Saturday, February 28, 2009

skit #58: we have it all

"Yeh, we have it all. Twleve-hunnerd-an-twelve types, fifdy-thousand-an-fordy-eight tools," Walt knew instinctively, as a duck innumerately knows her clutch count.

He stepped aside, revealing his palace. Storage shelves and holsters cascaded fixture-after-fixture to a remote infinitesimal point where some cornucopian secret must have slept, for something laid on every surface and hung on every hook. Nothing aged among his lustrous inventory of nonbiodegradable greases and stainless steels. Fluorescent lamps glowed overhead, causing all the facets and carats of his pragmatic jewels to glint and wink with the answers to riddles not yet encountered.

For all problems, a tool was stocked, each organized in superfluous triplicates: by size, then by fastener, then by thread-pitch; arrayed in every increment from invisible to audacious; paralleled glissandos carried on in a fugue by the screwdrivers, the Allen wrenches, the pliers. The potential of what could be constructed was immense, perhaps limitless. There were three-men torque wrenches to tighten transcontinental steam engine bolts, pliers weer than crossed eyelashes to temper mainsprings, and tools to tinker with all the other mundane contraptions through which one copes with space or time.

"Here's the catalog of spanners, drill bits, all of whatever. You go an find what you want. When you're ready, come get me right over there."

Walt's face was ancient, its reptilian features lazily webbed together to ensure they would not be severed easily, from his earlobes, to the corners of his ever-smiling lips, to his full-bellied eyelids. He was certainly born before the premises were built. Some think he was born before its tools were invented, and before humans had conferred on a genetic blueprint. When he fabulates he lost a fistfight to his once-ago-lover's boyfriend, a violently jealous bandsaw, suspicious listeners reckon it is more likely Walt was born even before the conception of the opposable thumb.

"I was there once, just like you. Not knowing what tools for what job. So trust I'll turn and answer politely without giving you no sass. Just ask."

He had seen it all, from transcontinental steam engines to pocketwatches. Now Walt lived easily. Should the world fall into disrepair, he had the tool. Should he find himself broken, he had time. He interleaved his eight fingers patiently.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

skit #57: one wayward penguin

There are no trees for twigs in the Antarctic wasteland, so nests are built of stones like half-stacked cairns. A pox of pebble-brimmed depressions blemishes the evenness of the rookery's skin, and over it smears a beautiful rash of black and white penguins; Here, the flock lives austerely without warmth nor flight nor color. Peeping chicks bury under the blubber of huddling mothers, protected from the furious wind and snow.

The colony needs food, so the fathers waddle off like crippled parishioners late for mass. Seven feet beneath their webbed toes swim schools of unwitting crystal krill, but the frozen sea does not break for three kilometers north of the rookery. The coastline lies north of here, but so does the Far East and the Old West and everything in between. The only thing standing south are the fishless mountains, and past that, the South Pole.

One misguided penguin totters south, south, south, through the deserted ice sheets; south, south, south, through the spires of frozen volcanic vapors; south, south, south, through the human encampments. The humans belong in Antarctica as much as they belong on the moon. The penguin will never reach the South Pole, being there no fish in those fishless mountains, and will surely expire en route. He marches with compulsory progression, like a spark along a dynamite fuse, in the only direction his forward may take him.

When one penguin parts from his flock into the seductive arms of oblivion, confusion foments. Ornithologists then doubt their understanding of migratory patterns, astronomers then doubt their understanding of geomagnetism, sociologists then doubt their understanding of animal instinct, and statisticians then doubt the accuracy of research techniques. When one wayward penguin steers astray, so do his followers.

One such detour:

From atop snow bluffs,
a parka-swaddled field researcher, Märda Lundqvist, documents the penguin's unprecedented excursion and publishes a paper describing the anomaly.

From the depths of a quiet library,
a tweed-jacketed behaviorist, Archibald Parlington, reads Lundqvist's work and publishes a paper describing the evolutionary advantage of curiosity.

From the apex of an ivory tower, a lily-skinned philosopher, Gregor Imov, learns reads Parlington's work and publishes a paper describing celebrity as the product of novelty.

