a revue in red

skit #98: someone else

2010-04-29T09:50:00.000-07:00

The country boy reclined against the roots of the wise elm. He chewed the sweetness from the length of the final piece of field straw and gazed distantly. He gazed past the baled hay which accumulated over many months of days of hours of toil, past the very same space that occupied last year's harvest, only to find no familiar distances.

The work year ended. With the rest of the retiring country boys, he swaggered down to the autumn festivals. They celebrated what they had with what they had: pie-eating contests, ferris wheels, games of nominal chance, drag races, indiscretion, blue and red and white ribbons for exemplary domesticates, displays of machismo, saloons, muddy tractors, square dancing, plump lovers, plump wallets, youth under the unending night of the harvest moon. And since the night never ends, there is never another harvest.

The country boy writhes against the trunk of the forgetful elm. He gnashes some bitter grass into pulp and gazes desperately to find something he anticipates upon the horizon. But he can only find himself where he is. The unbaled timothy hay twitches anxiously like whiskers acutely receptive to an obscure present.

As he begins this harvest's work, he watches his fellow laborers thresh hay, fill silos, paint barns maroon, tune carburetors, play their fiddles at sunset, develop adolescent angsts, burn hay, slaughter milkless goats, father illegitimate children, elope to the theatre districts of various cities, forget arithmetics, obsess over dreams, obsess over lovers, drift to adjacent socioeconomic strata, consider ultimate questions of being, indulge, suffer, age, rest, and bale hay. Alongside these country boys, he works. Of all he does, some boys do the same, some do not.

The country boy will scurry among the boughs of the prescient elm. He will dine upon on the clovers, alfalfa, and rye of the known countryside, but never sate himself. He will scout the hummocked countryside from his treetop on the horizon and observe himself upon a former horizon, reclining against the roots of the wise elm, chewing the final field straw, gazing distantly; writhing against the forgetful elm, scurrying atop a prescient elm, inscribing upon the mute elm, deceiving the senile elm, deflowering the coy elm, pledging to the arbitrary elm; gazing towards horizons in all respective manners. In this countryside, every hill has its own horizon, and on each horizon is an elm from which he shall scout, and for each him atop other elms there expand other countrysides and elms and hims the country boy cannot see.

His eyes meet the eyes of another him and of someone else.

It was now spring. The seasons had begun to plant a new crop. He raised the hoe and struck it into the fecund countryside.

skit #97: timeliness

2010-04-14T20:58:00.000-07:00

The steam engine sibilantly evokes progression and progression as it whisks down its uncompromising tracks past all the rural towns deemed too small to warrant their own railroad stations. Long monotonies separate changes in scenery: a limpid brook, some healthy livestock, a gap-toothed windmill. Dirt backroads reticulate throughout the empty in-betweens like capillaries sustaining vestigial tissues. The train passengers cannot fathom what purpose they serves, but provincials trek along the paths.

Stray farmers rarely encounter any one else upon these backroads. Without each other, they would quite appear lonely. An amber sunlight coats the farmers and their mules, encasing them in an anachronistic resin. They move slowly to stillness. A snapped axle upsets a rickety mule cart, flinging loose apples into the air. The farmers are frantic but frozen. The apples just hang, poised to enact their Newtonian schtick. The train travels by so quickly that nothing changes in the spectacle of that moment, leaving its passengers blind to whether the farmers laugh or weep at their misfortune.

Ms Stutz rides in a first class cabin. She meets Mr and Mrs Estoppey, her cabinmates, both of whom were very personable, though slightly fatigued; they have been traveling for as long as they can recall. Their banter turns solemn as their journey lengthens and as their conversation deepens to topics of dreams, values, loves, and fears. Wine reddens their words. The train travels through the void of night and soon none can locate precisely where they are.

When the train arrives in Berlin, Ms Stutz enjoys coffee with Mr and Mrs Estoppey before parting ways. She will forever remember their company, though her memories of their faces and words become familiar inventions by the end of her life. She spends the next two days with her sister before returning home to Basel, first class. She meets more characters with whom she enjoys an approximately unique intimacy.

Nearing Basel, she finds the farmers still preserved in the formaldehyde of dusk. The locomotive's speed affords her only one glimpse into the diorama, as they were and may always be, the farmers frantic, their mule carts collapsed, their apple crop suspended midair, the faces stern yet to laugh or weep.

Ms Stutz remarks on the invention of the telephone, that soon one needn't ride for days by train to see one's sister, that all communication shall become practically effortless, that an era of international communication and harmony shall ensue, that imaginations shall no longer starve for audiences, that the freedom of ideas shall accelerate progress, and so on she went with her puerile idealism. Her cabinmates gave no rise, still sleeping in the red wake of last night.

Very soon, a jetliner flies far overhead. Window passengers curiously peer through their portals. Below, a series of parallel stitches mend the interminable scar of timeliness of which the planet shall never heal.

Thereafter, teleportation folds intricate origami of the spatial dimensions, enveloping everything indiscriminately, making every possible point a destination.

skit #96: what counts

2010-03-27T12:32:00.000-07:00

The oldest woman in Burbank remembered how things were before. She tried to explain to me and my sister.

She showed us a slender twig and a tin can. She told us these are two things. Then she counted everything else she could find: melted tires, another brittler twig, a palmful of fine silt, a sign dimpled by stray rocks, the frayed canvas tents of our camp, her, my sister, me, the other survivors.

We asked what counts as a thing. We asked if those count as one twig and another twig, or if they are two twigs. We asked if the berries still count, even if they're inedible and dessicated. We asked if the tires need wheels and if the wheels need a truck and if the truck needs a freeway to count. We asked if the letters each get their own number, and if the letters count, does the word. We asked how many grains are in her pile of silt, and how many people survived outside of the San Fernando Valley. We asked if we're people counting as one, or peoples as a few ones, or persons counting as a bunch ones.

She said she didn't know about our sorts of questions and continued her explanation.

She told us of plastic flora that required no water, of low-calorie strawberry ice cream, of love ballads played over radio waves, of plastic toy farm animals. She told us supermarket coupons, of traffic jams and speeding tickets, of public libraries, of prenuptial agreements, of streak-free dish washing detergents, of cell phone reception and inescapable service contracts, of breaking news alerts, of frequent flyer miles and cash-back rewards.

She repeated the legends we'd heard before.

She told us about how the fluorescent bulbs in every household generated a color that was indistinguishable from how they imagined pure white light to appear. The human eye just couldn't tell a difference. She told us how close they thought they were to perfection.

We were confused, but she said she didn't know about our sorts of questions.

After parted with the oldest woman in Burbank, me and my sister sat quietly on the duneside for a while, considering the beige color of the only landscape we had ever known.

skit #95: destination

2010-03-26T19:01:00.000-07:00

As he waits, he futilely cycles through decorative variations like a colorblind florist. Per usual, no more preparations are necessary. Everything suffices. But when it comes to the reception of his guests, anxious Mike Williamson strives to exceed unremarkable sufficiency. Everything must be perfect, even if the guests are too crass to sense perfection. The floors are mopped. Steel surfaces are polished doubly. The setting is serene and dignified. The aimless endeavor of his guests' lives will culminate in the coming moments.

He smiles to himself, recognizing he is fidgeting in his pop's manner. When he was Little Mike, he would perch upon on Big Mike Williamson's knee up in the projection booth. Before screenings, Big Mike would sweep the aisles, air out the theater, pop the kernels, dust the organ pipes; then he would shuffle about the hallways, fidgeting incessantly. Not until the neighborhood kids poured into the aisles, mottled with smeared candy and bruises, unbridled by the school year's end, did Big Mike calm. Giddy, they waited in Big Mike's theater to be delivered from the burden of juvenile responsibilities to some fantastic island paradise or to some kingdom in the skies. That was the moment the kids and Big Mike and Little Mike awaited all year.

Just as Big Mike's name never graced the film credits, when Little Mike's guests soon arrive he will seek no recognition, only transparency. This moment belongs to them alone. All extraneous beings, experiences, and phenomena form the vehicle that transports his guests to this moment. Little Mike is only one such apparatus. His duty to his guests to usher them to their destination, as though this moment will come to be with no intervention.

The promenade begins. The cattle clatter and moo. Little Mike ceremoniously welcomes his guests with a pneumatically actuated bolt, introducing cranial apertures so their souls may find levity when their bodies fail. Cleavers grant the favor of mechanically separating their impermanent flesh. Strong men clear the dais for newcomers. Runnels of blood ferry giblets away through the sluice grates until nothing remains. The earthy smell of unbounded life fills the room.

Little Mike will forever remain unknown to his patronage.

skit #94: the fastest man alive

2010-03-20T09:26:00.000-07:00

Here they come. Whoop, there they go. They're gone. These circular tracks are just clever as heck. With the finish line slapped down on the loop just any old where, like it matters a damn.

These races got it all, don't they? Got it all. The winners and the losers, a little wreckage, adoring fans, all these sponsorships with big-time corporations, the trophies, some birdies in bikinis paid-in-full. Yeh, got it all. Ain't quite entirely life itself, but wouldn't be wiser to elsewhere if you never been outside the racetrack.

Those other racers out there, they're racing this race. And after this, maybe they stay in some hotel, but then they're racing them other races on other tracks just like it. This race, that race. Not Astolfo Febretti. He doesn't compete with other men. He's motivated unlikely.

My cousin-in-law Tad is in the know. He sells the beers at the races and gets all the stories. He says he heard Febretti made a pact with the Devil. Febretti gave it all up to be the fastest man alive. But that fool Febretti don't know you can't never be the fastest man alive. You ain't never the man you just was.

Maybe the Devil was being all devious and mischiefy, interpreting Febretti real literally. But I don't think Febretti knew for a damn what he wanted before he put it in words.

Didn't give Febretti what he wanted, exactly, of course. Told him how to get it. The Devil says the secret was to get rid of all that extra weight. And the Devil said he could help Febretti rightly. Just advice, he promises, You're in control, Astolfo.

So it all can stand a change. Starts exercising good, off come sixty-five pounds of lethargy and pork. Gives up wearing denims and leathers, races nude. Shaved his golden hair, all off his head, his lip, his forearms, his -- well, right. Got some engineer types, built himself something real aerodynamic, looks like a black swan getting sucked into a blacker hole.

Starts fasting before races, two pounds lesser. Gives him a little clarity of minds, meditation. Weight and drag exist everywhere, he thinks. Gives up the wife, gives up the mistress, gives up the kids, gives up the parents and grandparents, gives up the fans. Gives up his belief in winning or losing. Gives up his belief in laws of physics and the speed of light. Gives up on being the fastest man alive.

What if he ever caught the speed record, I wonder to myself. What's he going to do with all that nothing he's been racing around with? His life is gone. He cannot win it all back, he can only replace it.

Not a thing in the world stopping him. Febretti's just the thought of winning these days. Fast as all heck. He don't even race any more. Wins every time in none of the races.

Here they come again. Whoop, there they go. Circular tracks, clever as heck.

skit #93: stewed tomatoes

2010-03-08T21:30:00.000-08:00

Freda prefers fresh produce, avoiding the canned vegetables altogether. Her cart sails without friction atop the waxed floors, but Freda falters and slows upon Aisle 9. A grocer diligently stacks tiers of dull tin cylinders containing stewed tomatoes. Half-way through her shopping list, this ominous ziggurat suddenly and privately reminds Freda of her past torment:

The post-war rations were tolerable. Stale bread, suspiciously nondescript meatcakes, preserved foods without expiry dates like orphans are without guardians, dull tin cans harboring salty and sweaty possibilities -- cans of chicken stock, green beans, stewed tomatoes.

Sometimes I would have to steal. Everyone had to steal. To be alive meant to be fed meant to be a thief. On these grounds, any citizen was reasonably suspected of crime. And under a brutal interrogation, all crimes inevitably became public.

Many boys enlisted as soldiers from an early age to avoid being bullied. These boys caught me stealing butter. Under Soviet disorganization, their bayonets imbued them with the wisdom to serve as judges and jury. They took down a concrete alleyway for my nominal trial. Subject to their leverage, I confessed. I confessed it all. After all was said, my butter had melted.

Before my punishment, they recited my confessions as itemized evidence at her improvised trial. They snickered and hooted between the descriptions of each perpetrated act 'gross moral indecency'. The list of my sordid crimes suddenly and privately reminded me of my past pleasure:

I presented that stolen key which allowed our clandestine nightly rendezvouses to the cellar. It was cold, but Gretchin was warm. The salty and sweaty possibilities Gretchin presented to my lips. She was well-fed, allowing her muscles to harden more powerfully than any woman I'd known. How she flexed until her vitality was drained and she laid lifelessly. How no other woman could ever compare to you.

And suddenly, privately reminded me of my past sorrow:

I discovered her in the cellar, her beautiful crown savaged by a rifle butt. My last kiss upon her tasted of her fatal wound, salty and sweaty. She laid disheveled, probably intruded upon. Someone must have discovered her sins. Had she been caught with me, I too should be dead. Or had she been caught with another woman, my weak heart should prefer death. I buried these conjectures. Gretchin evaporated with her vital fluids. How no woman could ever compare to you.

I remained in a state of moral and emotional fatigue. I no longer questioned why I, of all thieves, had been caught. I no longer questioned if what I had done was wrong. I no longer questioned who held the right to judge me, my livelihood. The oldest soldier executed my sentence, while the others snickered and hooted most dutifully.

She recalls her distaste for stewed tomatoes. Freda casually passes Aisle 9 and crosses the final items off her shopping list.

skit #92: balloonery

2010-02-04T21:30:00.000-08:00

Wilcox has dreamed of this moment, but he cannot explain where he is or how he got here.

He grew up suckling on the stories of heroic balloonists: the innovators, the pilots, the poets, the daredevils; your Jacques Tarasques, your Sanjay Guptas, your Hugh Swifts; as is written: 'Ah, the balloon! -- the starlet of gas laws! the tireless Icarus! levity embodied! the inflated angel!'; all those forgotten unforgettables who died, flattened, after long wistful falls when the serene cerulean heavens, quite unprepared to receive guests, abruptly returned those men to their earth.

The boy who could tolerate the nagging gravity of this world should make a better mule than a man. As a child, Wilcox studied to escape the yoke but he began schooling an era too late. He never encountered any adventures through the London Academy of Dirigibility, only exercises in tedium. He remained moored. Wilcox graduated, laden with archaic knowledge and insurmountable debts.

Some War came and balloonery was entertained for warfare. He served as the officer of an airship squadron and his unit saw a single battle. A slew of malfunctions prevented Wilcox from flying at all. Warplanes were the fad of this war, casually sexy and casually lethal. Day-job dog-fighters mercilessly felled scores of balloons, like whalers upon a bounty. Wilcox remained grounded and was eventually discharged for incompetence.

The age of the balloon had passed. Balloons only filled the niches: surprise parties, weather instrumentation, stadium sportscasting, nothing of true practical value. Many out-of-work pilots were recruited into the factory floors who were paid poorly on pittances and nostalgia. Wilcox worked. He clocked in, stitched together these toys, he clocked out, got paid.

He goes home to his life.

High, adrift in one of the wintrier strata, he buoys in his masterfully engineered cloud. The gondola plummets as rapidly as the balloon lifts. He lives on daring. His tendons are taut, his hair bristles, his heart pitter-patter-pitter-patters.

Looking down, he finds his maps inaccurate. The earth bears neither lines nor names. It is difficult to read in dreams. Compared to his landscape of pastel papers and approximate shapes, crooked mountains and staggered pines contradict the tranquil uniformity described by his trusted cartographers. Below is so real, so pointlessly wild. It only matters that he is where he is.

He leaves his moment to return to his task, to where he is, to how he got there.

Wilcox sews his balloon during the midnight hours after work. He can envision exactly how his balloon will look a million stitches from now, a billion stitches from now. He can envision exactly where he will travel. Maybe this balloon never needs to fly. His scarlet fabrics are unfurled throughout all the chambers of his apartment, like a deflated heart in a ribcage. He blows breath into an unsewn opening to watch it beat gently.

skit #91: my phantom twin

2010-01-08T11:49:00.000-08:00

We've met a few times before. Maybe more, probably continuously. You often forget my name, my face, my voice, my dimensionality. But, no, I never forget you. So rarely apart, we are. To be politely forthright: who else would complement you like I complement you? You can count anything as two, but a pair is rare.

A while ago, you began. You exist on the terms of standard contract that precedes your existence. It's around, somewhere. Unimportant details, very standard. All the big stars sign it. Chock-full of loaned matter, you are.

And more specifically, I've had your sort before. Quite mammalian, silly manes, rabid fabulists, right. All pulpy and gangling, all full of whimsy and wrath. Certain you're yourselves forever. But each of your sort so inevitably returns to me. Or I return to them. Like rainwater reposited into a river. An assimilation either way. Right back to how things were before all this particle jockeying.

All predictably spry and youthful. A new body. You roamed, wanderlusty. As though you could go anywhere outside me. Savoring the pittances earned by your franchised life. Of course, you own nothing you possess. You possess only facets of me. Other subcontracted yous. To them, though, they are them and you are me.

I've never been ubiquitous, per se. But universal complementarity probably isn't too different from ubiquity. Maybe instead of being yourself everywhere, you're everything else everywhere. It doesn't sound glamorous, but it's essential. What could any one thing be without everything else? A universe composed of singletons is scarcely a universe at all.

We're both here because we have to be. I'm without you as you're without me. Fifty-fifty, standard between all the other mes and other yous.

You're shaping up nicely. Proud to partner. I've been around, seen things, heard things, just like you have. Some of my complements don't make much use of their loans. You know the types. Barren moons, gratuitous plasticwraps, comfortable mosses, remote barnacles.

