The Nigh-Infinite Serpent - #fridayflash

It’s hard to believe we ever wanted to kill the Nigh-Infinite Serpent. I mean, I don’t know how you do that, and neither did the Ancients, since every bomb they invented never even sloughed its old skins. But I’ve got fat books full of stories of great knights and cyclopes who braved the mountains of the world trying to kill the Nigh-Infinite Serpent. Their bravery made for great tragedies, even if these days they only get adapted as comedies.

You have to be very brave to fight something that can and frequently does encircle the continent. Every Winter the nights get longer, not because we’re tilting from the sun, but because it’s shifting in the sky trying to warm up. You might as well try to arm wrestle an earthquake. Also, fighting it caused a lot of earthquakes, which is why the Moderns outlawed fighting it.

There was this one whole crusade that climbed up to the Nigh-Infinite Serpent’s mouth, using a combination of apatosauruses and gryphons for travel, just to die bravely and go to Ten Heavens. This was in the second dynasty of the Moderns, who dispatched one thousand runners to chase them and hand of the writs of cease-and-desist. It was bound to be an epic, and an epic against the serpent would probably wreck the entire continent for us.

So the crusade had to turn around, because if they broke the law then their dead souls would never get into Ten Heavens. Except they were so high up that they had to march down the Nigh-Infinite Serpent’s spine – there was no easier way. And marching around up there, the crusaders found there really was no more convenient way to get anywhere on the continent than by walking on the serpent. It was lying about so much of the world that some of them even visited islands cartographers had deemed lost and mythical by hopping off its tail.

You can tell which regions were the first to bribe the Nigh-Infinite Serpent into playing highway because they’re still rich as cake today. Ornithologists were conscribed to trick flocks of rocs and gryphons into straying past the Nigh-Infinite Serpent’s mouth, giving it ample sustenance, and for every load it would contort its amazing body, a length becoming a new bridge or tunnel, sometimes running two or three highways on top of each other if the bribe was plentiful enough. When the Moderns factored in the reduction in wars with nature and no longer needing to construct or pave highways, they considered bribing the beast to be an exceptional savings.

Nowadays it actually gets angry if people aren’t traveling on its hide, which is why it attacks so many aircrafts. The best we can tell is it’s used to all the traffic as a sort of back massage. I work in automobile manufacturing, so I don’t mind the anti-aircraft strikes, but the delays on the highway are miserable whenever the beast sheds.

Waiting for Godot Review

I had the great pleasure of attending my first Broadway play last week. It was Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in Waiting for Godot, which commanded the sort of cast I’m told you don’t usually get even in New York City. Thanks so much to Ross Dillon and Max Cantor for having me along with them, I, some Philistine who wasn’t sure Broadway was even a real place. It turns out is a place, like a lot of New York City, that exchanged the sky for glowing billboards, making it a fine place to watch two great actors ask each other if life is really happening.

Vladimir and Estragon.

It was a wonderful production. Shuler Hensley played Pozzo as a hooting Texan, which I’d never imagined and immediately adored. Billy Crudup rounded out the cast and completely nailed the role of Lucky, from his weary swaying to that impossible monologue on everything and nothing. There came a point when, as an exhausted Pozzo prepares to leave, Lucky took on a knowing expression and caressed his chin in a way I can scarcely believe they got to work on stage, with Crudup blocking so much of our view and facing away, and yet sharing his expression with a crowd behind him. That’s the level of craft the foursome brought to the play.

Shame on me for my highlight coming out of the non-superstars, but McKellen and Stewart were as sterling as you’d expect. McKellen is the more versatile performer, and here played Estragon with so many senile and demented notes, all with the weight of immense age, that reminded me keenly of my grandfather’s final years. Even gestural suggestions of senility were perfect for Waiting for Godot, and particularly for Estragon, who has to forget so much of what’s allegedly happened in front of us. It detracts from my reading of the play as raw nonsense, deliberately eschewing its own continuity to make points about post-modernism, and yet it fits to humanize the material. I love when good actors read material differently than I do. Art isn’t worth it if we all agree. Then it becomes Heinz ketchup.