From the southerliest point in the South Pole, a wayward penguin reads the Imov's paper and rediscovers purpose in his inane pursuit. He spins at the South Pole like a magnetic needle, shanghaiing all of his followers onto his illogical carousel.

skit #56: a throne

The lord acquired a throne, as luxurious as any lord deserves, certainly: backed with a scrimshawed bas-relief to retell his heroic struggle to lordship, adorned with gold-gilded swirls signifying the rich futures that await him, upholstered with Bactrian fleece to receive his heir-bearing loins. It is not subtly elevated to command superiority from whomever besieges him while upon it. It is vastly elevated, unbesiegably high, higher than the height of one man, of ten men, of fifty men. The throne sits the lord so high it distorts men to motes.

From this throne, the lord can see all his subjects. He can see his vassals, their serfs; his serfs, their families; his families, their children; his children. He can see past the tithes they pay, past the oaths of fealty they swear, past the trivia his closest ministers report.

When he squints, their anonymous subjects live lives. A butcher dresses a succulent pheasant which he will eat alone, a runt swings a scythe hoping to be recognized as a man, a nun purposely misconstrues the strict meaning of chastity, a vagrant tiles the bottom of his begging bowl with suggestive alms, a mother delivers a daughter prophesied to compose riddles that will flummox thinkers for eons, all bustling below him.

When he squints further, he observes things which transcend vision. The butcher's son abandoned him for the navy, the runt has convinced himself his beard is sprouting, the nun keeps her Husband in mind, the vagrant starves in hopes of marring his lord's benevolent reputation, the mother wanted only an obedient child to help with chores.

And when he squints even further, he finds no delay or separation from his subjects. Everything is intimate. He feels closer than goatskin gloves, closer than lovers' whispers, closer than the plague's rosettes, closer than the passion of inebriety, closer than scrutiny of morals. So close, the lord could not tell himself from the butcher, the runt, the nun, the vagrant, the mother.

Yet
when he squints even further, he rediscovers the familiar and ineffable intimacy that he feels as being himself, but it is projected upon his subjects -- to be oneself as another. He feels closer, and understands them in illiterate and innumerate ways, past description, past empiricism. And he is saturated in their feelings, past sympathy, past empathy. He is very close now, singular with his subjects' lives, no longer seated in his luxurious throne high above his fiefdom, with no hopes of ever dismounting again.

Monday, February 23, 2009

skit #55: the final niggling detail

Once widowed, Regina Howler wished to return to her life prior to marriage. Life was unwieldy and unnatural without her prehensile tail, as any monkey would agree.

From birth, her parents, as ascending members of the Amazonian gentry, wished to make use of this fortuitous daughter. They conditioned her for a specific nubility. Marrying Regina into the Old World Monkeys could be arranged for the token dowry of a bushel of bananas and equated to at least a few rungs on the social ladder.

She underwent etiquette lessons at charm school; Regina was to become a lady of manners. She effortlessly managed the china-clattering tea trays with her dexterous paws and the capricious codes of conduct with her simian whimsy. The game amused her: Sir this, madam that, tuck this, fold that, curtsy, wipe, blush, fan, so on. She performed her role as a woman impeccably. The final niggling detail, her tail, was snipped and its absence sutured.

Her parents found her a real Man named Roy Human, a son of an affluent if eccentric family. He was as hairy as a bonbon dropped in a barbershop; And as laconic as one too, for a creature blessed with a tongue articulate enough for speech.

The wedding ceremony was typical. The honeymoon was typical. Their love was typical. Even their household was once typical.


Despite his heritage, Roy was no nincompoop. If the bride's family did not imply Regina's species, her idiosyncrasies left no question. He knew he'd married a monkey. In the private comfort between spouses, matrimonial trust allowed to her live without acting. She scratched readily at fleas, salvaged melon rinds from the rubbish, dangled from the balcony's balustrades, masturbated as nonchalantly as one picks a scab. Then she broke loose and claimed the neighbors' homes for Roy by deed of urine.

