspect that this was a misreading of Plato. Perhaps Plato had discovered that to be before an object of one’s true love, or to stand before something really beautiful, is a crushingly banal experience. To a loved one we utter inanities, and feel as moved by a few nice words as we do before the Venus de Milo. A feeling of universal togetherness and immortality occur naturally after a half bottle of wine and watching the sun set over a lake. These are GOOD things, thought Plato, and enslave us to The Good, the general, the banal, the ethereal sky where there must exist perfect triangles and blue flowers. It is not a matter, therefore, to override any curse, but to admit the good as good and reject it. There is no shame in pursuing something less than good, for it bears all the specificity of spleen. 

The Abstract Man

I know an abstract man. He often talks of love, the soul, beauty, and the completion of the spirit. In his darkest moments he speaks of the void. I asked him once, as he was suffering what appeared to be a breakdown in my kitchen, What is the void, exactly? Why do you blame the void when it seems clear that’s you’re upset over a very specific set of circumstances? Namely, the woman you loved but left for rather arbitrary reasons (you were not sure if you loved her) started sleeping with someone else and is really happy? He looked at me, shook his head, profoundly disappointed. – We are born and we die but in between we struggle to make sense of a few scraps of life, he said, in a booming voice. – Surely one must live specifically before one is able to paint the world with generalities, I responded. I should have phrased it differently. He all but screamed, and said that I had clearly never known the void, and that I had no soul. He left my house abruptly, smashing awkwardly against the doorframe on his way out. He was right, perhaps. But my real error was to think that one needs to have lived first to become abstract. That’s not true. We are born into abstraction, die in abstraction, and in the middle only a few see strange fragments, like the mole between two fingers, a new color of grass, or a Nokia cell phone.

The Clouds

When things finally became the way I had waited so long for them to become, I stared out at the blue sky watching clouds pass, waiting for the feeling of nothing to pass.

Completion

The screenwriter has come to the end. He has read it over it twenty times. His friends have read it. His family has read it. The agents have read it. The managers. Four producers. Ten investors. Three directors. Twenty actors. The revisions have been made. The pages are locked. The script is printed. He has no need for a copy, but he has made one anyway. It is years from what it will be, but his work is over.

The Great Wall

The man who first thought of the Great Wall of China never got any credit. He imagined a wall bigger and longer than any wall in the world. He imagined it dividing China. But he was hundreds of years too early, and he lived in a place and time when no one cared and there was no need for a Great Wall. He died unhappily, wishing he could have lived long enough for someone else to have thought of the idea, and the building to begin. He imagined himself showing up on the building site, and showing his drawings as proof that he had been the first to think of it. He never considered the idea that they might have laughed at him not because they didn't believe him, but because it doesn’t matter.

The Pink Rose

I gave her a pink rose. She smiled and thanked me and put the rose to her nose and smelled the rose. It must have smelled good, because she opened her mouth as though to smell through her mouth as well. My mother always told me that I shouldn’t make too many funny faces in the mirror or my face would get trapped in a funny face and I would never be able to change it and I would ruin my life. But I never thought it could happen to her. She smelled and smelled and her mouth opened wider and wider. She plunged her nose into the rose and her tongue came out as though to taste the air around it. I wanted to talk to her. But her mouth was open so wide she could have fit the rose into her mouth and swallowed it. And I waited for her mouth to close and her to remember that I was there, and that a rose is just a rose. But her eyes became red and a tear fell from one of them and rolled down her cheek. And then finally she looked at me, her face frozen and open wide, and she said, I canah claha hmy hauch. I canah claugh ha haugh.

Lost Space-Time

John Hanson’s most prized daily experience was discovering a secret pocket of space-time, which to him meant moments when he was doing something boring and then felt inspired to stop and sit down in the corner of the room or at a table in the mall and scribble some ideas on a napkin, or even just stare out and see the world as though for the first time. The ideas were usually bad ideas, and he usually thought more about himself than he did about the things he was looking at, but that didn’t matter. Space-time made John’s daily existence into a field of endless possibilities, a mine field of alternate lives. The idea of a negative version of space-time, however, began to develop in John’s mind, like an evil twin that wants to destroy everything beautiful. John called this, rather imaginatively, LOST SPACE-TIME. Lost space-time was the sudden experience of panic that he was supposed to be somewhere else doing something else, and that he was already very late. During moments of lost space-time John heard people shouting at him, like the voices of his old schoolteachers. But what made lost space-time especially frustrating was that John could never remember what it was he was supposed to do. Naturally, the two ideas began to merge. John began developing the terror, mostly when he was trying to get to sleep, that whenever he would discover a new pocket of space-time that it would also bring with it a simultaneous feeling of lost space-time, as if the moment a pocket of space-time would open up it would open up into the void of loss and an impossible missed obligation. Part of this merging was the way John named it. Had John called lost space-time anything else it might not have invaded on his space-time. John found the only way to combat this dilemma was to long for lost space-time, to make appointments and obligations and not record them, so that his day would be filled with fear of missing appointments. John hoped that lost space-time would open up a new pocket of space-time. In those days John Hanson wasn’t working.