Also, I love Heinz ketchup.

Vladimir and Estragon.

McKellen got me thinking about other interpretations of the work, and inspired a vision that can never be: Waiting for Adventure Time. The cartoon is often absurd, but that’s a credential for this kind of mash-up, and is so often about exactly the kind of baffling logic that, here, Vladimir is infuriated with for not working. On the subway ride out, I pitched it to Ross and Max, with Finn as Vladimir and Jake as Estragon, and likely animated by the same crew. They won’t even have to switch backgrounds. Any number of Adventure Time voice actors would fit Pozzo, while if we’re going to get anyone to do Lucky’s monologue, it’s got to be Lady Rainicorn running it in Korean.

The play has that elemental nonsense about it, that honestly does remind me of Adventure Time. Adventure Time follows a contrived internal logic, something unreasonable and that children don’t know isn’t acceptable yet. Waiting for Godot is about a grown man’s inability to deal with that lack illogic. An easy highlight of the show was arguing with my friends over its potential meanings as we were stuck in the stairwell trying to exit the theatre.

Vladimir and Estragon.

And no comparison I make can render me guilty. No, sir and madame, every inane thing I think about Waiting for Godot was made to lofty after the lights in the theatre came up and a woman sitting two rows behind us asked, “Why were they waiting for him?”

That’s another highlight right there. You can get angry, or despair, or relish in gifts like those.

Phallus for the Sky - #fridayflash

A gorgeous shot from Icy Sedgwick's photo prompts.

"Hey honey."

"Oh for God's sake, Earth."

"I know you see it. It sure sees you."

"Put that away. It's not even morning. I'm tired."

"I can see the sun behind those clouds! Come on, it's the weekend."

"Where'd the romance go? You're all architecture these days."

"I sent you that shuttle!"

"I know it's the last one, Earth. All your TV satellites are floating in me."

"Have I told you that you look spacious lately?"

"I'm going back to bed."

"I bet a full moon will be out!"

"You're the worst planet I've ever dated. Pluto never needed artistic viagra."

"And look what happened to him! No, baby. I got you figured. You go take a nap. Dream on all this. "

"The single worst planet I've ever..."

Girl of Steel w/ Magnet

Theirs was barely a love story. And the attraction? Unfair. She was the Girl of Steel, and he was a magnet. She never bent, she never broke, but she couldn't let go of him. They met in the middle of a Chemistry exam: an alloy plus an object possessed of a magnetic field equaled true love. Neither were consulted about the affair they'd never stop having. They were merely equated, as romance tends to work.

It hurt the Girl of Steel's self-esteem. She was used to resisting, to withstanding, and at her favorite times, upholding. But this boy walked by and she instantly zipped to his side, and she never minded it. She minded that she didn't mind. She minded what others would think, too.

The world still needed her to build cars and skyscrapers and specific models of cans. They needed her for frying pans and satellites. There was not a country on the planet that didn't view her as a one-woman industry. Not a country on the planet that wouldn't judge the affair with this boy with his lopsided electrons.

He didn't see her as an industry. The magnet didn’t even see her as industrious; she got no work done around him. They looked into each others' eyes, studying the ripples in electron behavior, and watching countless hours of The Food Network. It was stuff the other major materials made fun of – the stuff she'd made fun of until that fated exam. The stuff she'd thought was cliché without having ever considered how clichés established.

He said that perhaps clichés were an industry. Was not all industry repetition?

That was trite, and she knew it, and she couldn't help liking it anyway. Not giggling, certainly not giggling like he did at her slights and insights. He was so enthusiastic, despite never having been asked to love her, to always be there, to, in his own way, always zip to her side, which, when she paid attention, she realized he did, being less massive than her. Sometimes bites of him chipped off on impact. The Girl of Steel collected those bits of him, and turned them into earrings, since they were clingy. He called her industrious. She called that trite, and she was right, and she didn't care, and that ambivalence bothered her, and she didn't care about that either.