Roy retorted as an ape, with heavy brow and heavier fists. He embarked on a campaign of brutality his family was historically known to relish. When Regina took refuge at upon the chandelier, Roy fetched his ladder from his toolshed. When Regina threw fists, Roy wrapped his thumb around her wrists. Alas, she was no match for him and endured his savage discourse until Alzheimer's left him knowing not whom nor what nor why he was to abuse.

He died. It is known a widow remains after the death of Man. Her marriage to Man took her tail, but did not return it even in death; She relinquished the wedding ring, Roy's home, the neighbors' urine-claimed homes, the abitrary behavioral regimens, and his endearing battery.

She went on as a monkey without her tail.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

skit #54: the instruments of their debate

One Mr Leslie and another Mr Leslie stood ankle-deep in Weehawken snow, a case of the sniffles a distant threat only to whomever stood vindicated. The immediate danger posed by the snow was its erasure everything aside from Mr Leslie (a gentleman), Mr Leslie (another gentleman), Fr Tibbler (the witness), the point of contention (the latter Mr Leslie's nobility), and their instruments of debate (a pair of rarely-used dueling pistols); The two gentleman saw only their twenty paces of separation.

Ever since Burr offed Hamilton, Weehawken became a fashionable dueling locale.
Gentlemen exercised their First and Second Amendment rights often, dispensing opinions in 14g plumbic doses. This fad attracted macabre entrepreneurs of all professions: botanists for the widows, distillers for the victors, undertakers for the undone, surgeons for the unlimbed, and gun dealers for the unarmed. Equality grew affordable; The esteemed title of Gentleman cost the price of a pistol.

Every injustice could be remedied by satisfaction. The world had gone crass, and there were many dishonorable foes that might offend an upstanding gentleman's sensibilities: murderers, rapists, adulterers, blackmailers, pickpockets, slanderers, liars, ruffians, inebriates, quibblers, derelicts, yokels.


The two Leslie gentleman were misters of the same loins. Subtleties noticed only by twins (between themselves) and narcissists (in themselves) eluded the Weehawkenians. Society saw Mr Leslie and Mr Leslie as two people by count of bodies. But Mr Leslie and Mr Leslie saw all their differences, all the moles they were born with, the scars accrued over time. And they intimately knew all the differences they contrived, the preferences for tenors or baritones, for ascots or cravats.

A third Mr Leslie, their long dead great-grandfather, hailed from a past age when firearms and diatribes finished each other' thoughts. Mr Leslie's dueling pistol set remained mounted above his fireplace, a delicate reminder of politeness to any guests he hosted. Mr Leslie slew many gentlemen over his years -- 'Forty-nine and three-fifths,' boasted the Leslie family's yarn. Past his fighting years and rife with battle wounds, an insolent fop mocked Mr Leslie's limp. They dueled; Mr Leslie perished and the fop limped home.

Among his estate, he bequeathed his legendary dueling pistol set to '[his] irreplaceably unique great-grandsons.' Mr Leslie and Mr Leslie both sought Mr Leslie's heirloom. After a petty run of spats, thefts, and slaps, the brothers agreed to let the dueling pistols decide their new master.

Ankle-deep in Weehawken snow, Fr Tibbler prompted: 'Ready, aim, fire.' A misfire and a misfire. Mr Leslie and Mr Leslie returned unharmed to their homes, an ass and an ass, proving nothing to anyone, defending no one's honor, the pistols prefering rust and disuse to exchanging bullets between t
wins or brothers, brothers or friends, friends or men, men or gentlemen.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

skit #53: she awoke old

Children are bestowed with abundant reveries, and so were they expendable in the economy of young Matilda's mind. She needed only concrete dreams. She was born glum and grew grave. Her heart pumped frugally and her face stayed dry.

Four is a suggestible age. Had she been swarmed by ladybugs or damselflies, she may have become a prima donna, an entomologist. But it was Haley and the Leonids who beckoned Matilda to join them, so to them she would go. She began her preparations immediately: she exercised holding her breath for minutes on end, she learned all the zodiacs' seasons and myths, she constructed a rocketship from an aluminum trashcan and automotive parts. In it, she habituated herself to the anticipated claustrophobia and loneliness of interstellar travel.