Booked

I love a woman. I say goodbye to her and tell her I love her. On the train to work, she is there. I ask her what she is doing on the train, since she usually stays home during the day. She tells me she doesn’t know what I am talking about. I love this woman. I tell her to stop following me, and touch her arm. She gives me her number, and tells me that she is going to a party tomorrow. When I go to the office she is there. I tell her I love her again, and she immediately complains that I didn’t call her last night. I promise to come visit her that night. During my lunch break, I go to get a sandwich and she is there, working behind the counter. I tell her I love her and that I see her everywhere and that I would like a big sandwich. She laughs, and I give her twenty dollars and tell her to meet me for a drink after work. She agrees. Back in the office she is there again. She has just started work part-time to pay off her student loans. I tell her to drop by my office in an hour, because I used to work for a bank and know a way to defer the interest charges. I’ll see her in an hour, then after work for a drink, then when I get home, then later that night, and again tomorrow night at a party.

Audit

She came home and found him at the table with the tax files open. She asked him what he was doing. He told her that he was doing his taxes. She said that it was too late in the year to be doing his taxes. Or too early. He told her that there was an audit. She asked him why he was being audited. He told her that he had started a phony charity in connection to his other legitimate charity in order to funnel off some of his capital gains made from short-selling last year and that he had been paying himself a monthly salary of ten thousand dollars a month as overseer of the charity. She asked him what the charity was for. He told her that it was for women’s rights. She asked him why he had never told him about this. He told her for obvious reasons. She asked him why he was telling her now. After all, he could easily have kept the audit a secret. But instead he’s got their tax files spread all over the dining room table. He told her that his lawyer had said she had better know, because he had started the company under her name, and that in fact she was the one who was being audited.

Parallel Dogs

He told her that the dog was dead. She was very upset and said that the dog couldn’t be dead, because she could still hear it barking in the backyard. They went to the back door but the dog wasn't there. He told her that the dog can live on in her imagination, but that it isn’t alive in reality anymore. She asked him if the dog was alive in heaven. He told her that if there was heaven then the dog was there, still barking in the backyard. She opened the door, saying that she wanted to let the dog in then because it was cold outside. He told her that it wasn’t cold in heaven, but she got upset and said that the dog was cold, because if there was a backyard just like this one in heaven then it could also be cold in heaven. She called out to the dog. He told her that if the dog was in heaven then it couldn’t also be here on earth. She started to cry and said that maybe this was hell because the dog was dead here and it was in the cold on earth and they couldn’t help it. He shut the door and said that this was not hell, because dogs don’t go to hell and so the dog couldn’t have died here. She said that this was now hell because the dog was gone, and because they could imagine a better world like earth where the dog was still alive but very cold and barking to be let in. He said that this couldn’t possibly be hell, because the dog’s body was still buried in the backyard. He pointed to the mound and the little cross he had put up in the backyard. They went out and looked at it. He told that this was earth, and that earth is full of life and death and we like to invent categories to separate the good from the bad, but that we often get confused by our own categories and think of them as parallel worlds. She didn’t understand this, and said that she didn’t like living with so many parallel worlds. He told her that the way to stop getting trapped in parallel worlds was to remember that there are only actually parallel lives. There are hundreds of thousands of dogs in the world and when one dies another is quickly born. And that there is a little girl and her father talking about this very same thing right now in Shanghai, becuase their dog has died too, and they too are coming to the same conclusion, that there are many dogs in the world, and he is already putting on his shoes to go to the kennel to find a new parallel dog. She ran inside and returned with his shoes. She told him to put them on quickly, because the man in Shanghai has already got his on and they might get to the kennel first and take the last parallel dog. That’s ok, he said, putting on his shoes. They have to drive all the way from Shanghai.

Marriage

He told her he loved her. She asked him what he meant, exactly. He told her that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her and grow old and have children. She asked him why he put children last. He asked her if marriage was going to be like this, with all these questions about love and the order of things. She said it might be that way. He asked her what her love meant to her. She said that her love was like a flower. He asked her if she had any particular flower in mind. She said it was like a sunflower. He said that a sunflower was a pretty obvious flower. She said that maybe it was, but that maybe love isn’t supposed to be original, and yet no two sunflowers are the same. He asked her what she meant by calling her love a sunflower. She said that it would grow and come out as long as it was shined on. He told her that sunflowers don’t grow. She said that they do, they begin as a seed and grow into flowers. He said that plants grow but that sunflowers are just sunflowers, they are already grown and die soon after. She said that that means she will love him until she is old. He said that he had thought she meant that her love was like a sunflower now. She said that was also true, which means that it would be good idea to have children sooner than later. He didn't respond. She thought he was hurt and apologized and told him that she loved him, and that was enough, and that maybe the metaphor was getting in the way. He agreed, then added that maybe they should wait a few years before deciding to have children.