Soon they went on public dates to every Friday exam at the lab, to see what other couples Science would pair up on paper. To see what else would come out the other side of equations. It was difficult to understand, and the magnet never really understood, but it felt nice. That was the Girl of Steel's reasoning, too, not that she ever said it. It was easier watching the inexplicable when the explicable didn't work. Love and the Friday exams were exasperating.

"Why Fantasy?" My answer, and asking yours.

 On Reddit someone was collecting various authors' answers to the question, "Why Fantasy?" It's an interesting thread, and despite being completely exhausted, this little explanation burbled out of me.

Because my mind has never been bound by the same rules as my body, and while I have great respect for pragmatists and wonder in the face of science, it's the fantastic that elicits my greatest intrigue and loudest laughter.

Nonsense is my mother tongue.

I'm an irrationalist. It's my nature.

If you care for Fantasy: why?

Bathroom Monologue: The Moon from Lionhead Lane

If you’ve been seeing the moon in the midday sky, you are not mad. Disregard the harassment of your many peers who do not see it there, and do not think it has been following the commuters along Lionhead Lane. Those who cannot see the moon’s daytime activities have an unusual belligerence, likely triggered by the moon’s private machinations.

If you suspect the moon has been whispering things to you, you’re not crazy. If it’s been whispering things to you that previously believed no one else could know, you’ve been right all along.

Regardless of your experiences, do not trust the moon.

If you’ve been seeing the moon in the midday sky, attempt to catch it and the sun in the same photograph. I haven’t worked out the physics of it yet, but I suspect it’s impossible. If you can do it, I’d be very interested to see the photos.

If the midday sun is whispering anything to you, return to your medication. The sun can’t telespeak.

If you have seen demons of any religious or secular stripe flying along Lionhead Lane, you’re not crazy. Avoid listening to them, and above all things, avoid looking at them and the moon at the same time. Do not photograph the demons.

If you have listened to or photographed the demons, stare the sun until the disembodied voices cease. If for some reason you fear the sun, very bright camera flashes may be a substitute. Regardless, do not heed the disembodied voices. They’re lying about the moon’s promises.

If you have listened to or photographed the demons… well, then you’re not reading this message, are you? You’re probably hearing it as I think it out before typing.

If you are experiencing this message telepathically, come to the coffee shop on the corner of 16th and Lionhead Lane. Bring ear muffs and solar lamps. We have work to do.

Bathroom Monologue: The Head Case

Reed’s head was a book, and one that was three-quarters unwritten.

Penn’s head was a writing utensil. Not a pen or pencil, because even I’m not that bad, but a fine horse hair brush. Penn fell madly in love with Reed, and he went on to scrawl most of the following in the margins of his lover’s head.

Taryn’s head was a fire hydrant. She spat on burning buildings, and for this was considered a hero. She had many unwanted suitors.

The Finn Quintuplets’ heads were fish. They kept trying to swim in Taryn’s spittle, following her around from heroism to heroism. She found this untoward, and so kept her valve shut whenever the Finns were at the similar parties.

If there was someone Taryn admired, it was Antonio, whose head was a water filtration system, and whose head filled hers with the naughtiest thoughts a hydrant can retain without leaking. He was, to Reed’s estimation, Penn’s mental image of himself. Antonio threw the best parties, with the spiciest foods, and interesting foreigners who played the latest music on their heads, and it all would have been perfect if Antonio didn’t own the biggest and most elaborate swimming pool in the city. The Finns always used this as an excuse to come, and so they followed Taryn along through the intricate tubing of the pool. They could be in any room she was.

Marta Maria’s head was the most elaborate swimming pool in the city. It was very hard on her neck, and she got quite lonely having to keep her body two floors below the best parties in the city. Thus Antonio often excused himself early to go downstairs and visit with her, and rub tiger balm on her neck.

