9:00PM
"Hey gals this'll be fun! Guys'll sit on chairs
in a circ, and we gals'll play musical chairs on 'em! On their laps, hoo-hah, grabbin'
'em with our butts! Let's GO!"
9:15PM The
boys sitting on the chairs looked bored or indifferent. There was no pleasure
in their eyes. I wondered why that was. I was just a spectator, thirty years
older, drinking. I wondered why the boys looked so bored, sitting there on
their chairs.
9:45PM Sgt.
Rick put his hand on the suspect's head to guide into the back of the squad
car. Sgt. Rick closed the door. He got in the front seat. He said to the
driver, Sgt. Nick, "Seems like an open-and-shut case."
10:00PM
INTERROGATION ROOM "I lost control. Something got a hold of me. I put my hands on her hips while she was
innocently sitting on my lap. She even spilled her bourbon, I was so
violent. I'm a ... perp!
10:15PM In the
car, Sgt. Rick said, "Sometimes I wonder if we should be locking up all
the young men, their unspeakable violence notwithstanding. There could be
something terribly wrong with our society." Sgt. Nick said, "Forget
it, Rick. It's Danforth."
*
The doctors
told me about my spleen. "Lots of people lack spleens. It's no biggie.
You're better off if we take it out."
They took out
my spleen. I felt better.
A month later
they focussed on my right hand. "You hardly use it. Besides, rehab is
character-building."
There it went.
What an improvement!
"Now that," they said, "you hardly
ever use that. It must be a burden to
you, right?"
It was a
simple surgery.
"Walk
some place and what do you see? More of the same. Legs
are windows to distraction."
This sounded
reasonable, so off they went.
"Advances
in plastics have made guts obsolete. Care for an upgrade?"
It would have
been primitive to refuse.
"There's
nothing worth hearing, seeing, smelling, or tasting. Care for a fix?"
I like how my
head felt like a cue-ball. I'm sure it looked cool too.
"With the
right nutrients, we can supply your brain. The respiratory and circulatory
systems are assholes anyway."
Hear-hear! I
cried.
"You
think too much, across time and through eras. We would like to take away your
soul. M'okay?"
They took my
soul away from me.
For the first
time in my life, I felt whole.
*
The theatrical
impresario met with the scenic director in 1930. The impresario said, "So,
Mahagonny. This Brecht,
he's so modern. I want newspapers all over the place! I want all the sets made
from newspapers. Can we do that?"
The scenic
director said, "What should the newspapers say?"
The impresario
said, "It doesn't matter! I want a panoply of
signs, meaningless signs. It means something and nothing at the same time.
That'll fix the bourgeoisie!"
The impresario
fell asleep and awoke in the future. Yes, he woke up 100 years in the future.
His whole Leipzig block has changed. He went out on the
street. Everything had changed! I think you get the point.
He found a man
selling flowers. He said, "Something mighty strange has happened to me.
What is this place? Is this Leipzig?"
The
flower-seller said, "בּ╠ῨἊᶼᴥھ?"
"Sorry,
didn't catch that."
"בּ╠ῨἊᶼᴥھ?"
"Sorry to
bother you."
The impresario
went to the Leipziger Weihnachtsmarkt.
Surely it was the same! But there he saw it all: big bright signs with strange
images. What did they mean? A picture of a cannon with
"Ṳẞᵍ۩ӂЄʡȺ" written under it?
"ɮǃﲎףּ∞Ὶ►♯!" on a pretty woman's face?
The impresario
wept. What had he done?
*
‑I don't
know how it started.
‑Who
ever does?
‑But I
can trace it back to about 1920.
‑But it
went back a long time earlier, right?
‑It
involved a man and a woman.
‑Sweat-soaked
with original sin.
‑He was
a sailor, and she was in a port town.
‑The
girl was beautiful and she had a great ass.
‑How did
you know?
‑I've
seen the pictures. I know the romance.
‑It
lasted for some time. They got married.
‑He was
away an awful lot.
‑She
probably had other lovers.
‑It was
a port town after all.
‑She
gave birth to a son and a daughter.
‑The
marriage was rocky.
‑She
moved to another continent.
‑The
divorce was uncontested.
‑They
went their separate ways.
‑The son
hated his mother.
‑He
couldn't wait to get away from home.