I admit I'm being a bit flippant. Judgmental. Who knows who I complement. I am haunted by my phantom twin I have not yet met. Who will chastise me over my misspent material expenditures. Galactic billiards and menageries, a cosmic waste. Read my soul off like an inventory of cheap trinkets.

But we make what we can with what we have. My phantom twin made me, after all. But you and me, I think we're not bad. Not bad at all.

skit #90: the two

2009-12-06T21:51:00.000-08:00

So you can put them into two categories. Err, I mean, there's more, but. Well, you know how rules always have gaps in their smiles.

You got the obsolete traditional types, who go around looking all regularly hideous. Really, most of those got killed way back when. You know, knights and exorcists and whoever. People can barely tolerate spiders, and even they have exterminators. No one talks about jabberwockies anymore. So don't worry about all the ugly monsters.

But, yeah. Then you got the newer-type clever monsters, who go around looking like people. Real regular-type people. Real sly. I figure there's a whole rude zoo of those monsters right under the skin of people you see every darn day. Engineers and aunts and veterinarians and clarinetists -- yeah, anyone, maybe, doesn't matter who. Sometimes the windows to their soul look all smudged up.

This ain't all bad. There's an elegance to this dichotomy. If your monster looks like a person, then you don't really have to worry about being gobbled up, because people don't have massive jaws and fangs. But if your monster looks like a monster -- well, no one's going to jail you for destroying some regularly hideous-type monster.

Huh? Yeah, a few. I've tangled with my share of monsters before. Lost these six fingers to the whorl worms of Patagonia. Went all higgledy-piggledy in my ladyparts. Yeah, I've got a few wriggled up inside me. Parasites -- the whorl worms of Patagonia. These things don't really turn me into a monster, per se. They just eat my flesh and reconstitute my likeness with wormflesh. So some whorlwormy chap will be doing wrong in my name. Or, who knows, maybe I'm doing good in his name.

Hell, even had someone spot me for a monster. They chased me down all of 32nd Street with a shotgun. No way you can really disprove it, neither. Just have to steer clear of them. But that's what I mean, I guess. The sly monsters look just like people. But, heh, maybe you're taking advice from a monster.

Well, yeah. Then there's three, technically.

Those third ones are the worst monsters. Don't look like anything. More abstract. A misplaced shadow. Awkward and protracted eye contact. A painfully trite malaise. Thoughts of aberrant geometries. Existential hangnails. The kind of monster you can never fight, can never dispel. That inauspicious happenstance that can never be confronted or defined. When something feels wrong.

But. Those have been around for a while. Best to stick to the two.

skit #89: the moon

2009-12-02T12:19:00.000-08:00

The night swallows desperately as the midnight express lodges in its throat like an unpalatable placebo. The coach bus slows and stops. White noise wafts from the coastline waves and the constellations make promises of stale fates. With the bus stopped, the night would be still, but acrid smoke from the engine provokes its passengers to disembark.

But not Erma. She remains on the bus. Erma is supposed to be somewhere. She does not know where, or even that there was a particular somewhere to be, but she could have been there nonetheless. She could have undergone the latent thing was supposed to happen to her. She stays on the bus even though it will not move. The smoke makes Erma's eyes water, but that's about it.

The passengers shiver in the coastal drizzle, occupying themselves by speculating idly or raging futilely. The driver, though competent and affable, bears no hope of repairing the bus. Everyone senses this -- the passengers, the driver, the bus, the smoke, the constellations, and Erma.

The smoke dissipates as the drizzle becomes heavier rain. Everyone returns to the bus. A repair truck finally arrives, but the mechanic will have to special order the damaged component. An opportunistic motel begins ferrying passengers to its pay-per-hour rooms until its capacity fills. Erma remains on the bus. The driver announces his company will cover any bills 'within reason'. The repair truck leaves until tomorrow afternoon.

Erma can't sleep, so she stares out the plexiglas window. The garish neon cursive spelling 'No Vacancy' mutes the subtle stars, giving the vain moon a full stage. The moon shines white, then red, then white. Clouds fog the scene, snoring upsets the serenity. No one cares about a lunar eclipse, not even Erma.

The bus resumes its course tomorrow evening. The mechanic is paid. The driver is competent. The motel has vacancies. The passengers are late. The moon is white. The thing is unknowable. Erma is supposed to be somewhere.

skit #88: ANIMAL FUN-DERSTANDING

2009-10-27T08:51:00.000-07:00

ANIMAL FUN-DERSTANDING

with Dr. Barbara Dorber

Granddad wakes me up when I'm still tired! He calls me a lazy monkey, but monkeys don't look lazy! Which animal sleeps the most during the day?
- Peggy P., Toledo, OH

Tell your grumpy grampy humans aren't monkeys but primates. As humans get old and cranky, they tend to need fewer hours of sleep. Most humans sleep between 7 and 9 hours a day, sleeping less than any other primate. Elderly humans, like your granddad, may sleep as few as 6 hours a day. Most of our primate cousins, including chimps and baboons, sleep approximately 10 hours a day. The laziest monkey, the owl monkey, sleeps 17 hours a day, devoid of any remarkable personal responsibilities.

So which animal sleeps the most? The nostalgic koala is known to sleep up to twenty hours per day, often dreaming about how elegantly she danced when she was younger, leaving her only four hours to pout in front of her full-body mirror, her middle-age flab extruding from the limb-holes of her joeyhood leotard. Why koalas practice in that which will inevitably depress them remains a controversial question among leading animal behaviorologists.

Why is my dog is so slow! It takes forever to play fetch with him. I want a faster pet. What should I get?
- Shelton F., Tulsa, OK

Do you like polkadots? Consider getting a cheetah! The cheetah is the fastest recorded land mile, sustaining speeds up to 68 miles per hour when sprinting. This is fast enough to run alongside a car on the freeway, and certainly fast enough to catch any prey that looks yummy.

Faster still, field biologists routinely sight hoofprints created by large game traveling at an estimated 82 miles per hour. Scat analyses identify these runners as wildebeest; further, kinesiologists affirm wildebeests' musculature may potentially produce as much thrust with each leg as a junior varsity football team! Wow!

Yet this shy specimen has never been observed moving any faster than what is expected of it, a mere 50 miles per hour, a handicap merrily exploited by trailing hyenas and lions. Under midnight, away from any audience, thundering wildebeests are tracked by seismologists hoping to understand this bashfulness. Regarding the wildebeest's nature, we ask ourselves what hyenas mock us, what cheetahs best us, what of our thunder rarely rumbles, and under what midnight we are free.

Most wildebeest opt for the conventional life: grazing on the savannah, succumbing in negligible numbers to predators, rearing calves, breaking no land speed records, and other matters well-documented.

My mommy is the best mommy for people, but what is the best mommy for animals? I want to draw her being best mommies with the animal for her Mother's Day card.
- Jess M., Las Vegas, NV

There are many kinds of mommies in this world. And just because she's your mommy doesn't mean she's not an animal. Human mommies take care of their babies longer than any other animal! There are all sorts of ways to be a good mommy.

An elephant seal mommy transfers up to six hundred pounds of fatty milk to her pup, draining her of vitality. She serves only as anonymous loins within a harem, then as vessel for nourishment for the parasite she calls her child, eventually returning to the frigid sea without her fat reserves, her lover, or her child to warm her. She finds her place on a chain of existentially-contrived links.

And the kangaroo mommy stows her joey in her pouch, taking her baby wherever she goes. Imagine the weight of it. Utterly responsible in every regard to a living being that is half hers. Now she must carry out her life a time and a half over. And always embarrassing her with caterwauling and odors. Humiliating her at the gala, delaying her attendance dance recitals, thwarts her important interview, dribbling on the forms at the unemployment office, getting her evicted from the flophouses. The weight of it. At least the weight brings them both down.

Above all reigns the rabbit mommy, who abandons her children upon birth. She sets the precedent, freeing her children from the obligation of motherhood, ensuring no rabbits have my regrets by their age.

skit #87: Sweet Osogovo

2009-10-06T09:56:00.000-07:00

Shorn summer flocks saturate the Osogovan mountainside like a superfluous sweater. Their unshaven chaperons dawdle in that leisurely way that makes idylls so imperturbably idyllic. Sweet Osogovo poses her hills in rows and rows of verdant mammaries, irresistible to sheep and shepherds alike. She promises an easy day, enticing all creation to indulge.

Stojan haloos Vlatko from afar, his ebullience echoing over and over over the din of bleating. Vlatko, visibly pleased, slips his slender oak kuval from his shirtfolds and begins fluting a low droning note. Stojan approaches, quite unconcerned with whatever his headcount should be, his nibbling flock strewn a league behind him along the buffet. The shepherds all admit the sheep and shepherding are convenient excuses, accessories, only means to this music. Giddy, Stojan eagerly extracts his own kuval from his knapsack.

Like a stolid usuror, Vlatko drones that low uncompromising drone, bedrock on which Stojan gambols freely. Slowly, the players forfeit control of the ezgija's melody, which flourishes as an evocative thicket of brambles and blossoms: fusillades of Slovakian arpeggios, baying of octaval wolves, contemplative wooden textures, and all the contours of Osogovo -- Stojan's and Vlatko's and all the shepherds' insatiable mistress.

When Stojan tires, he drones and Vlatko drives the melody. Perhaps different notes, but it is the same song, for the same idyll, for the same Osogovo. Dozens of shepherds join and leave the ezgija. They dare nothing, coddling every note, repeating this ritual. Worship tolerates no creativity. So they play until lips loosen, until fingers blister, until summer grows cranky. Sweet Osogovo hibernates and her men retreat to Baraklija until next summer awakens her.

Six months linger each year. The village becomes awkward and quiet and manly. None play music.

While their masters mope, agitated black and white wool commingles and demingles in cramped square pens, very reminiscent of the static produced by the defunct television Gjorgji procured this winter. During lucid moments, his television offers occasional glimpses of the world beyond Osogovo: Macedonian not Yugoslovia; how acting now may save 15 denari; St Petersburg not Leningrad; how all ruminants have four stomachs; and other matters inane and grave. These are all diversions from their beloved Osogovo.

The wool grows bushy. The television programming stays bland. The seasons change too slowly.

When summer returns, so does Osogovo. And so do her idylls and their sheep and their shepherds. And so do their kuvals and their ezgijas. And so do their dronings, their melodies, their blossoms, their brambles. And Stojan is there, and Vlatko and Risto are there, and all the shepherds are there. Even Gjorgji, who everyone now calls Television-Man. The ezgijas begin. Stojan goes, then Vlatko goes, and it's just like every year. Osogovo always receives her melodies so nonchalantly that one cannot tell if she receives them at all.

During the trek to the pastures, Gjorgji had confided his mind spent its winter far from Osogovo, far from Baraklija and far from Macedonia, to whereever his crystal ball directed him. It's his turn to play atop the shepherds' drone, his angular and perplexing melodies gouge the round easiness of the pasture, polluting it with whiny traffic horns, fluttering receipts, the syncopated chatter of data computations, terse telephone niceties, the crescendoing inflation of floundering economies. Under these sounds foreign to Osogovo and rare to Baraklija, the shepherds' drones start to falter then give away completely, leaving Gjorgji playing his thin melody a solo. The misfit Gjorgji dismisses himself. The shepherds continue, trying to resume their frivolities.

Summer goes, Baraklija populates with awkward men, summer comes.

The shepherds and sheep return. So does Television-Man. He brings electric guitars, theramins, pyrotechnic rigging, subwoofers, garish costumes, personnel to webcast the ordeal, fettering record contracts. The few sheep his flock retained seem common when hoof-to-hoof with the other shepherds' flocks. But within Gjorgji's herd of ibex, cassowaries, capybara, ride-on gas mowers, and whatever else, the shepherd's sheep remain unique.

skit #86: Zergoff the Mindmaster

2009-09-22T17:30:00.000-07:00

Washed in spotlighting, flamboyantly attired in his trademark sapphire-sequined tuxedo, somehow Zergoff the Mindmaster appears naked when on stage during tonight's performance.

Zergoff declares monotonically:

"He should have been an obedient son.
"He should have stayed out of his mother's closet.
"He should never have searched for the shoebox of heirlooms.
"He should never have taken his grandfather's pocketwatch.
"He should have honored the dead.
"He should have returned it when mom wept.
"He should have laid awake, undone with guilt.
"He should never have stayed up all night with it.
"He should never have admired its golden shine.
"He should never have lost himself in his reflection.
"He should have believed in magic instead.
"He should have gone into rabbits and top hats and sawing lovely assistants.
"He should have stayed out of people's heads.
"He should have feared so much power.
"He should have hidden the pocketwatch for a much later age.
"He should have waited until he was old enough to appreciate it.
"He should never have watched so many cartoons.
"He should never schemed so mischievously.
"He should never have practiced on Rufus.
"He should have thought more about what it's like to be a dog.
"He should have issued his instructions in woofs and howls.
"He should have taught Rufus something benign, like a trick or two.
"He should never have put human thoughts into a dog brain.
"He should never have imposed such existential crises upon loyal Rufus.
"He should have learned how to undo it.
"He should have confessed when mom wondered why Rufus was acting so very odd.
"He should have learned from mistakes made.
"He should never have practiced on Wally.
"He should never have practiced on Samantha.
"He should never have practiced on the guy who so adamantly insisted on being called dad.
"He should never have practiced on the teacher.
"He should never have practiced on the principal.
"He should never have practiced on mom.
"He should have really learned how to undo it.
"He should have retained a few authority figures.
"He should have learned some rules before bending them, before breaking them.
"He should never have left New Orleans.
"He should have been erased by Katrina.
"He should have felt lucky.
"He should have begun again, a simple life.
"He should have learned to accomplish things the normal way.
"He should have paid for brunch-time waffles.
"He should have rented his one-bedroom studio.
"He should have met someone nice.
"He should have met Lucy.
"He should have asked where she grew up.
"He should have asked how she got that barely-noticeable scar on her wrist.
"He should have politely yet confidentely asked her for her phone number.
"He should have asked her out for gelato, her choice of flavor.
"He should never have crammed up next to her in the subway.
"He should never have swayed that pocketwatch in front of her eyes.
"He should never have left her so confused the next morning.
"He should have met Melinda.
"He should have met Else.
"He should have met Hu.
"He should have met more people.
"He should have met anybody.
"He should never have met nobody.
"He should have felt brave without his pocket watch.
"He should have been strong enough on his own.
"He should have confessed how deceptive he is.
"He should have confessed how miserable he is.
"He should have been honest all along.
"He should have hypnotized himself.
"He should have committed himself to this admission.
"He should have felt relief.
"He should have felt clean.
"He should never have learned how to do it.
"He should never have learned how to undo it.

Zergoff finishes abruptly. The mesmerized audience, his strangers, applaud in a suspiciously rigid unison. The spotlight switches off and the show concludes. Eventually, all the patrons and performers leave the venue to return to their various done and undone lives.

skit #85: all inconspicuously

2009-09-08T10:05:00.000-07:00

It's around afternoon, maybe even after that. Nightfall seems an impossibility. The sun holds an ominous promise like the rancid orange on my dashboard. The air conditioning exhales sticky breath drawn from the tarmac-buttered road. Traffic is stopped, or I can't tell. We commuters lurch together in inches through barren scenery devoid of the landmarks necessary to appreciate progress. Relentless tans and yellows, relentless plains: neutrality wages its effortless war of attrition. I succumb utterly. I contemplate land tortoise, the treasury bond, the graham cracker, and other matters slow and stale.

The freeway insists forward we go. Dotted lines divide the lanes, outside of which we swerve as the heat warps our senses. The traffic flows so slowly that mortal accidents are rare. Death's Buick taps my bumper and by hand I limply waive the guilt of his second offense having learned the futility of honking years ago. Commuters of this freeway strive for civility, even in this traffic and heat.

My legs fall asleep from non-use. I can't tell if my foot covers the gas or brake. The billboards are large and colorful, mercilessly legible. They are my only stimulation, otherwise I'd slip underneath the dogged weight of this dog day. I can read these words, but my fatigue yields only sun-curdled thoughts. The car dealers on the billboards don't sweat, don't look human. They grin flat grins, ignorant of the suffering they've dispensed upon the traffic. Barbara Buckleys and Red Coulters and Joey Petronis gloat from above as we slog along under their serene faces.

I watch the cars, unending processions, cars, cars, cars. We drive forward. Forward, going. Behind, coming. The rear view mirror frames the Buick, still tailgating me. Draped over the steering wheel, I see Death subdued by the same malaise afflicting all us commuters. He looks peacefully still when he slouches, as though he is a spring unsprung. I too wish to be unsprung so. For a moment, we share our misery. But Death taps my bumper a third time, startling him from his laze. He raises his hand in flustered apology. My patience spent, I whip my head around, and glare darkly at Death's ineptitude.

Ahead, tail lights wink. My windshield allows a brief sense of freedom, shattering completely.

An inadequate dose of anesthesia renders me mute and numb as I watch my surgeon earn her paycheck. Her paper mask nullifies her identity, but I know who is in her body, still recklessly tailgating me.

I heal over some years and resume life as normal. Both my accident and brush with Death, mostly forgotten.

Pickles are half off, so I buy two jars. A clumsy skeletal hand reaches for the kalamatas, elbowing my rib during the grab. In that flustered apologetic way, Death's open palms beg a forgiveness, presumptuously accepting that which I do not grant. He rattles my shopping cart as he tries to scoot by, sending my vitamin-enriched Wonderbread to the polished floor. Nonchalant and unaware, he continues to nix collected items from his shopping list in other aisles.