John Hanson's Weekend

On Friday at noon John Hanson was fired from the Hollows Golf and Country Club after his night escapades of playing “flame golf” were discovered. Flame golf involves breaking into a golf course at night and driving burning golf balls soaked in lighter fluid at the main lodge with a two iron. John knew it was for the best, since he would now have more time to dedicate to his new novel, Golfing With Apollo. Golfing With Apollo was the story about a man very much like him who meets Apollo, the god of the sun, who by day looks just like a wealthy middle-aged Englishman with bad teeth. It recounted the quasi-homoerotic relationship between the two, their incendiary adventures playing flame golf and exploding gas stations in Springfield, Missouri. John returned to his bungalow at 1 p.m. on Friday. Three pages into his “edit,” John realized that it would be a lot easier to write after watching The Matrix trilogy and drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels mixed with lemonade. At 6 p.m., John called his friend Karl and the two of them went to the driving range, then got drunk and played pool, while John ranted about his book. The next morning, John awoke at 11 a.m., sobered up as best he could, and decided that Golfing With Apollo should be a graphic novel. He began calling his old classmates at Middlebury College to find out whether they knew of anyone who could draw or anyone in the graphic novel business. At 4 p.m., he opened up a bottle of Jagermeister than Luna had left in the cupboard after moving all her stuff out three months before. He began sending comments and emails to his friends on Tumblr blog pages. He fell in love with a woman named "catekill" and proposed to her online, offering her half of his inheritance. He sent her a photograph of his face and then opened up a new Tumblr page called JOHN HANDSOME in which he wrote a long erotic poem to catekill. She finally reponded and said no thanks. At 7 p.m., Karl came over and the two of them went to see a zombie film with two mickeys of Jim Bean and then tried to pick up two Goth chicks at the cinema. Karl got lucky but John's "target" decided to take a cab home. At 10 p.m., John took a cab to the casino alone and told a prostitute that he would write a book about her if she gave him a blowjob. She asked for two hundred dollars instead and she sucked him off in the handicapped bathroom at 11:15 p.m. John couldn’t come. He called Luna in tears at just after midnight telling her what had happened to him and she told him to fuck off and never call her again. John woke up at 4 p.m. on Sunday, sobered up as best he could, and picked up the manuscript for Golfing With Apollo for the third time. He stared at the cover page, and imagined his brains leaking out of his mouth and eyes like liquid Jell-o. Suddenly, John realized what his problem was. I am not John Hanson, he thought. I am Apollo. I am the god of the sun. The revelation seemed like a joke at first, but when he repeated the words again, “I am Apollo, I am the god of the sun,” shivers went through him, and his empty life seemed to have more meaning than ever before. If he really wanted to write Golfing With Apollo, he would have to take flame golfing a a lot more seriously, and start really blowing shit up.

Divorce

During their divorce trial he asked her why she had kept so many secrets and lovers from him. She told him that she needed secrets and lovers, because he had bored her and she never felt like she was alive. He told her that she should have tried to find a life instead of living out a statistic and blaming him for her unhappiness. She told him that they were both statistics, that he had worked too much and never had anything to say to her, that they were the kind of couple who had taken the dullest path and believed in a vague idea of love that quickly turned brown like an apricot you keep in your bag too long. He told her that she had never been this lucid when they were married, but that he would characterize their love less like a soft apricot and more like one of those stupid theories by Plato some failed grad student taught them in their first year of college that had no application to the real world. She told him that she was lucid and even happy now because she had thrown the apricot out and nothing smelled like rotten fruit anymore. He told her that he was happy too, that he had started rereading Plato and realized it was quite beautiful as long as one thought of it as poetry.

Bluebeard Update

A year into his second novel, John Hanson developed the habit of staying awake at night while his girlfriend Luna slept and drawing pornographic comics of the two of them having sex. She found them one day in his desk drawer. They were were not just midly perverse. John gave himself multiple phalluses, and often depicted Luna dead after the sex act, her brains blown out by the fire-hose pressure of his semen, or drew grotesque “internal” diagrams of her colon and vaginal canal during penetration. Luna knew that John often had a reason for what he did. John was strange, but it was partly a persona, and his first novel along with his persona had been reviewed well. She decided to just ask him about the drawings. “That’s an exercise in alterative lives,” he told her. “I’m living the life of someone very similar to me, someone who indulges in every one of his perverse desires. It’s for my character.” Luna hadn’t heard of John’s new character, since he rarely talked about his work with her. But this time he was inspired to share with her. He took her into a secret basement room to their house, a room she never knew existed. It was a second smaller room connected to the basement storeroom. Behind a wall of boxes and a stack of card tables was a small wooden door. Inside the cold little room were two naked light bulbs and a stained pullout couch. There were racks of drawings, most of them pornographic, as well as hundreds of swastikas and recreations of Nazi propaganda posters, each laboriously inked and colored in with pencil crayon. On a shelf was a row of large jars containing neighborhood cats and dogs soaking in preservation fluid that had gone missing in the neighborhood over the last year. There was a mini-Fridge filled with Amsterdam maximum alcohol beer, Red Bull, and Russian Standard vodka. (And yet, a year earlier, John’s friends staged an intervention for him and John broke down, vowing he would never drink again.) Nailed to the wall were women’s panties and thongs, as well as Polariod photos of humiliated prostitutes and underage street girls with come on their faces, or rolled up hundred dollar bills inserted in their rectums. Finally, squashed in the corner of the room was an old school desk with an IBM typewriter and a stack of file folders. – Meet John Hanson 2, he told Luna. – Oh, fuck, John, she said, unable to contain her disgust. – You mean to say you’ve been coming in here for the last year every day while I'm at work and writing your new novel on that shitty old typewriter? No wonder it’s taking you so long.