Taryn would excuse herself early and follow Antonio to be jealous of Marta Maria’s neck problems.

The Finn Quintuplets tried to excuse themselves, but were stuck up in the pool, unless it was raining. If it was raining, they followed Taryn down and performed obnoxious tricks with flakes of calzone crust.

Marta Maria would have given them all a disparaging look if she were capable. However, she was capable of asking Miss Yaki for help. Miss Yaki was a city councilperson and universally heralded as wise since her head was an idea. If you wanted solutions, you had to look into Miss Yaki’s eyes. Fortunately for Marta Maria, Miss Yaki loved spicy food and was entirely intolerant of it, and so always attended Antonio’s parties, and always ate a bite too much, and always needed a glass of water. As you’d imagine, Marta Maria had always been good at finding glasses of water. Miss Yaki owed her a favor, and Miss Yaki came up with a solution seven seconds later.

Now Penn thought this solution should have been: “That solution, like the rest of this story, is in Reed’s head.”

Reed, however, kept blotting away Penn’s brush strokes. Reed felt that the solution should be: “And they found Rosetta, a nice girl whose head was the world’s best neck support, and Rosetta and Maria Marta fell madly in love, and they explained sexual harassment to the Finn Quintuplets, and Taryn confessed her feelings to Antonio, who let her down gently about his lack of reciprocity, and the two of them instead became casual friends with minimal awkwardness ever after.”

Penn felt that his lover, while cute, was a terrible writer. And so the man with head of pages and the man with the head of a brush argued about the ending for three dawns, until as a gag they started transcribing the best parts of their bickering, the sharpest lines and barbs, and goofiest ideas. It is surely for that reason that Jove showed up in their story, a radiant third-gendered young person with a god for a head, who fixed everything for everyone to everyone’s satisfaction.

If that seems like a disappointing ending, then you’ve likely guessed that by the third dawn, Reed and Penn had stopped taking their joint novel seriously. Co-authoring is very difficult for some people. Partners tend to get ahead of themselves.

Bathroom Monologue: Why do you own so many pillows?

Photo by GardenKings.

This is the Monarch of the Pillows. Unlike most animal monarchs, this is not the biggest or strongest, yet it must be the ruler because it always rests on the top of the arrangement. It is unique in that it is circular and possesses gold frills, and too small to be of any utility in sleeping. Lenin would smile to know that the Monarch of the Pillows is the first cast to the floor every night.

The twins it rests upon must be the arch-dukes or some form of Pillow Priesthood. They are a stark color against the Monarch, standing out like wings behind his back. They take flight second and third to the floor every night, unless one of us tosses or turns in our sleep, in which case we may pretend one is useful between our knees for a while. That delusion is always brought to end by the Priest-pillow being punted back to the carpet.

One would expect them to descend into a pyramid of pillows. Instead, the Priesthood rests against two larger pillows, of size to jut out and remain apparent despite being three rows back on the bed-top. These are some level of elite Laboring pillows, stuffed enough and of mass to support the head. Why they have not cast off their ruling classes and taken up sole occupancy of the bed is beyond me. I sleep with one; my wife with the other. We need no additional cushioning for most of the year.

And yet there is a fourth layer, a wall of Gargantuan pillows the size of my torso, stacked like soldiers behind the Laborer-class of pillows. These are clearly too large to serve for sleep; a shoulder jars, and the neck is never at a comfortable angle. Sometimes one is of use to cuddle during a depressing or romantic film, but only until my wife returns. They are as ornamental as the Monarch, yet considerably more pathetic, adding such volume to the pillow display while adding almost no actual aesthetic. Oftentimes other ornamental pillows are placed on top of them, adding a second tier to the ranks. It is my belief that the laborer pillows pity the Gargantuans, and shelter and hide them, knowing they have no right place in the world and yet trying to afford them continuation. These I drop on the floor last, out of shared sympathy for something so large and so useless.