I doubt he even recognizes me, though we've met before. Even Death hates to wait; I position myself two patrons behind him in the Express Line. I count the items in his basket: 14, counting dubious multiples as singles. He remains oblivious as I cleverly spy from behind a tabloid. I notice my two fellow patrons also spying. Dozens of patrons, most of the cashiers, and two managers also spy. Perhaps Death adopted his oblivion so not to face all those he's acquainted professionally.

I hastily load my groceries into my car and manage to follow Death's Buick as he exits the parking lot. I trail him by a full city-block of space; I congratulate my inconspicuousness. I notice the entire grocery store, the entire neighborhood, the entire city trails him; all inconspicuously.

Death drives home in the traffic we once created. Ahead of him, drivers nervously watch their rear view mirrors, congesting matters in their wake, resulting in this elegantly necessary traffic. The dog days chase their tails and summer persists.

skit #84: Wriggly Hookins

2009-09-02T11:28:00.000-07:00

No, nuh uh. No fishes today. But look what else I got. In the old farmers pond out back I found him. Right there mixed in with the rest of the bait. Fattest one of em all. Knew he was lucky. See, look at all his luck oozing right out.

I wash the dishes. My son's rambling bothers me.

Mama, yer not listening. Wh--

Today is a weekday. Why did he not attend school?

W, w, well, I was fishing for all day long with Drew instead. School dont miss me. Social studies dont miss me. See, you could look it in the book! Presidents ago still got elect if I were there or werent. Nothing changed. Heck, you barely miss me.

He caught insufficient fish. His excursion was of no use.

But there werent barely no fishes, mama. That aint my fault. I did get this fattyfatty, by the grace of Wriggly Hookins. Fry him, mama. Im hungry.

He holds up a small box. His puny fish shall not satisfy me. He has a worm left. He must explain.

Used up all the other worms, because they don't mean nothing. I told you, Wriggly Hookin's lucky. You can't waste lucky worms. Dont you know nothing, mama? Haw, you probably never had a lucky worm in your whole life. I bet daddy had a million.

My son is foolish. Worms do not posses luck. Roy left us long ago. I mother poorly.

No, no, no. No. I used up all the littler worms and caught nothing but wet. Those littler worms are a penny a piece, nothing. Wriggly Hookins got us this fish. He caught the one all the other boys were after. Pete, Johnny, Tommy, all the rest, and even Drew tried. But they only had little worms too.

I had Wriggly Hookins. I cast him way deep in the pond. And sure enough my line tugs like I caught a mutt with pork chops. The boys all started hooting and clapping, yelling how I caught the fish, I caught the fish, I caught gnarly old Bubbubb! Some big old evil fish from back from before whenever, they gossip. Well, he aint all that big. But big for pond fodder. For dinner.

The boys kept cheering. But I didnt want some ugly fish. I wanted my lucky worm. And right when I get blue, when I reckon what trade Id just made, I see Wriggly Hookins squirming out of Bubbubb's gills. See, lucky as he is fat. And look at the bounty he brung.

The fish is absent. I wash more dishes.

Wait. Whered the fish go? It was right there, right in the box. Dont move. We have to find Bubbubb. He probably snuck back into the pond through the toilet tubes.

His nonsense must end. My son will attend school tomorrow.

No, mama! I have to catch it again! You dont have no sense. You cant let no wicked fish swim around your own backyard! Doubt youd martyr for hump diddlysquat. Wriggly Hookins wou--

I wallop the insolent boy. He sobs and flees to the fishing hole. He never attends school again.

Behold: Wriggly Hookins. He died for our dinner. Up on the hook. He unlocks the badness in Bubbubb like a key, sets it free. Well I can't remember all of it, but it's something like that.

My son and his make-believers look solemn by the pond shore at sunrise: Pete, Johnny, Tommy, all the rest, and even Drew. I sense they secretly hope never to catch their wicked fish.

skit #83: hue from her heyday

2009-08-06T14:22:00.000-07:00

She nibbled with gumflesh at the balustrade then pouted. Her rotting porch no longer tasted sweet enough to lure even the chubbiest of prey. Yyrja was growing thin and left to eat her unpalatable bait. She swept away the stale gingerbread crumbs with her expired, inanimate broom.

A wooden sliver roused a bud of blood from her pinky fingertip, whose pain she inspected as a curiosity of such things physical; such minutia which, as she aged and her sorceressliness waned, littered the floor of the confines of her life. Yyrja considered the vermilion, a familiar hue from her heyday: ink for infernal pacts, potions from virginal menses, steaming mounds of sacrificial goat offals, but never something she had bled; she never knew she contained that same rich hue.

Yyrja watched the neighborhood girls stroll the street with their sweethearts, squandering all that fervid blood.

Oh, how she longed for her sordid youth. She missed the sunless sinning. She missed sleeping with the Antichrist. Though they hadn't spoken in a millennium, she still remembered him as her malevolent little Beezeypie. They lost themselves, babbling the things romantics do, slurring sweet nothings, entwining their profane tongues. Her Beezeypie ditched her to stud for another of his vast and infernal harem.

Her love seemed antiquated and misplaced. The suburbs held no arboreal orgies. The streetlamps kept things too well lit and the shrubs were shorn too low.

Much of her twilight was spent observing the time, wallowing in the end of her days of witchery. She moped through her condo, impeccably tidy as a result of ample time rather than a hatred of filth. All her magic spent. Her wand lay limp. Her incantations merely malarkey. Her mirror mirror on the wall would not answer her at all. In it, Yyrja saw herself: utterly benign.

Yyrja wondered if she were still a witch at all. She felt listless, impotent, irrelevant. The forgettable and ephemeral magic of her youth was gone, so instead substituted what life presented her with memories: the jostle of public transit for madcap broom flights, the inanity of television for her nights as a gibbering mooncalf, pork butts for curious kinderfolk. She knew what it was to be a witch, and that perhaps that was enough. Her fingertip had clotted.

Some pudgy girls from next door ring the bell. Grandmotherly Yyrja invites them to relax on her porch, offering them scrumptious cookies.

skit #82: your ruckus

2009-07-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

The miserly jungle minds what she misspends, calmly reclaiming her bitterest fruits, her clumsiest birds, her laziest hogs, and her unfittest mothers; conserving her losses by the ways of worms and mulch. You were born by these jungly notions. Shortly after birth, the ants redistributed both your unfit mother and your limp placenta accordingly. Yet they spared you, abiding by some unknown etiquette.

When you neither stood nor stirred, I feared you too may decay. When you finally cried, I feared the tigers may near. Standing, you rose too high, out-of-arms-reach to rout up a meal of grubs and tubers, and I feared you may starve. I feared the many fears the jungle instilled in her denizens. You were my kin but hardly my kind. I did not yet know you were fashioned for survival.

Cradled by haphazardly thatched palm fronds, you gurgled and warbled so curiously. Your ruckus attracted no predators, only witnesses: the bears and lions, subdued by awe; the parrots and cicadas, quietly confused; the centipedes and snakes, neutralized; the apes, agape: My perplexed brothers hung from branches above, dolloping upon me gobs of dubious silence in place of the congratulations and condolences respectively due to a new father and widower. They were ominously still, very wary, sensate to the supernatural: of the jungle's many gambles, you were a rare yet portent cast, as enigmatic as six pips for six dice.

Your debut elapsed that night; and the jungle, but not your father, forgot about you.

Among the treetops, I introduced you to the ways of me, your father, of your passed mother, of my perplexed brothers, and soon, of you. You never felt at ease. Your furless body shivered itself to sleep, sending the canopy boughs fluttering all through the night. When the troop meant to migrate, you desperately moored yourself to the sturdiest branches, distrusting your agility and gravity's stern reputation.

I offered my hand to help you down and I noticed our digits did not interleave. In fact, you hadn't digits at all, but fine fingers and a stubbornly misplaced thumb, attached all wrong. Certainly from your mother's side, the defuncts of baboonery. I considered wrenching the deformity into its proper place, but it made sweet memento of your mother and the peculiar love we shared. So the two thumbs remained.

I knew you would leave us soon. You lost interest in ripe mangoes, in male bonding by brawling, in sharpened sticks, in hooting to claim domains, in courtship and in copulation, in peeling bark, in territorial scents, in lice, in the jungle's etiquette. At all this, you observed us simple creatures, twiddling your peculiar thumbs.

skit #81: Dwayne-Boy

2009-06-12T09:22:00.000-07:00

I.
Lo! Appetite-men of the Iowa, of the Kansas, of the Dakotas.
Sated on maize-whiskers, on soya and bran-meats,
Barbed by cockleburrs, and wooled by heavenly cotton.
Lo! Appetite-men made grown from fed appetite-boys,
From bulbous wombs bequeathed children and calves,
And from teats all suckled on copious dairy-wine.

Know that fertility abundanced the Midwest of yore,
With manly and herbly and meatly plentitude.
Farmer-Mother whose loins some Farmer-Father took,
Sprouted the heroic child-crop Dwayne-Boy,
Heightened by bovine milk left pure by nature,
Sipped unquenchedly, by hands and stones did grow,
Nourished to bull-strength -- by whose udder!
By the bosoms of the mooing prairie-angels!

Rumors make Dwayne-Boy's innocent life undone,
Tavern lore tells of Farmer-Father, merely a sire,
His nine sons by nine virginal Farmer-Mothers,
Numbering eight known by leveraged hedge-funds,
Numbering one known by keeping milk-faith and crops.
Of the one half-brother who dreamed little,
He lived humbly, and loved his wife, and his nine childs,
And sought only sustenance and perhaps a minivan,
Whose simple life his eight half-brothers dismissed.
Of the eight brothers did lust in excess of farmer-wives,
Tantalized by dreams of sating all men by their nutrition,
And tantalized by dreams of owning many of diesel tractors.
They with Modo bargained fiercely and shrewdly,
Without sleep for four days and five nights negotiated,
And the eight brothers brayed with glee, 'Hie!' and 'Ho!'
When wily Modo agreed under eight blood-scribed contracts,
To a business conglomerate by their greed and his sorcery,
So was signed their certificate of incorporation,
Whence born the golem known by name of the Monsanto,
The engine necromantic! The human un-being!
The fist of alchemy! The gene-muddler!
Borne with maw whose appetite consumes indiscriminately,
And borne with malice which schemes unscruplingly.
From one sire derived both Dwayne-Boy and the Monsanto.

II.
Never days passed when the Monsanto left farms unravaged,
Leaving hine and hands no fields to plow, no teats to pull,
Come each autumn, more farmers rallied at the harvest fete,
Where more to commiserate over pastures made fen,
Where more to starve, desperate for mutton and millet,
Where more to join militias, so futile against the Monsanto.
And among them arrived the minivan of Dwayne-Boy,
Who had no need to come to the Autumn Festival,
With his fecund wife, with his hardy boys nine,
With his hearty maize, with his pure milk,
With his peace, with his industry, with his bull-strength,
Farmer-Mother took her toddling son here afore,
But Dwayne-Boy grown found nothing remembered,
No honky-tonk played, and no sour-mash quaffed and,
No courters danced squares, and no rope-wars tugged and,
Dwayne-Boy found welcome as one of few farmers,
To endure the Mosanto! To preserve the Midwest!
Thus, the starved farmers championed Dwayne-Boy.
Huddled hundreds around the Hero-Propitious,
Of the Monsanto, they spake of their trials in turn.

By Waldo: 'My crops! My crops! Left to twist as weeds!
Oh, how the Monsanto transmogrified my livelihood!
Left with morsels first unpalatable and second scant!
My family left as scarcely fed as my granary is full!
By Yttrius: 'What the woman churns does not yield butter!
From the congealed sick-sap emanates an odor, an odor!
My two gluttons for sons consumed much and died,
And I see the cows graze, brewing toxic potions within.
By Mortimer: 'Mine crops grow so tall only to fall,
And plagues curdle the soil, making none else grow,
The sweet soya and bran-meat forfeit their fallow-home,
Left limp and dead for smug weeds to dance upon!
By Hullup: On fish my family always have dined,
But the Lakes bearing Greatness have tasted PCB,
And the trout-fleisch festers with a vile sheen,
Bringing rashes and runty kin and miscarriages upon us.
By Boggo: Our cattle now lurch like snails through pastures,
Leaving a trail of residue like a snail that wilted grass,
Their udders bloated with by insidious hex of rBST,
Like a moored zeppelin, their milk-sacs blistering with pus.
By Paltrow: The crops brought no longer cotton soft,
But wisps impalpable and dream-puffs useless,
No better than the promises advertised in pamphlets,
In droves, in thousands, farmers suicide themselves,
For debtors knock and the Monsanto has left nothing.
At the festival remained those few prideful and alive.

III.
These sad words brought Dwayne-Boy to weep openly,
And remember the impossible legends of the Monsanto,
And the recall rumors of his kinship to the Brothers Eight,
Who did partner by unsavory pacts with the CEO Modo.
The brave farmers of the Midwest asked not for sorrow!
But nor for sympathy! But nor for salvation!
All souls human and bovine and botanical would succumb,
To the Monsanto's devastation lest one intervened,
So went Dwayne-Boy to beseech his brothers unmet.
Traveling many days and nights by the coach bus Greyhound,
Subsisting on grilled cheese and corn flakes of greasy spoons,
Tasting foul, and Dwayne-Boy knew the Monsanto was near,
And nearer, until inside was he the corporate headquarters.

Past security desk and by elevator rose the One-Brother,
To the highest of ninety-nine floors which had no number,
In the executive penthouse laid the brothers eight in wait.
He, garbed in overalls with hay clamped tween his teeth,
They, garbed in suits pieced thrice and ties of power. But!
Dwayne-Boy nary trembled under evidence of class-disparity,
And so regaled the lamentations of the Midwesterners,
Telling of the weeds ubiquitous! Of the weeping salt-grain!
Of the misery-lowing kine! Of the purulent milchers!
Of the suicided farmers! Of the fatherless families!
Of all the misfortune and malady dispensed by the Monsanto!
Tearful Dwayne-Boy wept for the fate of the Midwest,
To which the brothers eight kept stoic and unmoved,
Dismissing all claims of harm brought by the One-Brother,
And unfurled charts and graphs and figures incomprehensible,
And calculated p-values singing statistical insignificance,
Citing research-evidence and statutes of the High Judges,
Proving the brothers eight and Modo and the Monsanto,
Unrelated to any adversity unto the Midwest beyond doubt,
Which did confound the humble-brains of Dwayne-Boy,
Who left defeated, not knowing why he went at all.

IV.
It was decided then-there by his insidious fraternity,
That Dwayne-Boy was no brother of needful keeping,
And did not represent the kind of Farmer-Father's guile.
The brothers eight invoked the sanguine-chant,
And drew the blood-icon. Thus summoned the CEO Modo!
Puppeteer of the Monsanto! The Stomachless One!
The wretched Modo paged the Monsanto only once,
Then informed by phone how Dwayne-Boy must end,
To which the Monsanto obediently complied and went.

Sullen Dwayne-Boy plowed his fields with dull sticks,
He irrigated his ditches with tears and plumbic-water,
And no crops did grow with vitamins or calories,
Leaving his crops dormant or wee, his draft horse brittle,
And himself pale and atrophied and lesion-spotted,
His family dead by disease, with his cough his only friend,
With wistful eyes, he briefly considers to suicide himself,
But instead resolves to triumph through diligence. When!
Afar upon the horizon, what invades his acreage? Behold!
The Agricultural-Giant, the Monsanto, razes the lands!
With minivan and pitchfork and blunderbuss goes Dwayne-Boy,
To end the Monsanto, with perish in mind for himself or it.

Never had Dwayne-Boy seen the Monsanto so close:
Under leather-hide writhed sinews sprung for predation,
Eyes which see germs, and ears which hear stars,
With eight arms and eight taloned hands to rend things living,
The perfect-mutant of no beast or tree known to the Midwest,
Towering above all moral responsibility stands the Monsanto.
And against him, the earthly Dwayne-Boy, the Bull-Child,
Who among men fared many hands high and stones heavy,
But still only a single man battling the Ever-Million Gened.
Whose pitchfork bent against the Monsanto's ferric-bone!
Whose pellets as useless as seeds upon the Monsanto's skin!
Whose minivan crumpled under the hoof of the Monsanto's fury!
The Monsanto battered Dwayne-Boy, ignorant of mercy,
Pulverizing his toes into jelly, his bones splintered to many,
His ribs imploded to stab the throne of soul-being, his heart!
Beaten, awaiting death, Dwayne-Boy coughed blood in rivers,
Which puddled about the Monsanto's feet unsuspectingly.
Contrived in the laboratory, Modo crafted the Monsanto,
By a design blind to all inventions natural to the earth,
To surpass them all by fortitude and cunning -- Alas!
The virulent cough of Dwayne-Boy spread by haste,
Infecting the Monsanto thoroughly and fatally,
Who went from sniffles to splotches to irreversible death.
And collapsed under the weight of its own engineering.

V.
The triumphant sought retribution upon the brothers eight,
Violently quartered to make thirty-two punishable portions,
With twenty-four quarters to fertilize the new crops of the Midwest!
On oats, on triticale! On barley, vetch, red clover!
On cotton, flax, and rye. On sorghum, maize, and spinach!
On buckwheat, rapeseed. Kale and marigolds! On cowpeas!
And mustard, canola, and turnips! And soya, hemp!
On horse beans, field peas, and mung beans!
On alfalfa and on millet! And the crops grew high and rich!
With four quarters sacrificed to the deities to protect the dairies!
To protect the eggs, the milk, the beef, the poultry!
And with four quarters sent North and South, East and West,
As warnings to those business-farmers who dabble,
In the black witchcraftery kept secret as GMOs and pesticides,
And displayed forever for all entering the Midwest to see.