Past Condional Grail

Had someone told the Grail Knight, “if you leave that beautiful princess with the golden hair behind, if you abstain from touching her at night, if you throw yourself into the forest again with nothing, you might come across the Holy Grail,” then there would be nothing that distinguishes the Grail Knight from any other knight. That’s not what happened. God onlly knew what went through the Grail Knight’s mind when he left princess Blancheflor behind. Even the nasty little dwarf didn't know. He too left Blancheflor’s castle without getting laid, not even by the lady dwarf who worked in the kitchen. He too plunged into the dark forest, which seems even darker to a dwarf. But he never saw what the Grail Knight never intended to see.

What the Writer said to his Character

No one liked you. No one thought you were a believable character. I guess we gave it a shot. I don’t know what it was about you. Of course it was my fault. You’re not real. But I still have one last chapter to write. It’s the one where you are hermetically sealed in a room for an entire year with only water and a minimal amount of food. After one year, spikes emerge from the ceiling and begin moving down. They move down a few inches every day and, after ten days, the spikes pierce your brain. For hours, all you can do is scream. And then you slowly expire. I won’t bother to make your last thoughts realistic. It would be out of character.

Improve Your Brain

A book which has sold over a million copies in Japan promises to improve one’s brain power. The book consists of simple mathematical equations, memorization exercises, and passages from great works of literature which are meant to be read aloud daily. After about the fifth exercise, a little rabbit shows up at the bottom of the page and tells you that you are doing a good job. A few pages later, a monkey comes up and asks you if you have noticed any improvements. On the thirtieth page, the rabbit and the monkey are playing a game of “tag” among the mathematical equations. Then they both show up a page later with the caption, “Do you like the book?” It’s not as though you could respond to them. By page 40, the monkey, the rabbit, and a new character, the frog, are shown fishing by the pond. The caption reads, “Just Fishing.” On page 45, the rabbit and the monkey stand over the frog, who looks like he has died. They both have a confused look on their faces. On page 55, both the monkey and the rabbit are lying on the ground, maybe sleeping, maybe dead. They never show up again. On the last page is a glossy photo of Dr. Kawashima, the author. “It has been 60 days now,” the caption reads, “And you should have a better brain.”

Prodigal

My daughter returned to me a queen. It is a small, despotic country, and my new son-in-law is anything but kind. But I am still very proud, for she left my house a whore!

Good Organization, or How Beef Becomes Pork

I was looking for coffee, and walked to the center of the shopping market. I picked up some fruit on my way. I got confused between organic bananas and normal bananas, overripe bananas and brown bananas. None of the bananas were yellow. I got espresso, not coffee, at the end of an aisle. I walked back to buy bread. A woman was throwing buns from one container into the next. They looked more like pretzels. I put one bun in a bag, walked away, then walked back and took three more. A woman was speaking English on her cell phone. I took two little packages of liver paté. I wandered into the wine section. I realized my basket was too heavy and walked back to the front of the store to get a cart but then found one on the way. How lucky, I thought. That’s good organization. I put the basket in my cart and wheeled it to the wine section, taking a jar of pasta sauce and a package of salami on the way. The same woman from before was now speaking Hungarian to her friend. I put two cans of two different non-alcoholic beers in my cart, then two more bottles, then two bottles of regular dark beer, then put two cans back of non-alcoholic beer and got a bottle of Hungarian red wine. I took a carton of grapefruit juice. I put some cookies in my basket, then put them back. I wandered back to the dairy section, got one individual yogurt, two sour creams, one kefir, then three more individual yogurts, then exchanged two of those yogurts for a big one, and put back one sour cream. I passed the cookie aisle again, and took a cheaper brand. I found some frozen chicken wings in bags. I put them in my cart. I wanted to leave now. But I needed a head of lettuce. There was no lettuce. I was lost. There was a special on mozzarella. I hadn’t bought enough, I thought. I looked a long time at a pre-made chicken sandwich. I wandered over to the meat section, and stared at the meat. It looked like beef. But it could have been pork.

Piotr's Dream Part 2

After Piotr and the President of the United States had killed Piotr’s two brothers they would decide to leave the corpses on the floor so they would dry up and disappear because Piotr’s brothers were never kind to anyone when they were alive and so they didn’t deserve to be buried properly. And there would be a beautiful woman with red hair and blue eyes covered in pretty furs that Piotr had never seen before in the doorway. “You have been away so long,” she would say to Piotr, which wouldn’t be true. “When are you going to make love to me?” And the President would say, “Go ahead, Piotr, I just like to watch.” And afterwards Piotr and the President of the United States would take the blood-red plane to Moscow, leaving the red-headed girl behind. “I’ve always wanted to see Moscow,” the President would say, in good Russian, because Piotr preferred speaking Russian. “Let’s go and find some pretty dark-haired tall girls and hear them laugh at our stories and make love to them and then we will fly back to Washington, where I will let you sit on an ivory throne beside my golden throne, and I will give you a job writing comic books and talking to women and continuing your important research on the Dark Force for your dissertation.” And then they would go and do all of these things.