She learned the orphaned light she dreamt upon may come from stars whom had extinguished long ago. She wondered which dreams never shone on the earth, if her deserved dream idled in the gut of a black hole.

So, naturally, she became an astronaut and obtained her mission.

Her rocketship stole away from earth with languid ease. She exchanged some professional words with Mission Control. She had trained for many years, so she slept for many years, unconscious to the sidereal suggestions of dreams meant for others. She heeded only to her dream in the black hole.

She awoke old. Further professional words with Mission Control established she and they had grown irrelevant to each other. The Mission Control team she launched with had aged, retired, died. The new team mispronounced her name and she ascertained she'd been forgotten. Her mission had been abandoned but communications were maintained as a courtesy to her sacrifice. She was bid thanks and adieu.

Ahead, a vast blot of nothingness awaited. Matilda approached the event horizon.
In her last moments, time slowed down or sped up infinitely. She gave herself and she was spaghettified. All the starlight slurred and spun together with herself. At her final coordinates she remains today, so very close to an arbitrary dream: known by none to be with it, known by none to be without it.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

skit #52: his dimensions, mass, dietary habits, lifespan

Olia squatted in mud for thirty-seven hours, sleeping two for every eight. Her patience and binoculars finally delivered her from squalor into her subject's parlor. Quite a dapper cock greeted her. His ebony feathers curled like tar-slicked tuxedo tails. On his head sat a rococo headdress -- part papal crown, part potted marigolds. His iridescent plumage alternated in mauve and maroon pinstripes. He loosed a curious mewl when picking a ripe coffee bean from the bush, and he loosed a guttural and lusty belch when courting a hen.

He began the mating ritual by clearing the forest floor of any twigs. He arranged a crude circle of snail shells to delineate his amorous arena. There he stood statuesquely; As Olia jostled her camera to make sure the film hadn't jammed, he exploded. His feet shuffled precisely like stenography. His head rolled slow coy loops. His splayed wing feathers undulated hypnotically. All these gestures carried on as he spun in tight drill-bit spirals, warbling madly. Olia briefly forgot whether she or the hen was being seduced.

Olia eventually spent the last rubles of her grant, so she left Papua to return to Russia with her findings.

No entries in her copy (or any fellow's copy) of the Royal Avian Compendium resembled the star of her thirty-seven hour film
. Perhaps this was a rare form of melanism or dwarfism, though none of the possible nor impossible mutations could produce such a bird. Her research fellows were also uncertain of the bird's species; One fellow mentioned a premier position in her publication's byline might inspire him. If he was indeed undiscovered, Olia had no inkling as to how a bird so oblivious to discretion went unnoticed by the ornithological community.

She began identifying the bird with obtuse qualifications and scientific jargon. She described the colors in terms of sterile paint swatches rather than in the ethereal hues of heavenly bodies. She choreographed the dance-steps in terms of Labanotation rather than noted for their persuasive carnality. She approximated the rarity in terms of an observation-to-sighting ratio rather than by her undeserved serendipity
. She transliterated his relentless lovesong to 'iririr-cwar-ir gwar' when crude and 'siliti-siliti gwar' when sultry. Many of the blanks she estimated: his dimensions, mass, dietary habits, lifespan.

Her submission was promptly accepted for inclusion by the Royal Avian Compendium. Her bird stood center-frame in a monochromatic picture labeled
Paradisaea Oliae, just as unique as any entry under Birds of Paradise.

Monday, February 16, 2009

skit #51: he somehow slept soundly

Tomorrow at dusk, just as it went every day, the goods would be exported and replaced with identical imports fit for sale by middlemen. Nothing in the trading post stayed at rest except Rimbaud. He somehow slept soundly on the pallets of firearms and sacks of coffee beans. His biggest buyer, the governor of Harar, recognized both the Italians and fatigue as unwelcome intruders. The war fetched Rimbaud a modest income, as all theatres need props.