Dwayne-Boy healed, nursed by the fruits of the farmlands,
And when he stood, became the Farmer-King of the Midwest.
All farmers prosper, and the harvest returned to the familiar,
Where honky-tonk played, and where sour-mash quaffed and,
Where courters danced squares, and where rope-wars tugged.
So peace again found the farmlands of the Midwest,
As before the Hunger Age of Modo and the Mosanto.

But with great prejudice, foods deemed impure were eradicated,
And only in old age did Dwayne-Boy understand the legend,
That the Farmer-King and the Monsanto were intolerant alike,
And starved the people by the pursuit of ideals without reason,
With that, Dwayne-Boy left the Midwest, never returning.
Ending the Hunger Age forever upon this world and his people.

skit #80: the manor

2009-06-01T14:16:00.000-07:00

You traveled too far. You promised to return with peach preserves and candied pecans, but you accumulated only an irreversible distance.

Upon your return, gossip of your presumptuous repatriation reached the queen. As prescribed for any ant, she denounced you as a defector from the colony. The anthill predictably aligned itself with her vapid propaganda. What punishment the queen invented was none but a formulaic product of the royal whim; The queen only sought obedience from the loyal ants, not harm upon the disloyal. Your sorority concurred to make you unwelcome, and I was part of that sorority. You remained unperturbed while your only family shunned you. At that time did I both admire and pity you.

The queen insisted we each are capable of, and in fact destined for, treason against the hive. Even the queen may betray the hive, whereupon all truly loyal citizens shall demand a new queen.

Curled in a cozy nook off the path in a tunnel wall, you held staid and supine. You fasted and slept for days. We sisters took turns pestering for answers, but you explained nothing. Even when I visited you apart from the factory hours and alone from the queen's cohorts, you would not divulge your new demeanor. Whatever epiphany spurred your reticence remained a mystery to your sisters. Behind black and chitin-curtained eyes, you safely stowed your secret. I told you how your silence served no purpose unless the hive understood your vow, my stubborn sister.

As we passed you on work days, some of the snider sisters passed judgments, threatening your expulsion, your excommunication, your execution. Unprovoked by these insults, you remained in that cozy nook, idle and aloof. They had been right, and I could not defend how you abstained from our very livelihood which sheltered and nurtured you so. Dismissive of you, we continued with our labors.

Your scandalous return did not rile the older sisters. They had seen many sisters come and go. Departing the hive changes each lady incurably, they noted; Some joked with uncertainty whether it was something to cure at all. They brewed their stagnant wisdom from complacent homesteadiness. And they promised that one day I, should I never defect, may drink their bland ambrosia too.

Shifting through grass chaff for seeds, a sister in my platoon described how she found you. She found you deep within the manor as she searched for honey. You were in a deplorable state: not working, not moving, not eating; incapacitated, dried and dessicated; an empty husk like the chaff we tread on. She carried you from the pantry, down the cupboards, out of the kitchen, under the window jamb, through the garden, back to our formicary. She could have returned with gobs of honey, but instead we regained you and your ingratitude.

No matter how we wish vitality upon your thorax, my stubborn sister, you refuse it. No matter how we set morsels in your mandibles, my stubborn sister, you release it. You show no remorse as you let it all spill to waste.

All ants must bring fertility to the colony, actively or passively. Looking to gain favor, the younger sisters enacted the royal punishment. They buried you into the food store to compost, and you did not resist. Only the antly would struggle against such lethargy. Some of the older sisters attended your burial, recounting among themselves all the times they'd each seen this ceremony, tallying their sadness by means of morbid arithmetic. The hive lost a sister.

I recalled how the nursery raised all of us sisters in the same manner. The matrons diverted all the nymphs with the same fables honey-lakes effervescing deep in the manor. The legends made exclusive promises with you and not with me. The colonial life satisfied me, but you looked afar for peach preserves and candied pecans.

Weeks later, my daily duties determined me to feed your lifeless body to our nymphs in the nursery.

Now I am an older sister, brimming with stagnant wisdom. All the nymphs I raised on legends of honey-lakes have grown. I see you have returned, reborn among the young. I show you which door jamb allows your entrance to the splendors of the manor.

skit #79: the racehorse

2009-05-26T10:36:00.000-07:00

Riley mopes about the grandstand, burdened by the inverted levity of having nothing. Congruent with the bookie's odds, for every ebullient face unlike his, he finds ten dismal twins. In name and notion, the Downs makes no pretense of how Riley shall collapse. His uniform buries him beneath denims and dungarees. Only does the Downs provide a slit through which he may peep upon his dream.

The stadium sets him far away from the spectacle. In the center of the racetrack, wee mammals run useless circles, saddled with even weer mammals. Over the chatter of his fellow losers, he can not hear the giddiups or whinnies of jockeys or ponies; At this distance, the racers seem to move at such a lazy pace that even he could outtrot them, though Riley forgoes this feat.

His fingers grope for change in the abyss of is pocket. The few coins he retrieves are rigid in form and petty in value. He reverses and re-reverses his nickel from no to yes to no. Far too predictable for gambling, so instead he invests the coin in the predictable sort of dream. Riley clicks the coin against the bar to buy a golden draught, not caring which face shows.

The plight of the racehorse inspires Riley to ask no one, 'Gawd. Who's on my back.'

'That's why you're here, isn't it? For a little freedom? Let them go, let them all go,' replies the clean-shaven man to his right.

'Ha, can't go nowhere without a ticket.'

'A ticket doesn't win money, it buys a fantasy. Might as well imagine yourself a ticket.'

'Hell, spent all my imagination on this beer.'

The clean-shaven man chuckles wisely, “Don't get down on yourself, brother. Money means nothing, what does – '

...
AND HURTLING FIRST THROUGH THE GATE IS BLUE COLLAR BOBBY
FOLLOWED BY STRANGE BOON
WITH INEVITABLE ALLEGORY PLACING THIRD
FOR THE NEXT RACE FRESH FROM THE HAYSTACK WE HAVE
...

' – yaaaaahooooooo!'

The clean-shaven man returns with generosity to match his mirth. He does not mind when his full billfold molts a few notes onto Riley's lap. After the clean-shaven man bids farewell and departs the Downs, Riley bets his spoils on Entry #56. Riley sits in the bleachers besides the thousands else, each with their own wishes and their own betting slips. Riley's slip reads:

MONEY TALKS
Louis Bragnan

Over the loudspeaker, an announcer's tongue frantically speeds in league with the horses' legs.

...
THERES THE PISTOL MARK
AND THEYRE OFF OUT OF THE GATE
HOME SWEET HOME SEIZES THE LEAD
TRAILING COME MY FAIR LADY AND A LITTLE SUGAR ON THE SIDE
YAHWEHS FAVE CLOSES THE GAP AND CUTS INTO THIRD
PUTTING CORNUCOPIA OUT OF THE TOP RUNNERS
A LITTLE SUGAR ON THE SIDE DRIVES THE INSIDE
PASSES HOME SWEET HOME IN A WIDE SWEEP
AND THE QUARTER MARK
HARMLESS FUN AND MONEY TALKS MAKE THEIR WAY
THUNDERING PAST YAHWEHS FAVE AND MY FAIR LADY
A LITTLE SUGAR ON THE SIDE STILL UNSHAKABLE
MONEY TALKS AND YOU OBEY
YOUR HEART BEATS TO THEIR HOOVES ON THE TRACK
THIS IS WHERE YOU SPENT THE WEEK
THIS IS WHERE YOU BELONG
UP TO THE HALF MARK
SHE LEFT YOU ALL OVER SOME HARMLESS FUN
BUT SHELL COME BACK ONE DAY
THEN YOU CAN TELL HER SHE HAD HER CHANCE
SOON YOULL BE TANNING IN THE SUN
DRINKING TOP SHELF MAI TAIS WITH NUBILE TAHITIANS
YOU DREAM HARD ENOUGH AND ITLL COME TRUE RILEY
THREE QUARTERS
MONEY TALKS USURPS FIRST PLACE
UPSETTING A LITTLE SUGAR ON THE SIDE
FOLLOWED BY HOME SWEET HOME AND CORNUCOPIA
MONEY TALKS SETS A STRONG LEAD
SHES FLYING LIKE SHE BUSTED OUT OF A GLUE FACTORY
LOUIS BRAGNAN TAKES MONEY TALKS TWO LENGTHS AHEAD
FIVE LENGTHS AHEAD
SIX LENGTHS AHEAD
THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE
NINE LENGTHS AHEAD
OH NO
WHAT IN THE HECK IS LOUIS BRAGNAN
NOW FIFTEEN LENGTHS AHEAD
OH LORDY
OH MY
THIS AINT GOOD
SIXTEEN LENGTHS AHEAD
MONEY TALKS SETS THE FIRST LAP
...

Louis Bragnan stands as tall as he can stand. So does Riley. His arms rise to the sky victoriously. So do Riley's. The rest of the crowd remains seated; Riley scoffs at those who dared not vote for the underdog, #56. Money Talks slows from gallop to canter to walk. The remaining racers thunder past the mistaken champions, considering them competitors no longer, only irrelevant obstacles. As Riley sprints to collect on #56, the race continues without his attention.

skit #78: MAKING YOU DESIRABLE

2009-05-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

Her badge read:

MS. LARA F.
MAKING YOU DESIRABLE
BEAUTICIAN

Perfunctorily, she smiled. Fissures cracked around her mouth and eyelids; a make-up mask caked with desperate thickness betrayed her appearance of natural beauty. Mrs Hampson did not judge, for she knew she was far older and far uglier. She noticed Ms Lara F's lipstick perfectly matched the stain's shade.

'Good morning, miss. How may I help you?' chirped Ms Lara F.

'I want to look young,' admitted Mrs Hampson.

'Gosh, maybe we can knock off a year or two. How does nineteen sound?' Ms Lara F laughed a facetious laugh.

Mrs Hampson brushed off the vapid compliment. 'Your lipstick. What kind is it?'

Ms Lara F shuffled for the applicator, 'Furtive Flirt. Here, try.'

Mrs Hampson painted sloppy and sensuous colors around her lips. 'What do you think? How does it work on husbands?'

'Well, I've never been married. One day!' She knocked on wood with an naive eagerness that irritated Mrs Hampson. It reminded her of herself before marrying Arthur. 'You look beautiful!'

Mrs Hampson inspected herself in the mirror. She pouted her lips, imagining staining her husband's dress shirt with a pigment of her own.

Ms Lara F regurgitated the slogan, 'Making you desirable!'

Mrs Hampson paid the balance with her husband's credit card. Ms Lara F's inexperience prolonged the transaction, granting Mrs Hampson ample time to admire the familiar faces on the cosmetics magazines. The receipt printed. Mrs Hampson left, her echoing heels incising through the hollows of the cosmetics department, her lips a predatory pink under the fluorescent lighting, a new woman.

skit #77: Calamity Jane

2009-05-20T10:23:00.000-07:00

Neither of us have left her room for some days. Pneumonia incapacitates her. Worry immobilizes me. My breath trails hers warily, as her last leads my last.

Calamity Jane coughs violently, and though she never liked pretty things, she inadvertantly decorates her bedsheets with the floral pattern of a portentous funerary bouquet: verdurous phlegm flecked with crimson buds. The brutess does not notice, continues to cough until empty, then spits. To her violence, I flinch and squeal and wail, just as her ongoing regimens of daily abuse had conditioned me to react. My histrionics, which normally elicits her boastful guffaw, fail to fruit even a smirk. She slips into a defeated sleep, and I contemplate the brief life that may await me without her protection.

Nervously, I watch through the window slats. Her illness advertises an opportunity to all the prairie's marauders: the coyotes and the desperados. Now Calamity Jane cannot protect Deadwood or, more selfishly, me. With its heroine fallen, they come to exact retribution upon all which abides by that very society which shuns them. Man and beast alike run Main Street amok, gobbling the vittles off still-clucking chickens, urinating to claim property like conquistadors, nipping up skirts at feminine softnesses, howling with the seductive madness that makes one join in; But I resist their call. How they meet my eyes through the window slats, I know they know I am a gentleman, and so I too shall bear retribution.

Two years ago, Marsh & Coe, Co. declared their intent to establish the first and only bank in Deadwood, South Dakota. As an apprentice, the firm paid me a meager stipend, affording me scarcely enough to rent the lowliest flat in all Dorchester. Like a peacock among pigeons, I failed to blend in with Dorchester's denizens. No one likes an outsider. Daily, I drudged through the mires of Dorchester's worst. And every day I arrived, my suit disheveled, my complexion bruised blue, my pockets picked. So every day Marsh & Coe, Co. found the degraded gentleman that remained of me. Of their staff, the executive management estimated me to be their rowdiest employee. They shuttled me off to orchestrate the construction of their bank, the First Deadwood Bank.

I arrived and Deadwood knew. One posse procured my luggage set; another posse procured Marsh & Coe Co.'s realty payment; a third posse procured my accouterments momentarily; Calamity Jane procured me as her chattel, clobbered the thieves, reclaimed the clothing that was now hers (by extension of me), left me undressed and sinful, and checked us into a single room with a matrimonial bed at the Loose Dove's Roost.

No one disturbed Calamity Jane or her belongings. Though she slew many men during our courtship, she remained a sensitive lover. But as a partner, she lacked the eloquence needed to garner my respect, so she domesticated me by whip. Once I thought I might grow old with Calamity Jane, forever: she, my man, and I, her dude. But our romance best suited brevity. All her sweet nothings smell of sour mash. She wears other men's blood like mascara and other men's sweat like perfume; She does not disclose how she becomes stained so. She has reprimanded the impudence of my mouth so many times my words wear the swollen drawl of one who fears speech.

Now I see the First Deadwood Bank, its scaffolded skeleton, half-built, without a blueprint or plan, unsound.

Now I see my beloved Calamity Jane, half-dead, half-loved, her eyes on her bottle and her gun.

I step outside to renounce my life as a gentleman, to become one of the Calamity Johns, to ravage the Dakotas from south to north. But they shoot me. I think hear her muster the strength to guffaw.

skit #76: nothing unnatural

2009-05-05T10:54:00.000-07:00

Reeds waft and mosquitoes croon, ripening us. Many broadcast their midnight sentiments in the lagoon. The barrage of trilling frogsongs sets every amphibian gonad aquiver, either to activity or to anticipation. Their slick vocal sacs balloon and unballoon, seducing us volumetrically. We all wade eye-deep in the very same soup, wanting nothing more than to relieve our bodies of impatient eggs. I find a song for me.

You and I grope one another pheromonally at pond-length through porous skins; Skin has no stomach so we are never sated. As I paddle coyly towards you, my webbing unavoidably swats the jellied eggs and pollywogs that already fill the basin underwater. I may crush some, but we will soon make more. We care not of who, but how.

A carnal mantra truncates all my thoughts. Hormones manage my marionette strings, conducting me masterfully. I am out of control. You, my tiny suitor, clamber atop me like a fertile island. I find an archipelago of conquistador-newfoundlands shuddering about me. The innumerable babies below indent my belly, and I cannot help but expel my eggs into the pond.

We all do. Eggs are everywhere. A reproductive diagram somewhere outlines our life cycle, and we fulfill its prophecy.

As foreign as icebergs in our Mississippi bayou, quality-rejected pills quietly buoy from the pharmaceutical company upstream: anti-depressants, contraceptives, fertility meds. They mandate my exhausted body must copulate again, so I do. Again, so I do, so do we all. Nothing unnatural makes us suspicious. Our amplified hormones bring only clarity. If anything, according to the diagram, we are too alive.

A pickup truck parks at the muddy shore. We cannot and shall not disentangle. Compulsion paralyzes us all. Again, so do we all.

brrrrEEEEEEEEEEP.

Trudy's back depresses the car horn as Micky fumbles unhooking her bra. The highbeams of her pickup truck illuminate the eyes of the mating frogs. Their nictations twinkle cosmically among the black bog-formed firmament. Her FM radio drones love ballads, setting the mood. Trudy finds a song for her.

Things with Micky were going well. They had been going steady for three weeks. Micky had a job and bought her ice cream after school. They neck ineptly, like teething vampires. Her gynecologist had taught her the responsibilities of womanhood. She had showed Trudy pictures of a female ovum and of a male sperm, the latter seeming nothing more than little parasitic tadpoles. The gynecologist then gave Trudy the Pill.

But Trudy still didn't feel ready. Micky's hand got only as far as her breast despite his exaggerated claims. Trudy kept him at bay until week six. Then she ran the first leg through the reproductive cycle, perhaps limping, perhaps sprinting, not yet knowing if it felt natural.

skit #75: whatever he respired

2009-05-02T10:28:00.000-07:00

Percy's personal moon wasted no time on the in-betweens: always full, a shoulder-width aperture to uncontained skies; or new, the covered manhole; or eclipsed, the downtown traffic racing over his subterranean kingdom. The Sanitation Department did not doubt Percy's self-proclaimed passion for sewage treatment, nor did they refuse his volunteered time. At the end of some workdays, he would return above ground and wait for public transit to deliver him to the discomfort of his apartment where he spent the evening resenting the moon's regular faces under which continent men slept.

But most nights he slept in the sewers, swaddled in his municipally-provided uniform. He could leave whenever he wanted to -- the sewer or the job or Manhattan or anything else. He was free from everything except his bowels. He thought these thoughts as he delayed dreaming, his head heavy against the concrete precipice. The fetid stench of sewer muck wafted from the river, burbling with what New York's stomachs could not use; The handkerchief he held to his nose was doused with his auntie's perfume, a scent so dense nothing noisome could penetrate it.

