a-

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.