I do not understand why there must be so many pillows on the bed. I have wondered, but I have never been so foolish as to ask.

Bathroom Monologue: Rorschark Attack

A Washington D.C. Rationalist Think Tank was on holiday at the undisclosed beach that day. Three employees saw it break the surface. Tammy saw a deck of playing cards. Guido saw a platter of fried shrimp. Ironically only one of the rationalists, Virginia Welsley, saw a shark fin. Even more ironically, she was the only rationalist in the water.

She swam like Hell. Tammy would attest that the shark went straight after Virginia, while Guido swears it swam in the opposite direction. Other beach-goers looked when they heard the screams, but the majority said they didn’t see a shark at all (while three saw an ice cream truck treading water behind Virginia).

When Virginia looked over her shoulder mid-breaststroke, she saw the gaping jaws of her third grade Math teacher – the one who always put impossible bonus questions at the end of his quizzes, presumably just to watch his pupils struggle and fail. That pungent memory felt apt as she swam for her life, and even more apt when she was seized in the middle-aged Math teacher’s overbite.

She was fortunate enough to awake, alive, in the local ICU. Apparently the shark had nearly ripped her in half. After much fighting with her doctors she was allowed to see the damage the shark had done to her torso. When the medical technician removed the bandages so that she could see the marks he instantly stepped back and crossed himself.

“It’s the Blessed Mother!” he exclaimed, looking at the bizarre shape of her bite wounds. She frowned at him and looked down.

“No it isn’t.” she said disdainfully. Then she squinted at the sutures. “Is… is that a Ferris wheel?”

Bathroom Monologue: Coldblooded Body Image Redux

“I try not to talk about it because it's unfashionable for men to have body image issues. Society is acutely aware of how unrealistic their demands are on women's appearances, but you never think how much pressure you put on a man. I spend hours in aerobics classes, arms behind my back and undulating on my belly. I've paid thousands for skin creams and mud treatments without a single scale to show for it. There's a surgery to bifurcate your tongue if you want to half-ass it. Truth is, science won't ever give you a reptilian mouth. The funding isn't there. It isn’t profitable enough. Now you're going to tell me I'm silly, that I'm too hard on myself, that nobody expects me to become a snake. Ride the rails in my shoes for just one day. How they stare at me while I’m trying to coil in my chair. They're all thinking, "What a worthless cobra he makes." But none of them are willing to help me become whole!”

BM: Was Lincoln's Depression the Fuel for Greatness?

Joshua Shenk wrote a book called Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. I read an article by him about it, not the book itself, but the title spurred something in me. The following is what it spurred.

The gnome was puzzled as soon as he departed the esophagus. His fellow gnomes were shoveling what looked like solid sadness into great ovens that burned around the president's stomach.

A slightly taller than average gnome approached him with a clipboard.

"You one of the new men?"

"Sir, yes, sir." The new gnome straightened his posture. "Reporting for duty in service of my country, sir."

"Good, good," said the superior gnome. "Fetch a shovel and get to burning that depression."

"Sir, is it constitutional to damage the emotions of the commander in chief, sir?"

The superior gnome frowned over his clipboard.

"That's why we're here, private."

"Sir, I read that depression was the cause of his greatness, sir."

"No, no. The fuel." The superior gnome came closer. "It's the fuel of his greatness. And what do you do with fuel?"

The new gnome kept his eyes forward.

"Sir, store it in something safe, sir?"

"You're a cute one. What do you do with gasoline? Burn it. What do you do with coal? Burn it."

"Sir, so what you're saying is..."

"What I'm saying is that if we want this president to get anything done we've got to find all his depression and set it on fire. Now come on. He's got to emancipate the slaves and win the biggest war this country's ever seen! It's going to take a lot of depression."

"And cause it, I'd assume.” And then he remembered to add, “Sir!"

The superior gnome pointed to the nearest oven, which billowed with a smoky melancholy.