Percy peeked over his handkerchief. He held the tincture of his auntie's perfume against the utility lights. He rotated it between his forefinger and thumb and in each facet it appeared equally pale, where his history remained imprisoned behind a millimeter of brittle glass. Deeper he looked into the perfume and deeper he huffed his handkerchief. Olfactory memories whisked him away.

His mother and her sister clucked as they made way through garden, trimming hedges into pleasing geometries and weeding anything ugly. They gossiped and sipped beers. He was old enough, maybe twelve years, and he had accidentally shat himself again. But he knew this time wasn't his fault. The rose thorns hooked his overalls. He bleated for help for hours, but the adults had left for indoors long ago. A little one slipped out as he wept -- just one little one. But his mother's pittance of patience had been spent. She walloped him. Then she sent him to a behaviorist. Then she sent him to disciplinary school. His auntie was the one who wept as she saw him off.

His mother wore the same scent as his auntie. Or maybe his auntie wore the same scent as his mother. Yet they smelled differently: sometimes the perfume smelled like composting soil, like bleach, like suffocating shame; and sometimes it smelled like baby wipes, like bubble baths, like bedtime stories; but always like roses.

Remembrance left Percy too bleary to see the tincture any longer. He watched the sewage come only to go inconsequentially. It drifted freely throughout the labyrinths of the sewer. He goes where ever he likes and his mother will never know. Between the velvety must of the rose perfume and the blighted tunnel air, whatever he respired sickened him.

The Central Office transmitted Percy's orders over the walkie-talkie: SEPTIC BLOCKAGE, ROUTE 44-7JW-B. But they weren't paying him so Percy ignored them. It was six in the morning. He stood beneath his mother's apartmental facilities, listening. He can hear her squeak meekly and moments later the plumbing produced her stool. He smiled forgivingly like a good son could.

His personal moon reflected on the sewage. Though his mother does not watch the same moon, she may witness the same reflection.

skit #74: like the rest of the animals

2009-04-30T22:04:00.000-07:00

Pappy worked twelve-hour days, six days a week. He would get all kinds of money. One day he bought something and he called it his baby. He let it sleep underneath a blanket in the big red barn in a stable like the rest of the animals. Alby said its probably a newborn elephant.

Before she went to bed, Mammy opened the bedroom windows for summertime. Me and Alby had contests to see who could stay up latest and after ten o'clock we could see and hear Pappy over in the barn. He talked to his baby and his baby talked back. It talked like chittering sounds and low grumbling sounds. Alby is smarter than me and she thought it was how a humpback whale talks. But it made angry sounds or maybe hungry sounds. Alby said some animals are basically monsters.

Once me and Alby were up real late and we snuck into the big red barn. Pappy dint know of it and we dint want him to know of it so we were quiet and in the dark. There was his baby but it was awake. It was out from its blanket. Me an Alby seen lots of animals before being both farm childs, but Alby knew more from books. But Pappy's baby wernt like any cows or dogs. Alby thought it looked more like an anglerfish but they breathe water. It had a face with too many shapes on it and all the shapes were in wrong places.

It stayed still like when the cats wait for mice so we dint get too close to it. We knew it was watching us because it had two big eyes. They dint blink not once the whole time. We dint see how many claws it had or how fast it was and we dint see if the mouth had fangs or maybe it was a beak or where it could eat something. It was real dark. Alby said maybe an kodiak bear or a komodo dragon but she said they dont live near big cities like Topeka so probably not either one.

Pappy's baby was being so quiet, so we got scared.

Quicker than Alby could stop me, I picked up a rock and threw it to make sure Pappy's baby knew we wernt for eating, that it knew we were Pappy's kin. The rock hit its shell and it went PANG! then it made a low moan. Alby said maybe it sleeps with its eyes open like great white sharks do. We thought about this a few seconds and hoped it would blink but then we got scared even more and ran.

Pappy must have knew what we did, but he never scolded us or whupped us for it. He just put a lock on the doors. That was the only time we saw his baby. Alby thought it was definitely a monster that wanted revenge and Pappy begged for mercy on us as long as we make sure we never bothered it again. Mammy heard Alby and said all sweetly that we were such imaginative little children. Mammy said she thought it was some kind of milk machine but me and Alby knew better.

Summertime was gone and Mammy dint open the windows anymore before bed. We couldnt hear Pappy anymore but we could see his tracks when we woke up. Winter got real cold. Pappy was working more hours and Alby said she saw the barn lights on all night. We only saw him when we all at breakfast but he dint want to talk to me and Alby and Mammy.

There was one Sunday where we came out in the morning. The barn doors were open. Mammy was crying because Pappy was nowhere. Alby says she saw when Pappy went in to feed his baby last night. There was a fight and his baby went and ate Pappy up whole. There were Pappy's footprints going in and his baby's slither tracks coming out, two tracks side- by-side like wagon wheels. Alby thinks it was probably two gigantic snakes, like anacondas or maybe boa constrictors.

skit #73: His select reserve

2009-04-29T20:18:00.000-07:00

Sunshine happens upon the world in halves, and none know whether days precede or follow twilight. Each eve in Bordeaux, nocturnal pitch pours down alleyways, varnishing the city with the venereal film peculiar to sinfulness. Sticky seepage trickles out into boulevards where lamps light the filth for all to see; Everyone sees the muck and simply steps over it. Schoolboys play hopscotch and policemen walk beats.

Cardinal Mourlot walks his ingrained diurnal walk down these alleyways after every evening mass. Uneven cobblestones make his steps falter, and he exerts himself to maintain his balance and poise, grunting low among the fornicators; Their sordid chorus bellows from quarter-hourly hotel rooms. Groping for the palpable comfort spirituality lacks, the cardinal fidgets with his rosary beads. Safely tethered to his trusty anchor, he whiffs deeply the curious musts: the smell of his congregates conjugating; and he hears the solicitations of sirens: sweet Virginia de Clugny-Twat selling herself by the pound like ham hocks.

After one of her brief arrests for prostitution, Virginia confessed to Mourlot how God speaks to her. His recollection went so:

God confided in Virginia that a great flood would wash over Man, not unlike the Great Flood. It was Man's dabbling in penicillin and pasteurization that would wage such carnage. So Man would survive, which was satisfactory, but God's most esteemed creature would perish. God had bestowed upon Virginia the honor to serve as a sanctuary for His select reserve: the animalcules by His ridiculous naming. Everything else on the planet was, as He put it, 'superfluous in number and complexity.' God's cargo had migrated to Noah; God asked Virginia to obtain the cargo herself, for traveling distances was difficult for His bitty animalcules.

She swore on God's ordination to infect herself with all of His favored children. Last month she had inducted consumption, the clap, and a zoo of stomach flora. She was collecting French disease when Mourlot finds her.

The two holy folks judge each other in so many ways. A few:

He approaches her, and she knows he never used his body: the cardinal's black robe is utterly negated by the darkness, so Mourlot appears disembodied, as nothing but the pale grimace of a scarlet-capped cherub.

He approaches her, and he knows she has fallen from grace: the lips that fouled the cardinal's ring, the lips that slobbered over the Eucharist, the lips that lied in confessional, decorated with resplendent ruby sores.

He approaches her, and she knows he is but a man underneath that costume: sweat wets his temples, his pupils keen as predators' do, the smoothness of his cardinal robe is betrayed by a bulge.

He approaches her, and he knows she is clean under her grime: the little girl he baptised as Virginia, frocked with a patina of unwarranted abuse, her innocence salvageable by his abundant piety.

'I can rescue you from this farce you live,' both say in awkward simultaneity.

skit #72: something blue and useless

2009-04-06T10:26:00.001-07:00

That era's great blue planet modeled asphalt oceans, automobiles grazing in lush pastures, cellular antennae groves, mountains of unrecycled post-consumer waste, badlands of monotonous habitations. That modern mankind did not live in dystopia, only its present. When its present passed, some new texture would clothe earth's curves, some new scar would scab earth's skin. The eternal Spring to which modern man acclimated eventually unsprung.

Doomsday evangelists and Mayan calendars enjoyed brief vindication prior to the indiscriminate mayhem ends-of-epochs tend to usher. Cereal crops withered under droughts. Oil reserves depleted. Natural disasters raged perniciously over unnatural landscapes. Wanton warring left the earth scorched and the winters nuclear. The common cold cashed its chips, making its abrupt exit along with billions of its hosts. Catastrophes erased all life between between Sydney and Calgary like a broad stripe of primer, turning everything earthly dead and gray.

Her people were once confident cities would stand again, eventually acquiescing to the reality of their bleak frontier. Refugees have been displaced from their homeland; Nomads have no homeland.

An ultraviolet dawn invisibly smiled upon Lucy, sweetly gracing her cheek with a cancerous kiss. She awoke, yawned through her pantyhose gas mask, and enjoyed her morning stretches. Hungry, she left her tent for the jetty to fish for breakfast.

Never did she expect to snag salmon, perhaps a fish stick or hot dog if lucky. She baited her line optimistically, jacketing a bent screw with the tantalizingly fluorescent nib of a yellow highlighter. She cast her spool of telephone wire as far as her atrophied arms would allow.

Viscous with crud and gunk, the river slipped over its unknown contents, like greasy fingers through unkempt purse: its morsels, its treasures, its trash. The yellow nib plumbed bravely into the river, into the opaque toxins in which even fluorescence could hide.

Lucy listened to the burbling river's muddy wisdom. She remembered shopping for bargains in the supermarket long ago with her mother. But now, she had no choices. The hook and river would agree upon what she deserved.

She reeled and found something: something too lustrous for a shell fragment or fishscale, something too ornate for biproduct from the ancient cosmetics factory decaying upstream, something too fragile to have survived river's toxicity and turbulence by its own, something unedible, something impractical, something improbable, something blue and useless. She placed it in her pocket. Of the things she found and kept were those she wanted not needed.

She would eat tomorrow. Today, she adored the bauble's absurdity.

skit #71: an error corrected in seven steps

2009-04-04T21:46:00.000-07:00

After long hours, he finally looked up.

1.038 and 1.000.
1.038. But then 1.000.
1.038. 1.000.

Triple-checking changed nothing. The readout looked wrong and felt wrong. The discrepancy did not seem trivial.

'Errrrr, huh...' he reasoned then conceded, '... ... ... murhhhh.'

Mr Vibler breathed shallowly, then not at all. His fellow clerks shuffled documents with rote assiduity, and none noticed him grow so very reticent and so very remote. Everything paused, everything nullified. His heart pumped no blood and his wiles contrived no excuses. He remained transfixed and tacit long enough to dupe a mortician, as brittle and still as frost-frocked grass. The error and its father lapsed into the moment; the moment distended into an eternity; the eternity afforded Mr Vibler ages to wallow in the comprehension of his folly.

It felt as much like absence as anything can.

Over years of crusades and alms-collection, the Vatican accrued the unwieldy and superfluous affluence as was pre-ordained by the Divine Will, giving the nation a preliminary taste of its due heavenly riches. Even the Vatican had water bills to pay and stock portfolios to play. Its financial bureau operated under gaggle of meticulous treasury stewards, maintaining its tidy fortune. Every task of its stewardship laid predicated in the infallible recipes of procedural manuals. All the stewards, including Mr Vibler, concurred errors arose only when one deviated from the steps; all errors were accidental or intentional. The same dreary work which sedated Mr Vibler wholly preoccupied his coworkers, so when he lapsed in to a guilt-ridden stasis, none noticed. Even he did not know whether he deviated accidentally or intentionally.

Here is how he went about his correction.

And Mr Vibler printed a copy of the Employee's Handbook. He furtively thumbed through APPENDIX 4C-05: MISHAP MITIGATION. Company policy transformed his error into a manageable liability. The Handbook illuminated the corporate ethics of what was right and and what was wrong, as easily understood as day and night.

And Mr Vibler sobbed. Tears blurred his sight, obfuscating the text's from inanely bureaucratic to utterly unintelligible. Staging a diversion, he ruffled papers meaninglessly until he regained composure. Between his welled eyes and the bewept linoleum, Mr Vibler read through the consequences to be executed by the managerial staff with highly professional stoicism, sniffling only inaudibly.

And Mr Vibler made a great mound of APPENDIX 4C-05 upon his desk. His puddled tears were behind him, and he was ready to comply with the Steward's Code. He completed form after form, populating all the fallow fields with admissions of guilt in green ink, signing a pointed thicket of signatures, completing every leaf of paper flawlessly.

And Mr Vibler reflected on how insignificant his error seemed, a mere difference of 0.038. While the Vatican was powerful, it was neither the only religion nor the only business. Among all the figures all the world's accountants considered each day, how little 0.038 mattered. But the very economy that eclipsed Mr Vibler's piddling 0.038 was itself made of such 0.038s. And precisely its contribution to this summation obligated Mr Vibler to represent the 0.038 he brought into this world.

And Mr Vibler floated through the sea of stewards whom he, though a steward himself for so long, hardly recognized, nor they him. Their cold hearts mustered lukewarm adieus and their glassy eyes indifferently watched him drift away into a blue distance. Something abstractly amniotic about salaried positions attracted both the thoroughly bland and the timidly eccentric. Cradled by the ebb and flow of corporate finance, most stewards were happy as clams. Others suffocated in its monotonous tides.

And Mr Vibler trod through the Vatican's corridors, the 4C-05 tucked under his musky armpit. He trod past the groundskeepers suffering great burdens, past the chittering of idle receptionists, past the braying of middle management, past a plethora of unmet persons with unknown purposes, past couriers, chefs, comptrollers, security, past unending diversities. Of all the multifarious departments, only one could properly address his 4C-05. He slipped the manila folder into the mailslot of HR. In his explication, from one human being to another, he begged for sympathy.

And Mr Vibler was released from his duties later that evening by a unanimous executive vote. The Vatican went on without him. To today, Mr Vibler wished he had kept the error to himself.

skit #70: clueless druids

2009-03-25T23:37:00.000-07:00

What Britannia's knights could not budge, clever Merlin portered Stonehenge over to Salisbury Plain by the glib sorcery privy only to the brilliantly lazy. In memory of those peaceably practicing death, and in consideration of those suffering life, Merlin arranged the trilithons into a harmonious geometry so as to bring good health to those in pain.

The possible ills it could cure were many: bloody flux, hysteria, leprosy, the ague, menstruation, nits, the black plague, the red plague, and all things ranging from phlegmy to choleric. Stonehenge, an instrument of magic, and magic, an expression of the divine, healed only ailments spiritual in nature -- barring misfortune ordained by the heavens, understandably.

How it healed them, none knew. Maybe the stones' approximate circles coerced the Prime Mover to deliver equally approximate relief. Maybe some then-undetectable penicillin stowed away on the sarsen stones. Maybe Merlin was indeed a bastard spawned between a incubus and a princess, borne with an armory of spells capable of transporting and enchanting this superstitious pile of rocks known as Stonehenge. Full of as much modesty as guile, the charalatan or wizard known as Merlin sought no credit for this boon, as he was already preserved in the formaldehyde of superior legends.

These things historical, among many things responsible, AGW & Sons Construction Co. never considered.

Important interstates overran England, leaving only a few idyllic pastures strewn about for historic landmarks. The foremen orchestrated a fleet of bulldozers and cranes into the crude snort and swing of civil construction, conducting the the wrath of Man. An operator dressed in day-glow orange garb sneezed, jerking a lever, loosing the wrecking ball. The highway overhead pass collapsed, toppling Stonehenge like playing cards. AGW & Sons restored all those big old rocks to just about the right vicinities.

As cranes suspended the elements of Stonehenge in the sky, the dumbstruck tourists knew they were witnessing a marvelous spectacle, so they embraced intimate silence such spectacles encourage. Pirouetting against the squall of the English autumn, Stonehenge exposed its audience to a barrage of magics not Merlin nor the Prime Mover nor AGW & Sons Construction Co. anticipated. Like clueless druids, the onlookers awaited answers from inanimate stone.

Stonehenge deciphered the stifled words of lovers' hearts.
Stonehenge afflicted many with agnosticism.
Stonehenge placed White Noise as second at today's pony race.
Stonehenge recommended Highway A344 as a detour considering recent events.
Stonehenge admitted Merlin was just an old fabulist.
Stonehenge admitted it was just a pile of rocks.

The crane lowered Stonehenge whereupon it remained silent for the rest of its ageless days.

skit #69: Y ⅄

2009-03-23T16:23:00.000-07:00

No town would have him, for an alphabet of misdeeds preceded his decency. On his flesh, searing irons forever inscribed 'V' for vagabond, 'D' for deserter, 'S' for slave, 'B' for blasphemer. Wesley never felt remorse for exercising his freedoms, though the repeated brandings convinced him to carry a mote of regret.

His back ribbed with whip runs and his face flecked with knife nicks, Wesley still recognized himself. And though he could not imagine what methods delivered the majority of his scars (perhaps he was swathed in incandescent chickenwire or honey-glazed to feed fireants), he still recognized himself.

On his left temple he bore another letter whose corresponding crime Wesley never learned. Between all the seasoned scoundrels and pedantic lawmen he encountered during his interminable vagrancy, none could decipher its significance.

A Texan undertaker made known, 'Yeasayer. No one likes an optimist.'
A scowling Chihuahuan jailer muttered, 'Yanqui.'
'Yap too much.' noted the chain gang leader.
A Californian prospector squealed, 'Yuh--yah--yahooooooooooooowieeeee!' before falling off his barstool.
A sentimental whore supposed, 'Y is for yesterday, so you never forget what you did.'