He had heard no peep from his muse
for ten or eleven years, gracing him with the autonomy to live unleashed and uninspired. During those three years long ago, he glutted the muse with enough poetic fervor to make her pop, just as flexed muscles burst mosquitoes. She had retired utterly, leaving his letters to Charleville circumspect and terse, leaving his mercantile inventory accurate and obvious. He had regained control his voice: monotone but his own.

The affairs, the absinthe, the hashish, and, worst, the histrionic poetry were once among his habits.
Some men, Rimbaud had witnessed, spent whole lives shackled to such doom and dismay. He no longer questioned why when bovine men graze on wild grasses some should be pricked by burrs of poetry and others be left to ruminate peaceably, for he had popped his muse.

Once, a camera arrived among the imports. Press the button and reality was conveyed with no possibility of derangement unless a thumb accidentally smudged the lens. Rimbaud took a self-portrait of himself alone. He once snapped a photograph of old refrains, but even revealed by his albumen print he could not decipher her verse.

He lived the good life society had promised him. Money came effortlessly as though he deserved it. He entertained a pride of nubile Nubians, and they entertained him; One might be suitable for motherhood. Perhaps he could raise a boy, an engineer, someone practical, someone he could bring up as best and as right as possible. It was something to think about. Rimbaud ruminated peaceably.

The gates of Harar gaped openly and Rimbaud smiled.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

skit #50: Slippy Sally

Slippy Sally knew it all had been used before.

The former-Yugoslavian army pawned surplus military equipment to any bidder. Once high-quality, now frayed, the hemp ropes sold quickly. The buying shepherd tethered his flock for sheering and slaughter. The gentle lambs put no stress on the rope, bleating for the sake of bleating. The sheep-in-the-know (of which there were few, by nature of their education) would buck and flail when the noose was slipped around their necks, be it for sheering or slaughter. One January, liberated on dandelion wine, the shepherd emancipated a third of his flock along with half his rope. Though he deeply regretted his lapse into altruism the next day, he should know the Belgrade circus made fine use of his rope.

The fly bar was made from hickory. The ringmaster fashioned it out of an old walking stick, the one he wielded to discipline the misbehaving lions and the misbalancing bears.
A savage chronicle was nicked into its length with tooth marks and contusions. The weatherproofing had flaked off, though leaving its surface smooth for callused hands to grasp, it was varnished with a palpable malice that made Slippy Sally wince. When she swings, she must cling for her life to this weapon. Something so brutal shan't be used for something so graceful.

Flippy Filipe extended his fingers, the mendacious little fingers that fondled her after Sundays' shows and other circus nymphs the remaining days. Of course she saw the lout in congress with the bearded lady, their mustaches and pubes amorously braided behind the elephants' stall. The fink swore to Sally that love-cove was theirs and theirs alone. She did not mind the other women; In fact, they knew his schedule: the knife thrower before Sally, the painted lady after. He acted so imperceivably sly as to be insulting. All the ladies gossiped about his inverted prick, clucking and cackling in the women's trailer. 'No wonder his willy seeks freaks like us,' squeaked Lilliputian Lilly. There, on the trapeze, his extended hands gesticulating, 'Trust me!'

The trapeze came and went in the predictable parabolas all acrobats expect, tracing the fatalistic movements of a pendulum. Somewhere, the trapeze could be caught. Elsewhere, there was only air. Sally swung. The crowd groaned when she let go.


There are three things that could happen:

Slippy Sally released and missed the rope, missed the flybar, missed Filipe's mendacious little fingers. She died, unable cope with the flaws of the trapeze. The crowd stopped groaning, mourned, and remembered her as a foolish girl.

Slippy Sally released and caught Filipe's mendacious little fingers. The trapezist exists only in grace, immune to flaws. That night, the crowd believed in perfection.

Slippy Sally released and missed the rope, missed the flybar, missed Filipe's mendacious little fingers, missed the promise of descent, missed the deadly ground. She had trained to intercept the trapeze, but there are things to catch beyond flaws and flawlessness.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

skit #49: an approximate blackness

I was not always a jaguar. Once I was the terror of the New World, an apparition of no name nor rival. Then my invisibility, the incredible black cloak I had been blessed with, was stripped from me.