‑Lucky
him, a war started up.
‑And he
went to it like the sun to the moon.
‑The
next seventy years I don't want to discuss.
‑You'd
rather go back in time.
‑These
strings tie us to the start of everything.
‑Everyone
knows consciousness is terrible.
‑It is
the tip of an iceberg.
‑We
can't get to know anything.
‑Could
even be lies.
*
O K, I
completely understand your wanting that, in your wish
to be a Red Indian. You are confined and you are afraid. You fear and hate your
boss at the insurance company. Your average Red Indian, as everyone knows, is
autochthonous, and thus doesn't have to worry what his father thinks because he
doesn't have one. If you could start again, somewhere else, you would be
different.
O Bascom, I completely understand your
wanting that, in your wish to be a mole. They're quiet creatures, not bothered
by landlords or governments, with nothing to do but to be a beast of burrow,
with always but one task ahead of every day. Everything seemed set, didn't it,
the minute you were born, in Mars Hill, in 1882, nowhere else, and at no other time. Why are we given these lives, and no other?
O John, I
completely understand your wanting that, in your wish
to be free of possessions. They burden you down. The white piano, the curtains,
the woman your obstinacy will not allow you to dump:
it's all so shoddy. Why weren't you a Red Indian, or a mole? Every day there's
less and less freedom for you.
*
Invasion of Those Things That Walk Around
(from 'The Oral History')
First I heard
of it, was from the wife. I was doing the books for the Barkington Palace dog shop, and she called me up. She
was really scared, poor thing. She said, "They're trying to get into the
house!" I said, "What? What are they?" I figured she was talking
about birds or something. She said, "Those things that walk around!
They're trying to get in!" "Wait," I said, "What do you
mean?" She said‑kinda
shrieking-like‑"You know them! The things in those
movies!" I said, "Calm down. What movies? You mean
extras?" I guess I shouldn't have mocked her like that, but anyway.
"No, I mean those other movies, the scary ones." "Frankensteins?" "No, not
that. They're from those, oh my God they're inside!" I don't know
why I continued to torment her, with, "Are they bipeds or
quadrupeds?" Then she dropped the phone or something and all I heard was
screams. So that's the moment when I learned what was going on. My poor wife. I hope I see her in heaven someday. It was a
pretty funny thing, in a grim way. We'll laugh about it.
*
We were
playing down at Giant River, and someone looked up and saw
something strange over in Giant Field. We all looked up to see. It looked like
a platform suspended in mid-air. We had to go closer to discover it wasn't a
platform suspended in mid-air; it was the side of a big wooden house that had
tipped over. (We didn't talk at the time about how strange it was that it
didn't have a foundation because we were pretty dumb back then.)
We spent the
rest of the afternoon tipping it back up. We used ropes and pulleys from all
the garages around and we used nearby trees to help us out. We could see then
that it was just the well-detailed exterior of the building along with a long
staircase inside like it was meant to be three storeys altogether. We all
stared in wonder at this inexplicable representation of a house that was
incapable of housing anyone. Who had constructed it, and what was its purpose?
Next day we
went back to Giant Field. We saw the signs of our yesterday's labours in the
grasses and on the trees, but there was no house anywhere nearby.
*
7th session
I tell him I
really want to punch my father.
He says,
"That sounds like a legitimate response."
9th session
I tell him I
punched my father.
He says,
"How did he take it?"
11th session
I tell him I
hit my mother.
He says,
"She must have been somewhat enabling, don't you think?"
13th session
I tell him I
burned down their house.
He says,
"Fire is a lovely thing, don't you think? A real psychic
clean-up."
17th session
I tell him I
tracked my parents down. They're at in a cabin in the north.
He says,
"You've surprising tracking skills. Anyone ever tell you that?"
18th session
I tell him the
cops have an APB out on me.
He says,
"I hope you can still make these sessions."
21st session
I tell him
he's caused all my problems.
He says,
"Well, this is just straight-up transference."
23rd session
I tell him I
dream of murdering him.
He says,
"I'm sorry, I don't do dream analysis."
24th session
I tell him
I've getting a weapon in the mail.
He says,
"Acting out. I'll consult my Laing
volumes."
25th session
He gasps,
"So much for the talking cure."