The torpid Yuma winds made no effort to cover Wesley's tracks. Every tiresome stride remained plotted in the dunes, tracing a disparaging retrogression into the very very distant horizon. There he could see his origin: the last town that had evicted him. Footprints quantified the distance he marched, dispelling any misconceptions of his progress. Wesley wished for a sandstorm or, when desperate, cataracts, but everything remained unequivocally clear.

He littered despair like the preemptive breadcrumbs of someone planning to become lost. He sometimes took relief in reveries that he may one day step into his first footsteps, inadvertently completing some unexpected circle,
never feeling obligated to walk those steps again. Vultures loomed between Wesley and the sun, pausing to judge his resemblance to carrion. Each morbid interruption of daylight returned his focus from the diversion of daydreaming to the necessity of marching.

He drifted through seas of sand he could not drink, through forests of cacti that provided no refuge. He marched directly towards where ever he intuited the next town may lay, detoured only when the regal Saguaros stood stubbornly in his path. 'They never gotta move a sister's whisker,' Wesley admired, and, 'How wrong-made I am for this desert,' Wesley admitted. When Wesley sweat or cried, he suspected the cacti somehow pocketed his moisture.

He began to resent that when alone in the desert he was not of his own belonging. When the town did not want him, he was cast into the desert. Wesley did not know where to go when even the badlands refused him. Sand, sand, sand, and sand. At least all the branding irons were gone, all his indictments were gone, all the naysayers were gone. When offered nothing, Wesley searched for anything. Under his microscopy, no trivia went unexamined in his search for something.

From the sand smiled a wee ivory sliver. Wesley gingerly extracted the wishbone; so dainty and delicate, it must be a quail's. Though he didn't know why it seemed familiar, Wesley was happy to find anything at all.

skit #68: Moonshine Rules

2009-03-21T16:33:00.000-07:00

Two events allowed the reclusive hamlet of Wersolla Bluerock to enjoy fifty-four years of invisibility.

First, a promotion-minded Union commander's boastful report exaggerated the success of his contribution to General Lee's scorched earth policy, making claims of thorough Ozarkian eradication when, truthfully, it was a mere peppering of devastation. Second, a federally-funded committee of transgressive Arkansans, for fear of their families' safeties, omitted the whereabouts of their cherished hometowns when responding to federal surveys. Wersolla Bluerock, for what any yankee or carpetbagger or scalawag knew, had been destroyed.

Even had Wersolla Bluerock been razed, few would miss it. Its only citizens were a few dozen moonshiners living in ramshackle shacks. They perpetually slept, distilled, or recreated in eight-hour staggered rotations. Unmolested by the government and self-satisfied, the merry band lived lawlessly and happily for a number of years. When cirrhosis made its inevitable rounds, the shantytown was completely depopulated by 1888.

Wersolla Bluerock no longer had men in its huts, nor a place on a map, but had abundant of hooch in vats. The untended moonshine began to burble to one another. They began courteously, introducing their names, their distillers, the locations of their vats, and so on, and so on, and so on. The depletion of all smalltalk topics made for deeper discussions: their interests, their ambitions; conjectures on the meaning happiness, on existence, on purpose.

They learned of commonalities between moonshines. Wishing to testify their fraternity, they constructed a list of qualities describing moonshininess. They began with the necessary platitudes to form a foundation upon which every moonshine must agree. As the list lengthened, it grew divisive with audacious entries. Some speculate the list's abrupt end marks the abandonment of the Moonshine Rules, as the moonshines slowly realized how different they were.

When Wersolla Bluerock was rediscovered in 1919, Arkansan sheriffs donated the Moonshine Rules to the Little Rock History Museum, whereupon the tattered document was meticulously reassembled. Whether the words of the Moonshine Rules belong to the moonshines or were warped by civilized men remains unknown.

The Moonshine Rules

1. All moonshines are spirits.
2. All spirits are liquid.
3. Spirits must be contained in vessels.
4. Spirits come in a variety of potencies.
5. One's distiller determines one's potency.
6. A moonshine was distilled to exalt its distiller.
7. To falsify one's potency by means of forged proof or methanol is unmoonshinelike.
8. To be unmoonshinelike is to portray one's distiller as undistillerlike.
9. A moonshine has no hands so as to make unmoonshinelike falsifications.
10. A moonshine has no wisdom so as to conduct unmoonshinelike reasoning.
11. [missing] bliss with neither use of hands nor wisdom.
12. [missing]

skit #67: sometimes forever

2009-03-19T22:12:00.000-07:00

No history books will enshrine the recently-deposed regime responsible for obliterating the Library of Alexandria. As the Library is rebuilt, the offending censors are appropriately forgotten, sometimes forever. Half-stocked with books, cheeky Alexandria takes on a gap-toothed cheshire grin. The Library remains chipper, never decaying from within, only destroyed from without.

By sheer volume, the Library has known and forgotten the world many times over, though never bothering to take an inventory. Its patrons rumor of its contents: magical recipebooks; necromonicons; blueprints for the pyramids; an alchemical method; a self-addressed letter from Jesus to Daddy; a proof for the true meaning of life; a proof for the meaning of truth; a proof for the meaning of meaning. Some rumor of herds of intralibrarian gazelle. Some rumor of an enclave in the northeastern wing, complete with bunkbeds and a mayor. Some rumor of book nymphs, presumably you.

Spines and spaces occupy every shelf, susurruses and silence occupy every aisle. Soaring shelves partition the library into a labyrinth full of forks and corridors, simplifying navigation into discrete rights and lefts and forwards. Of no apparent help, this particular instance of the Library of Alexandria abides by Dewey Decimal Classification. Some patrons still manage to become lost though inundated among so many structures: architectures, maps, taxonomies, logics, alphabets, grammars, dogmas, philosophies. Those in search of specific tomes find their quarry no faster than those roaming aimlessly.

Whichever of the Libraries stands, it always lures the same people. The trenches surge with idealists and idiots, scholars and madmen, all sorts insatiable, sloshing against the walls, consuming everything, molesting nothing. Yet you glide through the chaos with the elegance of an aphorism. I admire you through an aperture, peripherally squared by Principia, Quixote, Symposium, and Genesis.

The absent books permit me to see your candlelit silhouette. I selfishly wish for an empty library so I could see all the parts of you, but then neither of us would be here at all. I see you preoccupied, your eyes scanning passages, your lips mouthing words reflexively, your thumbs thumbing page corners. You are probably searching for something. For your attention, I write a book, put it on the shelf, and wait for you to read it. Not yet, you don't.

Somebody, maybe the Moors, razes Alexandria. When the Library is rebuilt, the new librarians ensure every book and rumor and aperture returns.

skit #66: eggplants forever

2009-03-17T14:13:00.000-07:00

You did not finish everything on your plate. A puddle of uneaten aubergine takes a curiously distinct shape and winks a botanomantic wink. She, the aubergine, articulates the plight of suppertime plants through a series of vogued poses:

Forgo introductions. You remember me, you do, you do. You selected me -- me, the purplest, the firmest, from all the eggplants. You liberated me from that stagnant nunnery. The other ladies didn't even want to be eaten, just to be pretty. You'd think they wanted to be eggplants forever. Jealous, jealous. You slipped me into my chariot, a brown paper bag, whose confines left me victoriously deaf to their slander and slurs. Jealous nobodies.

We went to your apartment. I let you take me all apart, boy. My night skin off, my pale flesh cleft, that routine. All splendid. So you cooked me, served me. But then nothing. You let me go cold, untouched. You poked me with a fork and didn't even taste the tine.

And don't act picky. You look healthy enough. No scurvy, no beriberi, no goiter. I can only imagine the cornucopias you've shat. Okra and artichokes and fava beans and -- oh, how repulsively incriminating, I spy broccoli between your teeth. So come on, boy. You'll need me for a balanced diet. Just a nibble. Take in my vitamins. Take them all.

Sombre now, her gestures take on the grave tone of a potato. You do not know on what basis you sense this.

Oh, and you're very culpable, yes. You owe this to me. Buying all that produce week after week. You know where it comes from, you do. Agriculture, cultivars, GMO -- ptooie. Now all these seeds my momma gave me mean nothing. I want to be remembered, have children. Get me into your body, into your cells. Make me a part of you. You owe me, eat me up. Let me in.

Yes, yes. Absorb my sugars, simple and sweet. Leech those nutrients. Just make me a part of you. With me, ascend the subway stairs, go nowhere on the gymnasium treadmill, pedal, run, fornicate, frolic. With me, with me, mundane or not, anything. Just to feel what you feel. Anything outside of this eggplant feeling. To have toes and teeth if only for a day! Even when you flush me down, I will have had that day and you will still be fashioned from me. Yes, swallow me.

The first-course arugula urges you to dispose of the aubergine. Since your body hardly belongs to you, you spit her out. You start to trust his judge of character; She was manipulative and a little mad. Sedate, sated, you retire for the evening.

Other ghosts of forlorn vegetables swim in your kitchen, awaiting opportunities for incarnation.

skit #65: NOT YET TURNED

2009-03-15T16:14:00.000-07:00

The unquenchable curiosity of prodigy Antonin Antécédent often lured him to the last chapters of the assigned curriculum far before his classmates. What latent success his teachers spied in him would NEVER MANIFEST AS THEY PREDICTED. His mentors estimated his future to harbor typical prosperity, perhaps as an ambassador or an economist, unaware of his SEEMINGLY FORTUITOUS DESTINY.

ONE ILL-WEATHERED NIGHT, academic exhaustion and hypnotic rainfall lulled young Antonin to slumber. He slept, cocooned in a nest of his half-read texts. Storm clouds sulked above his apartment ominously. Witnesses described midnight's mood to emote PALPABLY DANGEROUS EMANATIONS.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZRRRRQQQQQQQQ--------KPOWWWW!!

Disgruntled after nine lightyears of schlepping, a SIRIAN SOLAR WIND stumbled upon one of any undeserving terrestrial blue planets. With great fury it effused a FOUL INTERGALACTIC MIASMA into Earth's hospitable heavens. IRRADIATED LIGHTNING AND NUCLEAR RAIN bombarded Antonin's apartment complex. The shingle-mailed roof, veteran to hailstorms and hurricanes, disintegrated. Not their landlord, not their local news station meteorologist, not even their PREFERRED DEITY could save them.

Emergency services arrived promptly, but found little life to salvage. An UNMARKED AMBULANCE whisked away the only survivor, an incapacitated prepubescent male. Antonin remained hospitalized throughout his youth, years which elapsed in cavalcade of month-long comas. His dreams were haunted with inklings of PSYCHOMANIPULATIVE EXPERIMENTATION. During his brief episodes of consciousness, he amused himself by rifling through a complementary assortment of books stacked on his bedside table, comprised solely of CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN-ADVENTURE NOVELS which he would later discover was of NO COINCIDENCE.

Antonin Antécédent stumbled into the world, no longer as a boy of yesterday, but a chimera fashioned from GENE-BENDING RADIATION, HIGHLY-CLASSIFIED EXPERIMENTATION, and LIMITLESS CURIOSITY. He re-emerged as...

THE TOMORROWER

The Tomorrower uses his EXTRAORDINARY POWER of INFALLIBLE PRESCIENCE to thwart the plots of wrong-doers. Pages of his comic book NOT YET TURNED appear to him as CLEARLY AS THE PRESENT. A hero devoted to justice, he uses his gift to prevent the calamities incited by the nefarious Vanguard of Villainy -- unsavory agents of COMMUNISM, TERRORISM, and CAPITALISM.

One secret still evades even the Tomorrower's clairvoyance. Page one of The Tomorrower #1 recounts The Tomorrower's FORGOTTEN BOYHOOD as young Antonin Antécédent. Should he ever read this page, he would FIND EVERLASTING PEACE AND TRANQUILITY; And so he must never read this page, for his retirement would mean CERTAIN DOOM for all those he protects.

The Tomorrower #11: THE BIG RED X
Will the Tomorrower outwit Aunt Ziety's insidious trap of LASER BLADES OF TRIFLUXIC ACID? Will the Tomorrower muster the UNQUESTIONING COURAGE needed to confront the inevitable? The Tomorrower must answer whether the only thing to fear is the fear of fearing fear itself.

The Tomorrower #32: THE TODAYER
When mad quantum physicist Dr Guillaume d'Libre projects the infinite number of Earth's realities, the Tomorrower finds there to be too many comics to read. Without the QUAINT PREDICTABILITY OF DETERMINISM, the Tomorrower must defeat d'Libre with INSTINCT AND WILES.

The Tomorrower #59: DRAWING BLANKS
The Cartoonist compromises his series's ARTISTIC INTEGRITY for the sake of INCREASING MARKETABILITY. As the Tomorrower revolts against his greedy creator, the Cartoonist improvises UNFAVORABLE PLOT DEVICES with his fountain pen, AN ARTIFACT FROM THE FOURTH DIMENSION.

skit #64: your midwife

2009-03-14T22:31:00.000-07:00

The mother ejects you into the world. You arrive upon a regal carpet, red and placental, dressed in a custom-tailored gown of natal finery. The doctor delivering you wears a hygienic paper mask, a pathological and emotional contraceptive. Despite your attempts to distinguish yourself, her eyebrows convey only indifference with a jaded evenness. Your grand entrance of blood and mucus does not make her fawn nor flinch. The mother does not even bother to wake. You suspect your birth will be reflected in a census somewhere.

It is when the doctor leaves and the mother sleeps that your midwife takes you.

When cradled in your midwife's hands, you are so utterly precious to her. Her resplendent warmth permeates her industry-standard latex membrane. She removes her gloves and holds you with real hands of flesh and fat. You are the little girl daddy always wanted. You are the sole heir of a dying patriarch. You are the first panda bred in captivity. She places you in the mother's arms, where you sleep in motionlessly blissful fatigue. Then she leaves.

The mother-in-your-bed inspects you suspiciously, jarring you awake. She searches in your eyes for the rhyme of your riddle. She does not know you are simple and intuitive, devoid of mystery. By her brutish manhandling, you ascertain she must be a butcher or a mechanic. You want only for her to leave you alone. You miss your midwife.

Through hermetically sealed glass, you see your midwife fondling another baby. Cradled in her hands writhes a bounty of animated amethyst, and her face smiles upon that child so utterly precious to her. Your midwife shamelessly smiles upon seven other babies as you watch during your stay. Each day, your midwife plays concierge to the perpetual influx of guests.

You refuse to acknowledge the certain thousands she smiled upon preceding and succeeding you. Your midwife is not yours alone. The smile imprinted on your id is generic.

You age. You no longer remember how your midwife smiled upon you at your birth. Nor does the electrician remember how your midwife smiled upon him at his birth. Nor do you remember each other as neighbors through the hermetically sealed glass. He repairs your refrigerator, delivers your bill, and offers no discount.

skit #63: the gray detective

2009-03-07T20:17:00.000-08:00

An excerpt from One Derringer Two Dead reads:

TURNER: Baby, I bought you something that reminded me of you.
TURNER gives MARIBEL his late wife's emerald brooch.
TURNER and MARIBEL embrace, uncertain of their future.

An excerpt from the article reads:

Mr Dean Clanson grew immensely famous during the 1940's, starring in such notable films as One Derringer Two Dead, Red Lipped Red Hipped Red Handed, and The Prince and the Copper. Over his 23-year career, Mr Clanson has won 12 international awards, starred in over 80 full-length features, and established himself as a film noir icon.

Though Mr Clanson easily qualifies for stardom with his gruff aplomb and handsome face, film critics laud his influential character interpretations. Early film noir entertained through intrigue in visually and morally monochromatic stories of cops and robbers. As subtle and sharp as a splinter, Clanson introduced gradients to the genre. His repertoire of skeptical glances, derisive smirks, and reserved tears sullied the image of the Good Guy and polished the image of the Bad Guy. The private eye was no longer a man with a gun, but a man who asked and answered questions.

"[Each film] has the potential to be more than just another shoot-'em-up flick. All the story has to ask is, 'Why did they shoot-him-up?' Don't worry that the diamonds are stolen or that the broad is dead. Worry about the unasked whys. Why not steal them? Why not kill her?" Clanson remarked in a 1954 interview.

Devoted to his craft and profession, Mr Clanson often brought his work home with him. He studied method acting since the beginning of his career at age 26. He acknowledged his zealous studies marred his marriage to model Chelsea Regalio in a 1943 interview: "Can't blame her. Who wants me for a husband when I ain't even up to being my wife's husband? Hell, I'm beginning to think even I don't want me as a husband." Mischief and sorrow often riddled his personal life. His innumerable trysts, benders, and divorces all fall under public scrutiny. Mr Clanson once flippantly justified his antics as "character research".

Mr Duke Valotti, director and lifelong friend, admired Mr Clanson's "Sure, Dean is professional and abides by the letters of the script, but he's mischievous. Transgressive, even. He'll find a way to run amok in the script, a fox in a chicken coup. Like in Red Lipped, Dean was the one who improvised Turner [Mr Clanson's role] giving his wife's brooch to his mistress. And what happens? He creates perhaps the most memorable scene of 40's noir."

Mr Clanson will be signing autographs this Saturday in the Tupelo Convention Center, RM 331. $10/per.

An excerpt from the police report reads:

Mary Nobody, a housekeeper employed by Rude Lucy's Bed & Breakfast, entered the premises to perform routine cleaning as no "Privacy, please." placard hung from the doorknob. Once inside, she recognized renowned actor Mr Dean Clanson. After requesting a complimentary autograph, she suspected him to be incapacitated and contacted emergency services.

The concierge, Joey Nobody, reported Mr Clanson to be quiet, polite, honest regarding his consumption from the mini-fridge, having rang up a $49 tab on ginger ales, coffees, and pastries.