My jungle is vast and, yes, can be measured in acres; but it's true immensity is in its obscurity.
Canopies cast shadows so great and persistent that a stray sunbeam, on the rare occasion it should reach the undergrowth, stagnates cluelessly unsure of what to do with itself. Tortuous ivies indiscriminately induct everything into its pervasive folds. Blossoms gush nectars, perhaps toxic or perhaps panacean. There are extant yet hidden rarities, and there are latent mysteries yet to be discovered. There are confusing moods orphaned from any civilities. There are things I could only show you, never tell you, for they do not abide by your taxonomies.

Then, slowly, I met them. So pathetic were they! The trappers imitated my stealth so as to outfoot the clumsiest of my prey, peccaries and capybaras. On occasion, I would modestly recompense myself with a human babe or two for my lesson
.

And so naive were they! The intrepid shamen partook of my rituals to perceive the world past simple predation and prey, past simple survival and death. When they licked their lips brimmed with ayahuasca and vomit, I admit I began to think of myself as a wise mother teaching her children of the vivid flavors concealed in life.

I taught the natives as though they were my cubs.

Their idolization was flattering. Undetected in my pelt, I watched them from the lowest boughs of a cashew tree. The warriors romped frenzied romps about the campfire, impersonating my growl and pantomiming my posture, before massacring a rival tribe, a deserving lot of pompous eagle-worshippers.
After being invoked prior to many such victories, I learned the elders had deified me. They told legends of me I never denied. I still regret I accepted this promotion.

As their obsession grew insatiable, my celebrity meant my demise. I no longer eavesdropped on their rituals, whose surfeit of reverence made me long for anonymity. The princes had taken to wearing eagle feathers, and with the eagle-worshippers vanquished, the princes needed new trophies of power. One conquers oneself, then one's fellow man, then one's god. I never saw these princes face to face, only their retainers whom I dispatched in mobs of five, of ten, of twenty. Every man I slew increased the desire for my hide. My doom was inevitable; To reject my reputation was to relinquish my pelt, to which I was spiritually and physically attached. Instead, I disappeared from the world of man.

I have left a void where I was, but man has replaced me with an approximate blackness. Now I am a coat-of-arms. Now I am a luxury automobile. Now I am a
football team. I am simple and defined. I hold a tenancy at the zoo and a tenureship in the dictionary.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

skit #48: and so did their continents

He was virile. He was known to have felled nine aurochs by his lonesome, to have made peace with the wild dogs. Draped behind his loincloth lurked his immense patrilineage, some rumoring him to be the son of the Sun. If survivability was measured in inches, he was by far the fittest of any hunter.

She was wide-hipped. During droughts, she wet-nursed the dry mothers' children with her effluent milk. Where she walked, she precipitated:
birds and mice wound her hair into nests, her sweat pooled into fishing holes, her droppings provided banquets for flies and beetles, and her menses gave root to sapling shoots.

Fire was still untamed and forbidden then, a punishment loosed by brooding gods, so heat was scarce. It was raining. He and she took cover under nominal tent of ribs, hide, and brush. Their colluding pheromones coaxed them to conjoin for warmth. It stopped raining after many days.

The herds migrated eastwards, from the then barren flats to the alfalfaed steppes. So he and the hunters followed, but she did not.
The east was frigid and perilous, and she was moored by her eighth month of pregnancy. The same curious impulses that made the mothers mothers brought them to found a village. They erected huts and halls. Each mother kindly repaid her birth-debt with a fertile daughter of her own. And the daughters had daughters who had daughters, proliferating necessary warmth throughout their village. Over thousands of years they grew to have aqueducts and monasteries and auto dealerships.