"That is not our problem! Now fetch a shovel or start cleaning the stoves. The grease that builds up in there is figuratively and literally bad for morale."

Bathroom Monologue: Death Becomes They

People have died for as long as imagination has existed. Death is a franchise that services every religion and spirituality, but it's more of a commerce thing. When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died, he became a set of box seats at an undisclosed opera house. When Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup died, he became a song – I can't tell you which because of afterlife copyright issues, but it's a good one. Underrated, actually.

Many artists become works. Ella Fitzgerald became a tune that homeless children in Hudson, New York used to entertain each other, while Rodney Dangerfield became a Yo Mama joke. It's hard to become your own eulogy, and thus it's a prized afterlife.

But it's not the only option. William Penn became a doorstop, which seems blasphemous to some, unless you were privy to some of the conversations he let drafts into.

Albert Einstein became an equation, and not the one you'd expect. He became "2 + 2 = ?" on the first test that a young boy was taking. That boy is a physicist now. There's a bureau looking into whether that's permissible.

Lao Tzu became a road, but one that cannot be walked.

You don't have to be famous for your death to mean something. I'm fairly certain the telegraph, electric battery and iPad were built out of people you've never heard of. A funny kid who never did more than sketch clouds became the kite Benjamin Franklin flew to test his theory of lightning – or he turned into the folk tale about it. I'll have to look that up.

Often the living do the dead wrong. A river of starvation victims became an ocean of grain – though because there is no reincarnation, live people must harvest and deliver that grain in this life. They must or they dishonor what the dead become.

Many people die angry or hurt, which is why there are so many bullets in the world. Every modern war has been a thunderstorm of the deceased yelling about their unfair shake. Anyone would rather become vengeance, but you can't become an intangible. That's just not possible. Your physicality begets a physicality, and it's your lot to become a bullet fired at the wrong person. The living don't even know how unhappy murder makes the world.

You can make the dead sing in sowing a better world from their contributions, or you can make them regret they ever existed. It is all in how you use their memory.

Bathroom Monologue: Frankenstein's Monsters

When they heard what Frankenstein was up to the town put up quite a ruckus. Anyone without a flashlight (and there were quite a few, as they hadn’t been invented yet) lit a stick on fire and called it a torch. Dozens of howling fire-bearers in jockey shorts hustled up to the gates of Castle Frankenstein and beat on the doors until the Doctor showed his face.

“There is no — ” he started to lie, but was cut off by the town Point Guard.

“Germany hasn’t won the gold medal in basketball in years and we hear you’ve got a seven-foot undead countryman up there. Can he come out and play?”

“You can’t…” The Doctor paused. “Wait, you want to what?”

“We want to see if he can slam dunk. We’ve never had a player who could reach the net without a step-ladder, and that’s illegal in the Olympics.”

Dr. Frankenstein kept most of his body braced behind the door, but poked his face out to stare at the jockey-shorted rioters.

“You don’t want to kill him?”

“Listen,” said the Point Guard, “we aren’t very tall and we don’t bathe often, but we’re very technically sound.”

The Doctor put a hand on his hip.

“I didn’t know there was a local basketball team.”

“Yes, advertising is difficult without moveable type. We’re buying a machine on lay-away, but all we have right now is the letter A, and eventually we get bored of stamping everything with the same vowel.”

“So you don’t want to kill my creation?”

“Heavens no! We want to kill that insipid American team that wins all the time. President James Monroe drives the lane like it’s his doctrine. It’s terribly frustrating. That’s why we need your giant. Let’s see him bowl over a man stitched together from the best German bodies available.”

The Doctor laughed nervously. “Here I thought you were coming to kill the Monster…”

“Monster?” the Point Guard exclaimed and looked back at the crowd. Their faces lit up in unison.

Another in the crowd cried, “That’s brilliant! We needed a team name.”

The Point Guard thrust his arm in the air. “Here’s to Frankenstein’s Monsters!”