The bellhop, Pablo Nobody, reported Mr Clanson to be a lightly packed and an excellent tipper. Mr Clanson and the bellhop shared a comfortable silence in the elevator ride.

Detectives believe Mr Clanson to have been researching the role for his next film, The Gray Detective. A screenplay authored by Mr Duke Valotti was discovered among Mr Clanson's otherwise spartan possessions.

The time of death is estimated to be 03:15AM, Sunday, March 19th. The cause of death is currently undetermined and homicide remains a possibility. The deceased has not been implicated with intent to commit any illegal. The chief of police plans to release a statement at 08:00AM, Monday, March 20th.

An excerpt from The Gray Detective reads:

VALOTTI: I wrote something that reminded me of you.
VALOTTI gives CLANSON a screenplay.
CLANSON: My first line says, 'Film noir starts with the climax and ends with the story.' So?
VALOTTI: Go on.
CLANSON: Next one says, 'Method acting starts with the actor and ends with the character.' And?
VALOTTI: One more.
CLANSON: 'What happens when you wind up having to play yourself?'
CLANSON appears pensive, uncertain of his future.

skit #62: a quantitative aptitude exam

2009-03-07T11:40:00.000-08:00

QUANTITATIVE APTITUDE EXAM

NAME:________________
DATE:________________

MECHANICS

1. A cylindrical piston capable of producing 43.6N of thrusting force. It is known skin naturally has a static friction coefficient of 0.60 and kinetic friction coefficient of 0.51.

a. Determine the force with which the cylindrical piston will slide off a buttock. For this exercise, a buttock may be approximated as uniformly spherical surface (x² + y² + z²) given the cylindrical piston is angled 35.0 degrees tangentially to the buttock's perimeter.

b. Human saliva lubricates, reducing static friction by -0.40 and kinetic friction by -0.32. Determine the force a saliva-lubricated cylinder will slide off the same buttock. Latex increases static friction by +0.34 and kinetic friction by +0.22 without the application of saliva. Determine whether a cylindrical piston encounters more friction when in contact with skin or when in contact with a latex-saliva combination.

THERMODYNAMICS

2. You are presented with a custom-made cupric torus (known as a Prince Albert). Copper is known to have a conductivity constant of 59.6 × 10⁶ S/m. Human sperm cells die in temperatures exceeding 37.7C. Human testicles (considered a wet conductive tissue) offer resistance at 1082.2 Ω.

An electric catheter is inserted into a urethra, providing stimulation at 500.0mA. Given coitus will ensue between an older yet virile male and a fertile young female, prove whether or not a prophylactic is superfluous in order to avoid impregnation by the penis in question.

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS & STANDARD DEVIATION

3. A struggling student may only pass a class with a mean grade greater than 0.700. The student's standing is calculated to be 622pts/900pts (0.691). The past four (4) exams indicate a mean grade of 0.653 (std dev 0.093). The Quantitative Aptitude Exam is worth 100pts.

a. A regression model extrapolates her exam performance. The constant a reflects her ability as a student, the constant b reflects her optimism on a given day, and the constant c reflects poor performance due to the distracting animal magnetism of her older yet virile professor.

y = ax⁵ + bx² - x - c

Determine the constants from Appendix A. Calculate y, where x is the number of hours studied.

b. Suppose a lenient professor offers to increase her final exam score in exchange for sexual favors. In this exchange rate, the professor defines 1 pt = 0.412 sordid affairs (SA). He proposes an economy of scale to the student's advantage, defining x as the number of SA and c as in the previous problem (3a).

y = cx²

Given her statistically probable final grade determined in problem 3a, what quantity of SA must commence for said student to receive a C (>0.700)? To receive a B (>0.800)? To receive an A (>0.900)? What is the student's most economic option?

PROPOSITIONAL LOGIC

4. Consider the following values held by a society:

- Citizens may be of any positive age less than 100 years old.
- A citizen reaches adulthood at the age of 18 years.
- Any two citizens who share relatives are related.
- Any citizen may issue their intent to pair with another citizen.
- A societally-acceptable pairing consists of:
--- two mutually-intent unrelated adults.
--- two mutually-intent unrelated non-adults.

Construct a truth table. Determine which pairings may exist in concordance with this society's values:

a. An older yet virile professor and his athletic son
b. An older yet virile professor innocently filming the pairing of his athletic son with a young fertile university student
c. An older yet virile professor and a young fertile university student (a very mature 19 years in age) by means of a private agreement

GRADE:_______ / 100

skit #61: merrily skipping beats

2009-03-06T19:28:00.000-08:00

1954: Four women sing doo-wop doo-wah into a condenser microphone. Their record becomes immensely popular, its songs mostly dealing the sorrow of loss.

1960: His four chambers form as atria and ventricles. His capillaries indiscriminately rout out all his extremities, the mundane toes and exotic testicles alike. His heart beats inside his mother's womb, pumping her borrowed blood into her son. A baby boy gestates. He will later change his recognized name to Hunter. Upon delivery, the pediatrician notes no congenital defects and report it is a heart like any other heart.

1968: It repeats a four verse mantra: intake, compression, power, exhaust. Suspended by a hydraulic lift, the car does not move. Gasoline makes the engine snarl horrible things, which seems to please two men from Engine Assembly. They tick off the standardized quality assurance criteria one-by-one, torque the V8 to the chassis, and approve the Chevrolet Chevelle 396-SS for consumer purchase.

1979: Hunter careens down the interstate in his Chevy. He bought it second-hand. The previous owner's abuse drove it from showpiece to jalopy in a mere eleven years. Hunter cares only that it has a radio, that it is red, and that it is fast.

The engine backfires and expels infernal incantations, grawachukka grawachukka. Hunter never acknowledges the officious red oil lamp who glows earnestly with all the other pedantic indicators of the dashboard. The 1986 Chevrolet Chevelle 396-SS Service Manual clearly suggests to "verify motor oil level and color are within factory recommended limits." Hunter snickers at the phrase "wipe the dipstick," reads nothing else, and closes the manual.

Hunter drives having never earned a license, intuitively and illegally. He's not one for learning. Hunter doesn't know any theories; He is not a theoretical man, or even a theoretical boy. He lives. His nineteen-year-old heart runs on the thin fuel of rotgut and cigarettes, merrily skipping beats. He has never noticed any indicator lights on his person, but he if he did, he would ignore them too.

The engine stalls at a red light. He suddenly realizes if the engine seized, he would need a replacement junker in which to barge about town. Stowed in the glovebox remains the Service Manual, its unread contents describing the predicted lifecycle of his failing Chevelle. The engine restarts apathetically. Hunter is relieved.

It's six o'clock, night or afternoon, and he is soused. He gets some fuel and his new girl named Trixy. His Chevy floats down the boulevard with enough gas to drive all day. The women living in his radio sing doo-wop doo-wah.

skit #60: to conduct its affairs

2009-03-02T23:06:00.001-08:00

If it were truly part of the body, the tongue would be its most powerful muscle. Never apart, so like the eternal union between lichen and bark or between lovers wedlocked, they are one. In the cockpit of her mouth curls a tender larva so innocently pink and vulnerable Mabel would never suspect its tyranny; This symbiosis profits every mouth, so the tongues all claim: its servant is paid in saccharine rewards to conduct its affairs.

Mabel often finds herself coaxed into strange circumstances by her tongue.

Sometimes, she stands in sleet outside the French bakery before sunrise. She gains a dress size over a month and her tongue remains suspiciously muscular. She eats her rationed gruel, an oppressively scrumptious brioche. When she savors her ration slowly, she finds refuge from the slavery of consumption. She chews, reveling in the temporary freedom from her tongue. Without her appetite, Mabel is thoughtless to the point of lucidity. Her tongue, nearly decapitated between carelessly gnashing teeth, spurts blood in protest of her failed coup d’état.

She finds potions to tame her master. Mabel's tongue whips in the cage of her teeth when she drinks poison, a venomous adder. Pacified by milk, it sleeps like a sated lioness.

Sometimes, her tongue longingly strokes the contours of her crowns and the girth of her molars. Her tongue embarks into the mouth of a lonely stranger. She suspects the two tongues might exchange hosts for the sheer sake of wanderlust, but she has no evidence of this; She imagines all tongues have the same general directives. The lip-shrouded larva between her legs awakes and commandeers the evening's operation, and Mabel complies oh-so-willingly to any clitoral suggestions, eventually resulting in a tear-gilded miscarriage.

Sometimes, her tongue twines her breath into words. As she is resigned to do, Mabel listens, impressed by her tongue's ability to produce opinions. The tongue never exhausts its stamina, only its audience. With confidence, its tone degrades from charming to flippant to insulting, at which point the tongue cowardly retreats to the haven of Mabel's jawbone. She is left to stammer in her tongue's defense with no present means for articulation. Mabel's friends (and their tongues) grow aloof.

She can tolerate her tongue's rule no longer. She fears it is unstable, dangerous. But without her tongue -- its sensuality, its voice -- she is not Mabel. Relinquishing the scissors, she postpones her independence. She and her tongue continue to marry.

skit #59: in prudence

2009-03-01T15:23:00.001-08:00

Guided by her notorious grandfather's meticulous notes, Victoria constructed an artificial man in her mountaintop laboratory. She did away with the Tesla coils and the grandeur and the superstitions. She would not fail where he did.

She established a trade rate with a lonely mortician, and exchanged her gender's warm flesh for his profession's still meat: tight lips, obedient eyes, attentive ears, dimples, strong hands, a reproductive tract, a heart, a token noggin. She accumulated her ingredients from the mortician's garden, piece-by-piece, pound-by-pound.

To see the inner-workings of her man, she reasoned, he must be utterly transparent. She blanched the tissues of any melanin in a potassium permanganate bath before drying upon several clotheslines. There hung the future of her man, as blank as overexposed photographs, as clean as Sunday's linens. She assembled his diaphanous body with delicate expertise, making no mistakes, transcribing her grandfather's morbid schematics to the unto her invisible patient.

She knew the fate her grandfather met and so dared not allow her Creature to live freely. In prudence, she disengaged the nervous system after every experiment.

Candlelight illuminated the dust which settled on the Creature's skin. The patina implied the visage of a velveteen warthog. She dutifully dabbed rubbing alcohol over his entire body before experimentation, slowly erasing him, in hopes of subduing her disgust under the pretense of minimizing the chance of infection.

During examinations, she arranged a halo of candles around the Creature, whom she perched on a stool. She injected localized dyes to her area of interest, giving him substance only when and where she deemed necessary. She attached diodes to muscles and watched them seize. She introduced luminous fluids and watched them circulate. She pressed her fingertips into his diaphanous flesh to observe his vitals and viscera displace. She turned off his nerves.

She blew out the candles. The dyes faded, and so did her man. She had scribbled notes of how he behaved under ideal conditions. In old age, when she would review these notes from her youth, she found them to be either illegible or inane.

As a scientist, Victoria differed from her grandfather. Where he was reckless, she was compulsively diligent. She repeated her experiments hundreds of times to ensure he results were sound. Endlessly: she turned him on, his muscles contracted, his fluids pumped, she probed him, she turned him off. Every time he felt his heart beat or his finger twitch, he knew a little more of what it was to live.

She initiated experiment: ninth trial, fifteenth series, umpteenth cycle. She plunged her syringe into his thigh. But the Creature was not there, nor was he anywhere in her lab.

skit #58: we have it all

2009-02-28T15:54:00.000-08:00

"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.

skit #57: one wayward penguin

2009-02-24T19:26:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-24T17:21:00.000-08:00

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.

skit #55: the final niggling detail

2009-02-23T15:18:00.000-08:00

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.

skit #54: the instruments of their debate

2009-02-22T17:53:00.000-08:00

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 twins or brothers, brothers or friends, friends or men, men or gentlemen.

skit #53: she awoke old

2009-02-21T23:14:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2009-02-18T23:44:00.000-08:00

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.

skit #51: he somehow slept soundly

2009-02-16T21:57:00.000-08:00

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.

skit #50: Slippy Sally

2009-02-15T22:47:00.001-08:00

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.

skit #49: an approximate blackness

2009-02-12T17:13:00.000-08:00

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.

skit #48: and so did their continents

2009-02-11T16:10:00.000-08:00

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.

skit #47: his mother taught him the same

2009-02-08T15:47:00.000-08:00

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.

skit #46: our whale we call home

2009-02-07T20:50:00.000-08:00

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.

skit #45: dispense slogies on hoagies

2009-02-05T21:57:00.000-08:00

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.

skit #44: cartoon frame sequences of narrative conflicts

2009-01-31T20:11:00.001-08:00

Man versus Man (though some have scrappily argued: Man versus Self)

6663: The character lights the wick.
6664: The character hurls the bomb.
6665: The bomb does not leave his hand.
6666: The fox lifts a jar that reads 'Superglue'.
6667: The fox holds the jar in the air for the character to read.
6668: The fox holds the jar in the air for the character to read.
6669: The fox grins broadly.
6670: The character grows panicked.
6671: The spark eats more of the fuse.
6672: The spark eats the last of the fuse, turning the bomb into a bowling ball.
6673: The bowling ball detonates.
6674: The frame turns gray with smoke.
6675: The smoke thins.
6676: The smoke thins.
6677: The smoke dissipates.
6678: An anthropomorphic silhouette stands in a fire-charred hallway. Only the eyes are white.
6679: The figure stands in the hallway. A trombone slide begins to play.
6680: The figure stands in the hallway.
6681: The figure stands in the hallway.
6682: The eyes turn black. A pizzicato plucks.
6683: The eyes turn white.
6684: The frame fades.
6685: The frame turns black.
6686: The trombone flatulates with a wide vibrato at its slump.

Man versus Nature

9957: The blackened silhouette and the hallway return to their repaired and colored states. The silhouette, now a character, does not have a discernible species but may be construed as mammalian. The decor is trite, and frankly, gaudy.
9958: The character's eyes telescope outside of their sockets. A klaxon howls.
9959: The eyes retract.
9960: The eyes telescope.
9961: The eyes retract.
9962: The character views a female anthropomorphite of the same vaguely mammalian phenotype. Though the lipstick, dress, and cleavage suggest her gender, the possibility of transvestism is never addressed throughout the animation.
9963: The female sashays down the poorly decorated hallway. A saxophone begins growling.
9964: She moves her hips as she takes a step.
9965: She moves her hips as she takes a step.
9966: She moves her hips as she takes a step.
9967: She moves her hips as she takes a step.
9968: Though the shameless ogling and copious salivation suggest his gender, the possibility of androgynous lesbianism is never addressed throughout the animation.
9969: She moves her hips as she takes a step.
9970: She moves her hips as she takes a step.
9971: The character stands behind a trapezoid labeled '1000kg'. As a two-dimensional object, we can assume the trapezoid's mass is infinitesimal.
9972: The character lifts the large black trapezoid.
9973: The trapezoid begins to lift off the ground.
9974: The trapezoid sharply ascends above his head.
9975: The character shows pride.
9976: The character shows pride.
9977: The character shows less pride.
9978: The character's knees begin to wobble.
9979: The wobbling intensifies.
9980: The trapezoid covers the character.
9981: She moves her hips as she takes a step. A trombone slide begins to play.
9982: She moves her hips as she takes a step.
9983: She moves her hips as she takes a step.
9984: The frame turns black.
9984: The trombone flatulates with a wide vibrato at its slump.

Man versus Self (to a lesser degree, Man versus Technology and Man versus Society)

11404: The character is incapacitated, wrapped in bandages, brooding in a hospital bed.
11405: No one visits the character.
11405: No one wishes the character well.
11405: No one brings the character flowers.
11406: The character lies there, immobilized.
11407: The character lies there, immobilized.
11408: The character lies there, immobilized.
11409: The frame turns black.
11410: The calliope whistles the exeunt music cheerfully.

skit #43: strict policy of nonhandedness

2009-01-30T15:44:00.000-08:00

We have all witnessed when our host, Charlie, enters the men's public restroom, he assumes his urinal after carefully cross-weighing a gamut of criteria. The putrid amber broth of one bowl warns of long-stagnant piss; His rainbow's repugnant hues ordered from safest to grossest: blue, clear, green, chartreuse, yellow, amber. Stray deciduous pubes decorate the urinal's basin, casualties Charlie insists is crab-induced itching. Smudged handles are a gamble because they show the urinal has been flushed repeatedly at the cost of a careless custodian. Urinals bearing lewd graffiti are frequented by villains of low moral standards -- likely disease vectors.

Our host hobbles in only close enough for the urinal to receive his bounty. Fearing infection more than indiscretion, his monumental tool stands visible to the periphery of any neighboring urinators. Like a repentant sinner, he forcefully and direly empties his bladder. He throttles his plumbing of any residual impurities. He breathes scentless air through his mouth. He wants to flee.

But the most concerning behavior is at the end of his routine: the high-kick. Yes, the same high-kick to the flush handle we've been seeing for months now, afterwards leaving without washing his hands. His rubber soles squeak cheerfully, insulating him from the clammy linoleum tiling and the rest of the filthy filthy world. Such preposterous antics are not becoming of a bacterial colony of our stature.

We petition our host to live a life of dignity and normalcy, interacting with daily appliances as any good host should. An eccentric emissary is an unemployed emissary. Should Charlie continue to accrue such ignominy, his position will be terminated. No further warnings, very simple and professional. Charlie must get dirty.

We suspect hypochondria lies at the root of his reluctance to make use of the bathroom amenities. Every time he shakes a hand, every time pays with a paper bill, every time he turns a doorknob, he receives the germs of a thousand other high-kicking self-righteous Charlies. Charlie should know he is easily replaceable. The world is full of hosts who have humiliated their colonies so, desperate for another chance to host in glory.