The herds dwindled, and the hunters atrophied down to skin-and-sinew ghosts who survived meekly on grubs. They trudged through the undead tundra where sometimes no meat nor sun would be seen for so long they reasoned they must also be dead. They slew and consumed the few creatures they saw, sometimes elk, sometimes other hunters. Dense blizzards utterly negated sight and sound leading each hunter to believe himself to be the last man alive. Thousands of years of white. Further east, colors returned to the earth -- greens and blonds. The hunters found queer beasts unlike those they originally sought, but savory nonetheless.

He and she drifted apart and so did their continents. She stayed herself, he himself.

Tectonics had split them once with a real distance. Categories that had been contrived over the centuries were revealed as quaint abstractions when compared to the warmth between two bodies' flesh.
The castes, the races, the religions, the genders, the creeds signified nothing. All diaspora have a cradle to return to.

His journey, which was once 19,000 years of arduous and unforgiving schlepping, took 19 hours by 747.

They met again in the Mesopotamian bazaar. Before there were dead kings to memorialize, coins to print them on, or economies to spend them in, they had known each other. Lovers know each other in and out of costume. Curly hair, elegant chins, stubby fingers, lilting voices, sepia skin, limpid irises, and all the other masks in the world's wardrobe disguised nothing.


Sunday, February 8, 2009

skit #47: his mother taught him the same

You begin to presume, but your mother taught you not to judge.

He might be anyone. His hair, greasy from mousse or neglect; his skin, somewhere between sunbathed and weather-chapped; his confidence, from a 401K or 40oz. It's not who he is, but what he is doing. On he goes, rambling to himself of things grandiose, inane, honest. You can just make out his hoarse, lisped voice.

"Pregnancy is no different from cancer. You know, babies are kinda like tumors."
"You can start to hear colors nineteen octaves above middle C. Burgundy -- mm, so very fine!"

His large person eclipses a petite woman strolling in the shadow of his starboard side. They both look enthralled in their eccentric brand of badinage. They laugh gleefully after each exchange, delighted by the sheer exchange of words.

Soon, their chatter is no longer exchanged but overlaps. Her meek voice comes in range of your ear. Strange, she must feel more comfortable speaking Mandarin and he in English; Yes, they're both bilingual with preferences for their native tongues. Their chatter grows furiouser and furiouser, but with complete independence. It is apparent they aren't conversing at all. They both ramble to themselves. She leaves, clambering into a monastery.

The man you've followed turns right, heretically defying against the Red Hand of the crosswalk. His hair whips in the trade winds that stir in the financial district, revealing a bluetooth headset. The abstract jargon he rattles off is due to echo in an executive-fraught conference hall on the 99th floor of one of the skyscrapers high above. His steady gait fearlessly plows through the traffic and crowds. He has mastered this city.

You follow him into the garage of the Decker & Co headquarters. His pace and dictation quicken, clearly late to assume his daily duties as comptroller. He must drive a nice car. Probably has his own space. But you realize there's no reception amid all this cement. The blue indicator does not shine; The bluetooth headset is turned off. He manages to use the lavatory before security requests he leave the premises.

The man tells you he believes himself to be the character of a story, with all he says to have significance to an invisible audience. That his life is rife with misleading symbols that he must translate into misleading words. His words have meaning to someone not present.

You become privy to learn the story in which he will star contains no such parlor tricks.


It is true, the man is talking to himself. He tells you he is his own best company. You would tell him he should find himself to be nonsensical, but your mother taught you not to judge. He should find you rather boring, but his mother taught him the same.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

skit #46: our whale we call home

Years of brine and spume have made us salty and unpalatable men. Should we ever return to civilization, it should spit us out. While we fishermen may feel ill-placed under this canopy of ribs and blubber, the fish schools speed and the hermit crabs scuttle, carrying out the functions of life unconcerned that their sea sloshes in the belly of an interoceanic whale. I fear one day it may be our whale we call home.

Nothing sates the whale. The stomach's inventory ranges diatoms to dreadnoughts, restocked hourly. We have been privy to many fortunes (within the greater misfortune of being ingested) that we as petty fishermen would otherwise never taste. Scavenging from wreckages, we live luxurious lives: an elaborate costume set from Tartuffe; casks upon casks upon casks (only once have we intoxicated the whale, leading her to perform terrifying barrel rolls); a herd of milk-cows, while an astonishing bounty, were sadly unaccompanied any bulls; arbitrary billions in unspendable bullion.