Kittens

Kittens is my favorite cat. Wherever Kittens is I want to be. If Kittens is hiding, I am mad because I have to find her. I work myself up into a frenzy. I look for her everywhere. But when I do find her it is a joyful encounter. She meows at me and I kiss her and say, Kittens, you are a bad kitty for hiding from me. And she comes and sleeps on my bed. Other days, however, I really can’t find her. I look under every bed and behind every curtain. And I get really upset and start drinking from the liquor cabinet. We are told never to go to the liquor cabinet but in this house everyone drinks so much that no one notices. Eventually, Kittens comes out of her hiding spot. By then I am usually a little bit tipsy. I was not hiding from you, I imagine Kittens saying. You just have nothing to offer me at the moment and I like to be alone. You are codependent and your love for me is tiring. I am just a cat after all, naturally domesticated, which you confuse as gratified desire. And I watch Kittens sadly as she sniffs around in her bowl, yawns, and then climbs up on my bed and falls asleep. Kittens is right. I cannot expect her to love me. I should be grateful only that she is alive. And if I want to love something passionately that does not love me back in any way I can recognize I can go to church.

Ordinary

Mr. Teffs was an ordinary man. Once he learned that, he was devastated. It didn’t help that it was a beautiful woman who told him. She meant it as a simple rejection of his sexual advances. He had spent almost a year trying to get her attention, following the rules from popular books such as, How to Pick up Women, Sexual Control, Turning No into Yes. But he had failed in every strategy to get her close to him, to get her to sleep with him, to get her to love him. One night, he had a revelation. I don’t need these books, he thought. I love this woman and I am going to be brutally honest about who I am. I think I could make her happy and I think she is lovely and I want to be with her forever. I want to smell her in the mornings and cook her breakfast and take care of her parents. But it turned out to be a very ordinary revelation.

Beckett's trilogy

There is something behind the old man looking for his dead mother through a wasted land. (Molloy) There's the man who was hired to find that man, who made up the story of the original man and hired himself. (Moran) But there’s something behind that. There’s the man who is alone in a room in a mental institution who made up the idea of the hired man. (Malone) But there is something behind that. There's the man living in an urn without legs, without arms, who created the man alone in the room in the mental institution with his words. (Mahood) Still, there is something behind that. There is a quivering ear that hears movement and an eye that sees nothing but grayness. (Worm)

Piotr's Dream

Piotr had never been to America. He hadn’t even been to Moscow. But he had a plan in his head. One day, he would to leave Chita behind. He would rent a sled and go to Tankha, where there would be a pretty woman with dark hair and dark eyes. She would teach him how to fly a red little plane. The two of them would fly to Vancouver, BC, and refuel the plane. Then he would meet a pretty woman with dark hair and blue eyes. And he would leave the first woman for the second. They would fly to Washington, DC. There he would meet a pretty blonde woman with blue eyes, eyes as blue as his own. And he would leave the second woman for her. And she would lead him to the White House, where the President would be waiting for him. And he would leave the woman behind, and enter the White House, and meet the president’s wife, who would cover him with kisses. You are such a beautiful boy, she would say. And the president would open a wooden box lined with red velvet. And he would take out two silver pistols. Come Piotr, he would say. I have prepared a big, blood red plane. We are going to return to Chita and kill your brothers.

Death Star troopers

John Hanson, b. 1978, d. 2005, left behind a closet full of creative work after his early death to cancer. His sister created a blog for him, and put some of his stories up there. His sculptures and his pottery was put on display in the basement of the Episcopalean Church. What excited most people, however, was a retrospective of his masterpiece, an existential comic book on Death Star troopers. The prints were meticulously drawn in large format, then inked and colored with the help of his friend Karl. (Karl also curated the exhibit at the Art Gallery and then published the comics at his own expense.) The premise of the comic was this: that the Death Star troopers from the Star Wars series, when they weren’t protecting the empire, including Detention Block AA-23, were busy working hard in training camps, writing stories, and even trying to commit to relationships. Hanson wanted to show how Death Star troopers had no idea of their historical situation. Like everyone else, they were caught up in everyday minutiae. For example, one whole comic was dedicated to Number 47, who was so obsessed with his girlfriend that he would run over banal conversations he had had with her over and over in his mind to asses whether she was angry with him. Then he started acting weird, and blamed her for his unhappiness. They split up, and she was killed a year later by a random explosion. Another comic told the story of Number 5, who was afflicted with feelings of melancholia during his training. He felt he didn’t belong on the Death Star, but when he visited his parents back on his home planet he felt even worse. He returned, and, after a year of being a Death Star trooper, developed an immobilizing depression. He was demoted by Devin Cant soon after and he eventually turned his E-11 blaster rifle on himself.