Then the jockey-shorted peasants began pumping their torches and chanting, “Mon-sters! Mon-sters!”

Except in German.

This story was originally published at Every Day Fiction.

Bathroom List: 16 Things That Are Not True About Salvador Dali

1. The real Salvador Dali had a secret lair in the base of a dormant volcano somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

2. The volcano was not actually dormant.

3. The real Salvador Dali had three pet ocelots that he trained to alert him when the volcano was waking.

4. There were actually four ocelots, but the fourth ocelot oscillated between our plane and a more fruited one, and so could not be counted in my father's census.

5. A Salvador Dali was a founder of the Census of Dark Artists and recruited my father for a living wage.

6. A Salvador Dali's "Persistence of Memory" was a self-portrait, done of a self from a parallel plane of existence where he had more ambition.

7. A Salvador Dali drowned this parallel self in a vat of unused cooking oil.

8. The real Salvador Dali collected vats of unused cooking oil to preserve their unuse.

9 & 10. The real Salvador Dali did not spend his final years in Spain; a body double did, and spent its final years there securing vats of unused cooking oil.

11 &12. The real Salvador Dali did not flee the Spanish Civil War; his body double did. The real Salvador Dali painted the Spanish Civil War into existence and could not flee until 1939, when he finished it.

13. A second body double still operates for a living wage.

14. A body double of Andre Breton continues to persecute this hypothetical second body double of Salvador Dali to this day.

15. A body double of Andre Breton cannot sufficiently slay the hypothetical second body double of Salvador Dali because it fears volcanoes.

16. A body double of Andre Breton is not allergic to ocelots.

Bathroom Monologue: No More Starlight

She can't paint. She can't imagine what she'd paint. She can't imagine which side to start from, what stroke or shade to apply, or what to feel. All that's making her heart rattle is other people's feelings, hypothetical reactions to creations she's too afraid to try. The world is prying the roof off her house and reaching in to strangle her imagination.

There is only one thing to do on foggy nights like this.

She visits the door of her one-room apartment. It is closed. She opens it as deliberately as you can open a door. She closes it as deliberately as –

-          not as deliberately as you could,

-          not as deliberately as Pierre-August Renoir could,

-          not as deliberately as Corinne Vionnet could,

-          not as deliberately as the unmatchable and far too young Amy Shackleton could,

– her Freshman art teacher could, but explicitly and precisely as deliberately as she could. This makes the world go away so quickly that she leaves the drapes open.

Leaves losing shades into a singular dark green, and then to utter silhouette. They waver against the overcast sky, some clouds thickening, grey on grey violence hiding where the moon might be rising. No starlight to bother her, and soon no grey-on-grey, only a thing that feels black. Her windowpanes become plastic white outlines on a ceaseless void.

There is no lamplight. There is no starlight. No cars backfire, no distant bridges cajole, and there are no stars in the sky because they are all too far away to reach her. To reach here. The world goes away. Her apartment doesn't rest on it; she lives on her own asteroid hurtling through a private bit of space. Would Renoir have liked The Next Generation?

Space abides no sound. It abides no neighbors, no debtors, no family angry at her for things she never wanted or intended to do with her adulthood. Her little apartment and perfect studio is so far away from any celestial body that gravity has to give up, and with it, the weight of all things social drifts and evaporates. A physiological metaphor plays across her shoulders and she feels that lift that's supposed to be cliché and that is actually so welcome it stirs tears. She dabs at them with a paintbrush, because then –

-          then she can stalk up to the canvas and look it in the eyes she's yet to birth.

-          then she can work without thinking of the verb.

-          then she can sleep the way the verb out to work.

– then she can open the door and face the world. She paints the knob first. It'll be avocado green.

Bathroom Monologue: Infestation of Nightmares

Every home in the burg had its share of nightmares. They'd settled out on the slope of an ominous forest, and the looming mountains lengthened night by a half an hour every summer, so it was their own fault. They understood. They accepted responsibility, and considered the number of nightmares that crept into their basements and attics and air conditioning systems to be the price for country living. The rest of the world wasn't exactly a peach.