*
In the dream,
I am in a boardroom with three, sometimes four, bigwig editors from Simon &
Schuster. It seems they're going to be publishing a mighty-big selection of my
writings. They say to me, "John, help us out. Here, look through these
binders and tell us the which are the best." They
pass me seven or eight big binders, two-inchers, and
I start flipping through.
None of it looks
familiar at all. I can't remember writing any of it. Then I come across
something‑it's something from Dickens. What the? Hey, here's
some aphorisms from La Rochefoucauld. Digging deeper
into it, I see stuff from Xenophon, Shakespeare, O
Henry, Edith Wharton and Henry James, lots of comic strips and comic books. The
editors are looking at me quizzically. What's going on here? Isn't there
anything original to be had in the lot? Page after page of other people's
stuff, even autobiographical writings for Christ's sake! How could I have
stolen that? Didn't I know it'd be
obviously plagiarized? Stephen King, Monty Python, Penthouse, Spike Jones,
this, that, what, even Sappho?
I suddenly
wake up, as if from a nightmare, only to find I have been transformed into a
giant insect!
*
Interviewer is
Janet Tolan of Bloomberg News.
Interviewee is
a dog-maimer.
Interview
conducted on 7 June 2016.
TOLAN:
Revealing my interviewee's name would diminish his livelihood.
DOG-MAIMER:
Yes it would. I have many competitors.
You maim dogs
for a living.
That's what I
do, yes.
Is it a good
living?
Can't
complain. I am
recompensed all right for my value-add.
So, how do you
do it?
There're
always a lot of dogs around. You scoop them up, or you breed them. Breeding's best once you've got some capital.
Can you
demonstrate?
Sure. See this
beagle? Watch. I take its hind leg in both hands, and‑snap!‑the leg is broken. Let it limp around for a couple
days and the bones set crooked. Dog's crippled.
I see.
Or
here, this poodle.
You take a blowtorch across one side of its head and presto! the
dog's scarred and blind in one eye!
The dogs
increase in value?
Mark-up's
about 6%.
Not a bad
business model.
Not
at all.
Then what?
I sell 'em to a retailer, he ships them
from Caracas to Vancouver.
Instant
rescue dog.
Where there's
a demand, a supply is created.
The
market in operation.
Four-legged
virtue signals.
That's right.
*
And glasses
made in Spain with lenses ground in Etobicoke
And a dark
green bomber jacket with speckled ermine fur
And huge Koss headphones playing huge Koss
headphone music
And a checked
black and red shirt with a button missing
And a yellow
sweater with pearls all over the collar
And a new
white shirt containing all colours in itself
That's made
from unbleached cotton that irritates nipples
And boots, a
pair of boots, with zippers up their sides
And inside the
boots are orange woolen socks sans holes
And a tiny
hidden anklet with a tiny ruby heart within
And black
rayon tights wrapping over something underneath
And a
new-fangled 'skort', that new-made word of crosswords
That's dark
grey and space age and camel-toe-hiding
And a pin on
the shirt that will say something surprising
And a belt
around the waist with a buckle of thin lead
And a finger
ring that turns out to actually be plastic
With a helix
etched around its partly hidden torus
And a hairclip
more expensive than everything else worn,
An heirloom
that can't be found in any dime store stall;
This is what
I'll be wearing when I meet you least expectedly.
*
And so another
year comes to an end.... Farewell, 2016....
And what
better way to end the year than with a little ... stand-up comedy!
For this joke
to be funny‑and I mean really funny‑you have to use your
imagination. I'm sure you can do that.
So. Imagine for me this. You're a Sanskrit
scholar, one who knows the entirety of the Upanishads backwards and forwards,
one who knows OM is actually AWM, and one who rolls his
eyes when someone mistakes Bhisma for Bhima.
So you're at a
conference with other Sanskrit scholars, and it's all a bit dry, shall
we say. So you notice on the bilingual programme that there's to be a little
bit of 'entertainment.' You're sceptical. You're thinking of your hotel room
and maybe about the Jacuzzi.
So the lights
go down. So a guy gets on stage. Everyone's quiet. The guy takes the microphone
in hand, and he starts his routine.
"I
started reading a Sanskrit-English dictionary, but I had to stop before I even
got to the end of the letter A‑it was all so negative!"
And everyone
laughs! Everyone gets the joke!
I want to wish
everyone a happy new year: 2017.