Allegory on Fridge

Hey I ate all the pears. Sorry, they were really good and I was talking on the phone last night (I suppose I was a little drunk too) and lost track of how many I was eating. I’ll pick some more up after work today if I can. Though if you have a chance could you pick them up (get a whole bunch) because we have a meeting that may run until 8pm. I’ve left you $20. Love you –

Dead Letter

Dear Dad,
Another year has passed. It’s been five years now that you’ve been gone. Where are you? I keep your plot happy, but I know you’re far away. You’re somewhere up in space. Today that thought came to me as I was watching my baby Francis play with his friends in the backyard. (I know he is almost eight now, but he will always be my baby!) I thought of you floating around in space, like by Jupiter, or Pluto, and fly-fishing for will-of-the-wisps. You’d be proud of Casey. Your son got a job articling with a good criminal lawyer in Winnipeg. Finally after a tough year. He moved there six months ago. He misses Edmonton, but he’s going to start making good money. I’m still here, of course. And James still works at Ford. Canada never saw much of that financial crisis. There weren’t even any layoffs. I guess you don’t know what I’m talking about. You missed that too. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m just happy being a mom. I’ve also joined a choir. Oh, I hate these letters, but they make me feel closer to you. And I suppose if I am worried about one thing it’s Casey. He'll always be my baby brother. He broke up with his girlfriend. And he drinks still. He doesn’t think anyone notices but I can hear it in his voice over the phone. He acts so kind, so rational, he even says he misses me and Edmonton and our monthly excursions for cool second-hand clothes. But he’s an expert at hiding it. He knows that you used to get mean and it was written all over your face. And so I think that he tells himself as long as he can be nice and everything you’re not he can drink as much as he wants. Well. I don’t mean to offend you. I just don't know what to say to him. If I tell him ... you know. Please send him your prayers, dad. You learned what alcohol did to you and spend the last fifteen years of your life really happy and helping all those people. But James is really clever and young. He writes poetry. He knows how to outsmart and outtalk anyone, you remember. I see you casting your line out by the stars. Send him a prayer. I love you dad.
Your daughter
Sherry

The Housewife’s Epiphany Realizing that the Killer is her Husband

I am alone.

Puppets

Some puppets are immobile. Some puppets can be wound up. Some puppets have glass eyes. Some puppets are manufactured to have poopies. [I continue on like this, “Some puppets do X, while other puppets do Y,” playing on idea of puppets, the limits of what a puppet can be, and end with something like,] Some puppets are staring at you doing your taxes in their head [, or,] Some puppets are people and deserve to be exposed as puppets and die [, or,] Some puppets have clones who sodomize cats [, and I get to the end that way. Puppets look vaguely human so I consider them uncanny, or not alive, then, by an afterthought, not yet alive, and then, again, alive and I just don’t know it. But what about a toothpick that wakes up at night and plots my destruction? Why can’t a dent in a wall have sentience? A small theater company in St. John’s, Newfoundland, put on a staged version of Reservoir Dogs. They thought it was a really clever idea.]

Adding Value

Watching pornography is not as good as having sex. Having sex is not as good as watching pornography while having sex. Watching pornography while having sex is not as good as filming oneself having sex watching pornography and then also watching that while still having sex.

Lake Manitoba

My lover wants to go to the sea. – Which sea, I ask. – Don’t be so literal, she says. – Don’t be so quick to tell me what I shouldn't do, I say. – Oh, stop it, she says. I am tired and you are just looking for a fight. – Fine, let’s go to the fucking sea, I say. After an hour in the car we are laughing again, listening to Simon and Garfunkel. And we even stop somewhere along the way and eat Greek salads and then drive to a rest stop and have sex in the back seat. – I love you, I say. – Yes, she says. We get to a brown murky lake where there are a few trailer cabins and a closed down ice cream shop. – I thought she said there was a beach, she says. (The woman who charged us two dollars to drive through the park said that.) – Yes. Well, maybe it will be nice. But it is not nice. It is gross and dirty and we skip stones for a while and it is overcast and there is no one but us. – I’m going swimming, I say. – Oh Christ, she says. This annoys me. I don’t know why. I take off all my clothes. – Are you crazy? She asks. I shake my hips back and forth so that my penis slaps against each side of my leg. – Dinky, dinky, dinky, I say. I bet you wish you could do that. – I sure do, she says, lighting a cigarette. I run into the water, as though to make a point. It is freezing, and I run back out. I sit beside her. The wind picks up. I put on my shirt. I can’t get on my underwear. I’m covered in sand and dead bugs. – Fuck, I say, and wait for her to respond. She doesn’t. I open a beer and it explodes. – Did you shake it, I ask. She says nothing, smoking. She’s reading Harlan Coben. It’s my book. – We need chairs, I say, trying to get the sand out from my toes. The beer is warm. A few gulls go by. – How was your swim? She asks. – Ha ha, I say. She says nothing. – Well it was rotten, I say. The sun breaks through the clouds, just for a moment. - But I'm glad I came, I say. – Yes, she says.