Mr. Rabbani had lived on the haunted slope for two decades. He kept an array of lamps on starting an hour before dusk and never slept with his feet jutting from the covers. These were reasonable precautions for his mortgage rate. That his only neighbor was an empty house seemed downright funny around Halloween.

Yet one November, Mr. Finkelstein moved into that empty house. It was three days of a veritable haunting, with all the clatter of moving furniture and groaning middle-aged men. Mr. Finkelstein had only a fuzzy notion of how many nightmares lived in the burg, and so he lost a few toenails to one on his first night. The neighbors saw him through his bathroom window around dawn, clutching a flashlight and barricading himself in.

Bathroom Monologue: LIVE from the Shoe

There was an old lady who lived in a shoe. She conceived what can only be considered an implausible number of children for a woman who lived in a cramped one-bedroom, but there they all were, living in abject poverty, thirteen people living where only five toes belonged. Yet this poverty did not last for long. Not in the age of Youtube.

One video was all it took for her soleful family to viral, and for CNN and Wired to herald her as an economic genius, making shoe-life work in a bad economy. Warren Buffett invited her to lunch, and she hosted the first-ever TED Talk from a Footlocker, on the wisdom of laces and how to expand your personal spaces. Before the end of the fiscal quarter, she was a real estate tycoon, able to flip any property into a spacious dream house.

She only started as an old lady who lived in a shoe. She was a visionary, and I believe she invented the Tardis.

Bathroom List: 6 Unused Gun Arguments

1. Nobody ever ate so many handguns that he died of heart disease. Why don’t we ban McDonalds?

2. Nobody ever fell into a gun show and was bitten to death by AK-47s. How come we don’t ban zoos?

3. Nobody ever got too close to a bag of guns and found himself swarmed by pistols until he was stung to death. Why don’t we ban bees?

4. Nobody ever drowned in a pile of guns. How come we don’t ban oceans?

5. Nobody ever jumped off the top of a sniper rifle because his stock portfolio tanked. Why don’t we ban skyscrapers?

6. Nobody ever got skin cancer from a rocket launcher being too bright. Why don’t we ban the sun?

Bathroom Monologue: What were they building?

Two jars of rarified air

Two jars of common air

One jar of the wind untamed

The unused speech for Richard Nixon if the moon landing failed

The left knee of an acclaimed diplomat

My seven favorite episodes of Gigantor from when I was six years and two months old

Three locks of an Amazon leader’s hair

Four handfuls of earth from the Underground Railroad

One pinhead of angels

My father’s unconditional love

My mother’s borscht recipe

One willing test subject/heir

Bathroom Monologue: No Such Thing as Sex-Positive

The gentler sex - charity for the drunken brother, contempt for the unfortunate sister
via Library of Congress

Are you sex-positive? No, because no one is, though many people think they are.

It sounds fun and liberating and progressive, as many mirages do. According to a preposterously trusted source, “The sex-positive movement is an ideology which promotes and embraces open sexuality with few limits beyond an emphasis on safe sex and the importance of informed consent.”

I learned of the movement this morning, and having skimmed a Wikipedia article, now know everything about it. That is why I regret to inform you that all sex-positive thought is a sham. You may ask, “Why? Surely boinking with informed consent is great and gooey.”

Gooey though it be, it makes everyone a rape victim. Everyone in the world started out a virgin, and virgins don’t actually know what sex is like until they’ve done it. Therefore every first time has been under uninformed consent, and every sex-positive sexer who kept doing it afterward was merely burying the trauma. It’s not informed consent. It’s Stockholm Syndrome with lube.

From this day forward I shall be sex-negative, which I now need to make up and adhere to with unwavering virility, and consent to no other ideology. Stand beside me, brothers and sisters. If you want to. If you know what standing beside me is like before you do it.