Whales eat plankton, not riches. Thus, our opulence remains inseparable from the miasma produced by mountains decaying animal matter. The rancid stench first caused my eyes to water. Now I weep knowing I have been here so long as to no longer detect its smell.

She must be nursing; we are awakened at every hour to the reciprocal croons between her and her calf.
A calf means there must be other whales. In fact, we have seen our whale swallow lesser whales like tadpoles. We wonder if lesser whales contain lesser men dwelling in their innards. And though none of us has verbalized this, we all tacitly acknowledge that we ourselves may be lesser men in a lesser whale. To dispel this solemn consideration, one fisherman joked that perhaps lesser men contain greater whales to which some laughed and some did not. I sleep as unsoundly were I sailing the Baltic or moored in the belly of a whale.

Our
only celestial body, the blowhole, does not keep months as the moon does so we do not know how long we've been here. Some of the fishermen have invented whale-days to live in accordance to the aperture. Others use the portal for divine communion with the Lord, praying to negotiate an escape from purgatory. The galleons have been torn plank-from-plank and rebuilt into shacks, some going so far as to pen deeds. Between the milk, silk, and rum, most fishermen prefer this life of unaccountable excess to their responsibilites back in Helsinki. One fisherman claims it would be a veritable utopia "if only there were womenfolk for [procreation]."

None of us can estimate how many years have passed except by ridiculous whale-time. Every function of our lives revolves around this infernal whale's habits. What she eats, we eat. What she breathes, we breathe. And now we're civilizing in this microcosm. To think, an existence dictated by the whims of a whale.

I've constructed a ladder from baleen and seaweed. None of the other fishermen wish to leave, but I must escape. I am leaving through the blowhole come this whale-Saturday, be I delivered to the surface of the Baltic Sea, to the depths of the Atlantic, or to the prison of a greater whale.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

skit #45: dispense slogies on hoagies

Their postcards read 'Greetings, from Nowtown!' The neighborhood bustles industriously, with lawnmowers, with carpools, with paper routes. Crime, carnality, and idleness not invisible but absent. Men wear hats, women wear aprons. Rain gutters are leafless. Cars stop at stop signs. Opinions are heard at town meetings, whoops are heard at town picnics. An olden elm stands rooted in the town center, in it a treehouse, a calico, redolent peaches. The poster hugs the bark like a bandaid.

Before the town had postcards, it had misery: craters, censorship, general dissent met by indiscriminate oppression. Dogmatic wars roared while people starved. Corned beef tins and bread loaves were scarce, but there was never a shortage of propaganda pamphlets for bathroom tissue. The malnourished serfs of Thensdale sardonically coined the saying, 'Dispense slogies [slogans] on hoagies.' The poster was not a bandaid, but the scar.

The scar was an patient man's face. Under the elm's umbrage, he darkened to stoicism, then darkened further to insidiously calculating. His face inspired trust in his reason more than in his intent. Some nights, the moonglow bestowed such a glowering look that even the drunkards avoided the poster's gaze. That his brow never furrowed made him appear less of a man and more of an unavoidable force.

A scab picked makes a wound. A wound healed makes a scab. So, none of the citizens removed the poster for fear a new poster would replace it. There is no shame in a sightly scab.

And is not a scab growth? The reaffirmation of national identity? What of the federally usurped economy? The defeat of corporate health care? The The democratically-earned suicide of those fickle general elections? The grand unification of bipartisanship to totalitarianism? The voluntarily relinquished rights? These wounds the scab protects. This scab the elm wears as a badge.

The geezers regard the poster's depth with its due reverence. The young Nowtownian vandals see only its surface, a defeated politician-turned-tyrant. The face that once procured national trust and produced national pride had been repeatedly defaced with an inked toothbrush mustache, diabolic horns, hopelessly academic glasses. A graffitist corrected the boldface slogan's initial H to read COPE.