The Infinite Sadness of the Planet of Venus, Second Planet from the Sun

(Written by Jared Monroe, June 12, 1996, at Camp Science and Nature, Clear Lake, Manitoba.)
Life on Venus is very hot. It is a planet of infinite sadness. I am very unhappy. I have no one to talk to and the mean temperature of Venus is 462 degrees Celsius. There is no oxygen in the air, which means that it is very hard to breathe. Sometimes I try to cry, but my tears become steam. And since the atmospheric pressure is 92 times that of earth, it is very uncomfortable just to sit and do nothing. It was not smart of you to send me here. Venus cannot be made habitable by mankind. Because of the greenhouse effect, the heat gets trapped in the atmosphere. The light also reflects off of the sulphuric gas in the atmosphere giving the planet a bright pink glow. Although Venus looks pretty to those on earth, the planet is always bright to us, and it stinks like sulphur, and I cannot sleep. It is a planet of infinite sadness. Many thought Venus was the planet of love, but it is not. For love to exist, there must be oxygen, a mean temperature of about 12 degrees Celsius, and other people who are nice, not dead people and dust and rocks and sulphuric gas. Venus is an uninhabitable planet, which means that I will probably die soon. It is a planet of infinite sadness. This is the last letter you will receive from me because I am going to have to run away or go to sickbay and die there.

Small Diary of Torture

(Calico) cat. Immolated (Zippo fluid). 30 seconds. / Rat (black). 45 seconds. / Parakeet (green and yellow). 11 seconds. / Parakeet (red), half-plucked. 3 minutes 58 seconds. / Toad (brown), leg cut off near groin. 45 seconds. / Goldfish (red), quarter filled teacup. 5 / seconds then it jumped out. / Again (same). 10 minutes 1 second. / 2 (brown) guppies, one-fifth. 2 minutes 48 seconds, / 4 minutes 4 seconds. / Kitten (orange and white). Boiling water. 15 seconds. / Oven at 200F. 29 seconds. / Rat in toilet. 1 hour 25 minutes. / Lye on canary. 35 minutes. / Dry lye. Almost 2 days (47 hours 13 minutes). / Cat (gray) suspended, 4 hooks in back. 2 hours / and 12 minutes. / Gerbil (brown). Microwave. 12 seconds on high. / (gray) 14 seconds on medium. / (gray) 25 seconds on low. / White mice: 11 seconds on high. / 9 seconds on medium. / 30 seconds on low. / (What’s with medium?) / Gerbil (gray). Front feet sliced off. 35 hours. / Mouse. Still alive (48 hours 35 minutes). / Gerbil (gray). Back feet. 20 hours. / Mouse. 30 hours. / Mouse still alive with front feet / sliced off. 5 hours 14 minutes (plus 48 hours 38 / minutes) / makes 52 hours 52 minutes. / 52:52? / Significant.

Microneedles

Her grandmother once told her the story about an old lady who was sewing late at night and lost track of a needle. It got stuck in the couch. She sat on it and the needle went right into her. It found its way into a vein and then slowly traveled towards her heart and punctured it. It is a strange story. It has a moral: always use a pincushion. But the story has more to do with the grandmother than the moral. Little girls don’t think like old ladies. Little girls have good blood running through their veins. When a needle pokes them, they feel it. It’s a grandmother's tale about a grandmother’s fear. A hard needle can’t travel through a vein like a missile launched at a city. But the idea is frightening. It’s like a sperm bringing death to the egg. Any one of us could have any number of needles in our veins, even our arteries. They could be magnetizing us as they circulate, collecting in places and building dams to destroy us. A wrench can be thrown into a machine. Honey into a fuel tank. In Crime And Punishment, Illuysha wraps a needle in a piece of bread and feeds it to a stray dog. The real moral of the story is this: there are showers of invisible needles in the air, microscopic needles, spring needles, needles made for little creatures who sew the broken wings of flies (Queen Mab’s needles), needles made to remove dirt from microchips (Jack Kilby’s needles), microneedles that enter the pores of our skin, filling us with metal, building a reserve and plotting our death like dust pneumonia.

Schizo Machine

She was bothered by a hair. It was in her eye last week. Then she felt it in the back of her throat. This week it's tickling her nose. No one knows where it is. Could it be in her head?

A Good Deal

She says she’ll be happy with me no matter who I am. She wants my children even if they come out dead. She will move with me to the farthest reaches of Northern Canada. This is a kind of paradise, I tell her. I can’t imagine a woman who will be happy no matter where I take her and who will raise my dead child. It’s not paradise, she tells me. It’s just a good deal.

A List

1. Sleep well
2. Sleep well
3. Sleep
4. Turn it down
5. Try to sleep
6. Rest
7. Rest
8. Rest a little
9. Wait
10. Wait until I’m asleep
11. Are you awake
12. You’ve ruined my life

Sea

upcoming in www.midwayjournal.com

A World

If you take a good long look at yourself in the mirror, you might wonder whether your face would look better pulled off and stretched over a round piece of Styrofoam.

Regret

I had a great idea, it was better than any other idea I’d ever had, but I could not carry it out, because I was an alcoholic, I had Down’s syndrome, and I was living in a period of history in which ideas were not respected and there was no funding for the arts.

3029

In 3029 very little will be different than today, except that relationships between people will have changed slightly. You might say hello to someone on the street, and if they like you, they will respond, and smile. And you will want to get to know them. You’ll take them out to dinner to a nice restaurant, which will cost about forty hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And after a few weeks you’ll make love. Sex will become a regular occurrence. It will get better and better. You’ll take drugs together, drugs that make you feel things that we have no names for today. And you’ll walk together in parks, and tell stories about the past together, and try to be conscious about how your words can hide your true feelings. You’ll vacation on the beaches of Croatia together or take a trip to Olympus Mons on Mars. Then one day, years later, you’ll be sitting alone in a room and suddenly have the urge to cause them physical harm. And you’ll call them over to you and ask them to have a look at this neat screen you’re reading or at this game you are playing and then slap them hard across the face. Tears will fill their eyes, then a look of horror and your heart will sink, and before you can apologize they’ll slap you back. Your face will sting and tears will fill your eyes. You’ll feel horribly wronged and angry, and slap them harder, maybe a few times. The world will seem to you a sickening place, and you’ll realize, slapping and punching and receiving slaps and punches, that this is 3029, that there is no going back to 3028, that no one in history has ever felt this, and that you alone have got to live with what you’ve done.

Heaven

When you run out of ideas and words, and feel no more stress, and stop checking your investment activity online, and no one cares where you are, and no one gets hurt or feels happy any longer by what you say, and you no longer feel tired, and you don’t feel good any more drinking a glass of scotch, you’ll be ready to die. A naked old woman will be there, and she will take your hand. You’ll walk with her into a field, into a kind of garden, in which there are lots of crickets. She’ll say, You made it, you’re finally here. And she’ll introduce you to a group of people with giant red eyes and a woman who doesn’t have legs. And you’ll start to get panicked like your first day at camp, or when your mother dropped you off each morning in kindergarten on her way to work. And you’ll ask the old woman, Where am I? And she’ll say, This is heaven. And, sensing your terror, she'll add, You’ll get used to it.

Rejection

Having come to terms with the fact that she would not marry him, he asked her to at least have the decency remain unhappy for the rest of her years, and then one day, take her own life.

A Certain Fact

In Italy, every woman is beautiful, but the most beautiful women of all act in pornographic films. In Italy, it is not considered a bad thing to act in pornographic films. The great myth about pornographic film actresses is that they are unhappy and live desperate lives, like prostitutes. That is true in most countries. In Italy, however, pornographic actresses are the most beautiful of all Italian women, and they are incredibly happy.

Kafka's Parables

An art student at the University of Winnipeg was once given a prize for his cartoon series. The first caption, drawn poorly, was of Jesus Christ with outstretched arms, giving light to his disciples. It read, “Jesus was a good man.” The next boxes were of Jesus performing all sorts of disgusting and immoral acts: sodomizing children, stealing from old ladies, killing dogs, farting in church, etc. The caption read, “But he was not all that good …” This bluntness was admired. One finds it in the parables in Kafka, but in this case the bluntness has been diluted by age and time.

I will not

be mean. I will not squash the frogs I’ve caught. I will not call Trent’s girlfriend a gook. I will ignore your acne. I will stop making anal sex jokes. I will respect German people. I will go to your recital. I will not
be cruel to her just because she doesn’t want to sleep with me. I will not let an appointment completely destroy my day. I will not use big words like poets, maybe slushpile poets, in Chicago Review do. I will not
plan to kill whoever criticizes me. I will not make anal sex the only true test of love. I will not drink more than five ounces of liquor a day. I will
look at you more often. I promise to love you. I will not say that aloud. I will drink up the bad liquor, but that doesn't count as part of the five ounces. I will finish your assignments. I will mourn the death of your stupid cat. I will not
say anything about black postal workers at 60637. I will no longer speak of angels and devils. No, it was your stupid dog. I will let it go.

A new house

After the death of his mother, a forty-four year old scholar, well known for his book, The Geography of Golf (1996), decided to use his inheritance to buy a beautiful old three-story house in the south side of Chicago. He moved all his things into a tiny bedroom on the second floor. It had originally been a kid’s room, squashed between a closet and a large open room. He pushed in his two orange tables and an old green chair. This was the only furniture he had brought from his previous apartment. The Murphy bed was already built in to the wall. He found an old pink comforter in a closet filled with junk and threw that on top. The shelves above the bed were filled with old dolls and romance novels. Someone had carved in a pornographic picture into the wall with a penknife. There was a rotary phone by the bed. He stacked his files up on and under the tables. He worked day and night from that room: pinning together his notes, creating bibliographies and reworking old publications that had received rejections. He went to sleep early. He drank Seagram’s gin and Schweppes tonic. The snow fell. He took his vitamins. He became thin, carving a path only to the tiny bathroom with a stand up shower and the kitchen on the first floor, where he ate mostly from tins delivered from a call in service. The dust settled in the other rooms. They were giant rooms. He was afraid to even look in them. He paid his taxes. In the evening, sometimes he would built a little fire in the backyard, surrounded by slums, and smoke hand-rolled cigarettes. And as the fire dwindled he would close his eyes and imagine that his mother was telling him that he would catch cold, and that he’d better come in.