But his actions cause deeper problems. His strict policy of nonhandedness hinders the colony's conquestorial ambitions. How are we to spread our domain under quarantine? Why, denying we germs the right to proliferate is evolutionary censorship!

One day as our host assumes his carefully selected urinal, he will falter and touch the sickly tile of the men's public restroom. On that day, we will launch our campaign. Until then, we are marooned on the embarrassing spectacle that is Charlie Umwitz.

skit #42: the tool is a lathe

2009-01-30T12:27:00.000-08:00

The man is a carpenter. A carpenter works with wood. The carpenter is making furniture. The carpenter is operating a tool. The tool is a lathe. A lathe helps shape wood. Furniture is constructed with different shapes of wood. The piece of furniture is a chair. The carpenter is making a chair leg.

The carpenter stands over the lathe. He reviews the requisition form for forty chairs, signed by the guildmaster. If he were not a carpenter, he would be standing over a bean field. If he were not a farmer, he would be standing over the lathe. He operates the lathe because the wood must be shaped to build a chair leg. Each chair has four legs. He must construct one hundred and sixty chair legs to fulfill the requisition form.

The guildmaster pays the carpenter a salary in exchange for his skill. The carpenter has used the guildmaster's money to buy a wedding band, a house, and a cradle. Now he has a wife, a son, a house, and a cradle. The house and cradle are made of wood. The wife and son are not made of wood. The wife and the son eat food.

The carpenter will make a chair. He will do this forty times. Each chair will be his best chair. Every chair is a representation of his ability. His ability represents the guild's profitability. The guild's profitability affects the employees' salaries. He must contribute his part to society. A king will sit in a chair. A scholar will sit in a chair. A serf will sit in a chair. A carpenter will sit in a chair.

The lathe holds the wood. The carpenter pumps the pedal. The wood spins in the lathe. The lathe shapes the wood. The wood becomes a chair leg and sawdust. The sawdust mixes with the sawdust on the workshop floor. The carpenter stops pumping the pedal. The carpenter is alone in the workshop. The lathe, the salary, the wood, the food, the society, and the carpenter made the chair leg.

The carpenter works until late.

skit #41: Cueva Cuaya

2009-01-30T12:21:00.000-08:00

The Paraguayan government hopes your attention to Cueva Cauya will increase our nation's tourism revenue, so they have promised Guaza-Cua a new secondary school in exchange for our cooperation. They reluctantly divulged the findings of your research thus far, as they regard our villagers as unlearned bumpkins (hence the school). While our village has a sparse and motley assortment of education (we being a demolitions expert from the Civil War, a first-year student at Asunción, an Australian expatriate, and an indigenous Guaraní), we've managed to collaboratively review your paper.

Your repertoire of tests deduces only speleogenetic attributes; the people of Guaza-Cua will tell you of the facets of Cueva Cauya.

The lagoon-filled crater at the foot of the opening shaft is not a result of sustained erosion. An affluent man, Don Arsello, lived here in Guaza-Cua centuries ago. His ranch did not survive one particularly odious February. His herds and sons fell to disease, his wife left him for her lover, and his lover took another man as his husband. He sought a place "as deep as his sorrows". Thinking he could fall forever, he plunged into the wailing maw bored in the earth. Only for one instant did he realize how shallow one man's woes are.

The rich phosphorous nitrate present in the lagoon water, as you have identified, is due to guano. Few animals are oriented inversely to the earth's pull and to man's conventions: the sloths in idleness, the opossums in deceit, and the bats in darkness. Bats are the doves of the afterlife, knowing secrets between life and death. What upright men condemn, upside-down men idolize. A tribe of bat-worshipers run the tunnels, hands beneath feet, subsisting on centipedes and fungi -- their noisome stool further enriching the lagoon foul elements. Where there are no stalagmites for use as ladder rungs, the troglodytes gouge fingerholds in the walls, scarring the cave's complexion with acne-pocks.

Triunfo de la Panocha is surely the most beautiful chamber in Cueva Cuaya. Your report notes its unique texture, its confounding composition, its indeterminate age. Late at night, the American Wyatt Yerlman wakes. He lurches from his farmhouse, past his turnstiles, past his ticket booth, and enters his cavegrounds. There he meets his brother-in-law, another American named Gilbert Dunt, a chemical engineer at the regional water treatment facility. On these nights, two-stroke engines belch and corrosives fume deep in Cueva Cuaya's bowels. Triunfo de la Panocha is a manmade cathedral, not natural phenomenon; and the grander the cathedral the deeper the collection plate.

You and we have discovered nothing of Cueva Cuaya. You and we both have invented stories to support what we find evident.

skit #40: spies & counterspies

2009-01-15T17:01:00.000-08:00

I felt the unbroken cyanide capsule stowed away in your hollow tooth when we kissed outside the particle accelerator. And I felt you feel mine. We both know only highly confidential assets receive possess such dire escape methods. These are our vulnerabilities. You forwent your chance to kill me, so it must not be your mission. Yet maybe you have concluded it is not my mission either, but even that I do not know.

There must be a reason they have instructed us to operate in such close proximity. Since it is not assassination then it is espionage. Seduction comes professionally to us both. I do not know what data I must elict from you, but my intent is clear -- so instinctively natural and limpid I fear its origin is subliminal. We make unrehearsed love upon the synchocyclotron, consecrating nothing.

We have been abandoned in our assignments with no one to report to. Any contact with our respective commissioners may jeopardize our agencies' anonymities. Our only allegiences to any agencies are tenuous, built entirely on the hope they have retained documentation of our civilian identities. They own reports on who we were and who we are.

There is no hope of returning to that past life. I have never even determined my mission, my only orders gleaned through cryptographic hints, whose meanings with whom I have no superior to confirm, include mundane conversations of the weather, suspicious surnames, envelopes disguised as telephone bills, esoteric non-sequiturs, men with red handkerchiefs, women coifed with peacock feathers. Everything becomes a potential clue. Perhaps even you are a clue.

Or perhaps your agency funded a countersemiotics campaign to disrupt my agency's spies (as I suspect there are others like me). Or perhaps the campaign was devised by my agency in order to confuse its opponents (as I suspect there are other counterspies with your agency, and even more agencies than the two of ours). Or perhaps we are each agents operating under the same superagency. How paranoia flays my senses of trust and place!

Our agencies value our reconnaissance, or else our projects would have been terminated. When I think of the defunct Red sattelites with which their astronomers have littered the firmament, I too grow despondent. What gravity awaits us when we are littered?

Who are we anymore but who we are. I am the spy, you are the counterspy. We fall deeper and deeper into obscurity.

skit #39: between a mermaids legs

2009-01-15T16:58:00.000-08:00

Me luv uv tha sea, eh? Long ago, whin I was a laddie. No bard on me chin, no bard bout me netherpurse. Ah, so yong an bonny! How I could fall in luv with jussabout anythin! Well, til I luved tha sea.

Llanwrst was a sailers town back before. Not like now with the moter engines and all that autermatic sailin. No, it was for men of bravery an spirit! Once a sailer -- oh, whatsit, Grwn -- I captined tolt me uv El Dorado, all jems an shiny medels on tha walls. Pools uv diamons an champane. I told im I knew tha place here in Wales, me childhood home uv Llanwrst. Me lads we rompt thru tha gittos. Gold pisst on tha walls, glidderin emerald boddle shards, ruby blood outsida pubs, tha sapphire smoke o tha opium burrows. Grwn wodnt know treasure from fancytales, twit!

We chillins lifed inna land o legend, Lord we did, none a doubt. The sailers we knewt were magishins, they havin all sortsa elixirs an artifacts an seen all sortas magical beasties nona the cityfolk knowt. They tolt all tha boys in town of tha sharkies, sure, but tha Kraken, tha Leviatan, tha long an slippery Jorrymurgand, tha beasties that makes em relize mans justa wee rabbit in a wickt glade.

A fadder o Catmail sailt all round tha seas. Catmail alweys toutin new trinkits ta ogle at -- you know, parls, sords, talsmans. Once there were mankeys, but they diet becos we dint have a bananer betwin we. An relics uv wars, scraps uv sails uv scurriless limey drednots, even tha canninball whicht had nockt off his best mates bloody ol noggin!

An one tha days, he pullt out a liddle cuff. We thot it parta dolls outfittery an callt him a bugga. But no, was made uv flesh! Like a sasage casin. Catmail's fadder leant in close, his eyes fulla lurid secrets, an his tongue barrelin all over his gapped teeth. Like hes wantin ready to feast, spiddle droppin from his lips.

Catmail's fadder riddles to we -- ahem, lemme do all pompous in his bloody briddish accent, "This, boys, is the thing between a mermaids legs that men love so; the reason for all the wars, for all the sins, for all the poetry on this wretched earth." Even tho he knewt damnwell theres no legs for sucha thing to hid tween onna mermaid! He gives us tha riddle-thing, right in our little scamp hands, sayin well know what to makeuvit.

Catmail claimt senority on us all, which was all tha bedder since wed neer seen a thing like it. Catmail tolt us his fadder had promised a means to ease the what he called tha "stickypricky". He slipt it on first. Then Hadyn. Then Garth. Then me too. We all diddit.

One day hes pisst at tha pub oer there. Or mebbe its this very one. And hes tellin tales so as to feel as a man, as we all do, and as I doin wit you here an now. Hes gottimself a crowd uv mosta tha men uv Llanwrst in there, so prolly tha fadders of all tha boys. Hes gottim all redfaced half drunk half laughin. The bastard crowing, ahem, "Bass entrails!"

Still, no womans touch ever been as good as that place between tha legs that no mermaid has.

skit #38: five Nicks

2009-01-15T16:51:00.000-08:00

171
The foot of the forum was very close. A boy, Nikolaos, had weaseled past the lictors to the front. The blathering of the plebes ceased once the dictator begun his oration. Nikolaos could talk, but not orate. The dictator's rhetoric was enrapturing, describing things which were ineffable under the market argot. He described the uniqueness of this century, the pride to be Roman, their confidence among of the gods. The plebes were quiet, entranced. The dictator possessed rhetoric Nikolaos wanted.

1711
His father opened his printed copy of the Bible. Nikolaus listened to his solemn father recite the passages: the sinners and their depravity, anecdotes proving the Lord's omniscience and omnipotence, the pending beatitude or misery of the afterlife. His father would slowly reread each word until he understood it. A proverb could linger with Nikolaus for days. His index finger felt the texture of the letters. Nikolaus wondered how something so flat could yield such depth.

1927
Nicholas spun the doohickey's knob, making the line dance. He yelped when the silence broke into staticky belches. His sister snickered at the success of her prank by the electrical outlet, but Nicholas ignored her just like mom instructed. He spun the knob like a roulette player amused more by the whirling than the odds. The streaming sound informed and slandered and and sung and fiddled and advertised and preached in a frantic human medley. Nicholas lay awake long past his bedtime with the radio, reveling in its incessancy, in the bombardment of chatter, in the plethora of stations, in its tireless companionship.

1972
Nicky was invited to watch television with the family when he turned old enough. He snuggled in between the thighs of his The aura flickered in the parlor, inducing a serenity and finally the meditative state he so often saw his folks embrace. Television condensed time, color and sound into an single horsepill. The phenomenological world had been dismembered, its efficiencies calculated, its vestigial moments discarded, and finally recapitulated into an RBG-tinted haze. Nicky meditated, consuming more life than reality could offer serially.

2007
The mouse took both of Nikolai's wee hands to wrangle. He clicked haphazardly and insatiably, delighted with the websites of everything he'd produced: an albino tiger, firecrackers, a bazooka, a lamborghini, an allosaurus. The internet bestowed to him all the birthday presents he had yearned for. They appeared in every with every opinion, in every context, in infinite variations on what he thought he'd wanted. And the internet bestowed to him things he hadn't known he'd yearned for yet: mortgages, valium, blowjobs. Nikolai ventured curiously past his adjacent world into a theatre of dreams.

skit #37: between coxswains at sea

2009-01-15T16:47:00.000-08:00

Oars paired astride down the length of the hull, fluttering inconsequentially like cilia against the immensity of a petri dish. The wind whipped, the salt stung, and all the other stimuli oarsmen expected. But who was to know if they made any progress at all? The oarsmen never saw the prow cut the blue Mediterranean silk in two, only the turbulent wake of water their paddling had upset.

The eight oarsmen were indistinguishable from one another, sometimes accidentally calling each other by, and even responding to, misnomers. They were identical: brawny arms, feeble legs, slack faces that tightened to normalcy under exertion, essential musculatures accrued naturally over time not unlike the way mountains erode. They were unified: silly little uniforms, a tendency to symmetries and parallels, an inaudible rhythm dictating when to beat their hearts and when to tauten their sinews, an allegiance to velocity over direction, a duty to a system.

There were eight of them plus a ninth who was everything they were not. The coxswain must have miscalculated their trajectory. He failed to spot any landmarks on the horizon. He pondered their coordinates, his arms idle and akimbo, the steering paddle reeling like an unfed dog's tail.

Many boats rowed at sea, each confidently traveling in congruent directions, opposite directions, or without direction. Over great distances, coxswains exchanged anonymous glances, knowing not each others' names nor recognizing each others' faces, performing pantomimes of admiration, envy, condescension, apathy. These charades were often misinterpreted over such great distances, but it was their often only hope of communication, for the Mediterraneans spoke many diverse and dying languages. To fear misinterpretation was foolish, as boats' courses rarely intersected.

Over the ages, sailors' fantasies graduated to rumors, rumors to tales, tales to myths, which are the manifestations of gods' dreams. The boats at sea were in search of promised islands: of monkeys, of mangoes, of buxotic virgins, of milkcows equipped with inexhaustible udders, of orifice-flowered forests, of ethanol geysers, of epiphanous lotus-meats, of undiscovered anti-carcinogens, of abandoned 5-star hotels, of decomissioned war engines, of crystalline cellphone reception, of unowned beachfront properties, of tax-free amenities. This legendary archipelago promised an island for everyone, for every need.

Few had maps or navigators or could read the constellations. Devoid of landmarks, a coxswain of this sea could only deduce his coordinates relative to the other boats' trajectories. They followed each other, sometimes in circles, sometimes not, rowing tenaciously towards these islands no cartographer had yet charted. There were nothing in those waters if not confidence between coxswains at sea.

skit #36: twennytwo

2009-01-15T16:44:00.000-08:00

'Nineteen, twenny, twennyone, twennyt-- no twennytwo, hell.'

The cowboy recalled the boss noting calf Twenty-Two by name, 'Lulu', a milky-hided heifer borne with a latent maternal warmth that he described solemnly as 'plumb beatific.' The cowboy had never had one to call his Twenty-Two, nor had his boy.

The cowboy knew he had no alibi. No indians or bandits: Ten miles too far and ten years too late to blame the Apaches; and on this route, there was more money in honest work than rustling. The calf must have stolen away along with his sobriety and wits as he nipped spirits and napped under the watch of the languid piñon trees.

A full moon hung that night, or maybe one day prior or past or every night, would lend just enough light to see Lulu's white haunches against the gypsum desert. Nothing is dark under the curiosity of moonlight, only blue.

The boy, eleven years or so, could easily manage the herd; they lolled with fatigue, lowing complacently. The boy tended the campfire and watched his father depart, the light's dim reach illuminating him as a cowboy, then dimmer as a stranger, dimming again to an implication, then effusing him in that blue color of the unknown afar.

He rode his roan past the gorge, past the valley, regressing all the way into the desert he, his boy, and the herd had so arduously crossed this week past. He swaddled himself in blankets and slugged rye when he grew hungry. He gnawed on jerky and slugged rye when he grew hungry. He fidgeted with his rifle and slugged rye when he grew scared. But he owned no tool nor elixir to produce Lulu.

The cowboy rode for weeks, perhaps months. He had forgotten of his son, of the herd, of his boss, of the length of his whiskers, of the hoofprints he followed, of the direction he rode, of Lulu, of Twenty-Two, of twennytwo. He subsisted on rye and the curious blue.

A herd of Twenty-Twos roamed the same gypsum desert, but never within the cowboy's sight. Each head an alabaster calf, each head a veritable Lulu. They bore brands from all the ranches that drove cattle on that trail: Samson, Villanueva, Mondekker, Riley, the cowboy's boss, among dozens. The Twenty-Twos could not be claimed by any master, their hides invisible during the white day, their brands illegible during the blue night.

skit #35: obvious if discovered

2009-01-12T16:49:00.000-08:00

An impenetrable thicket of obstacles consume the gymnasium like kudzu. A multifarious plethora of hoops, bars, pools, pits, ropes, arenas, broad walls, narrow tunnels, trampolines to nowhere, gyroscopes, askew geometries.

The prudent babysteps of a hippopotamus do not save her from falling from the tenuous balance beam. She is bested by a shrew who roves effortlessly across the beam, to him a boulevard, only to face an uncrossable chasm at the long jump. No sloths complete the 500m sprint to advance to the vertical wall climb. Inappropriate conduct disqualifies seven bonobos halfway through the monkeybars. The lions perform passably, too much modesty, lacking the unabashed ambition the hyenas exercised; Both species' progress is eventually thwarted at the rope swing.

Minor pH adjustments flunk an impressively resilient newt for poor environmental adaptability. A goat demonstrates her impervious gastrointestinal system only to choke needlessly on a button. All but two canines navigate the olfactory labyrinth. Despite their similarities, primitive tool use disqualifies as many contestants as procreation disqualifies few.

Every contestant inevitably will be disqualified: a splash, a fumble, a wheeze, a jerk. There's no hope of completing the course, but each animal's heart pumps earnestly (should their species have one).

Rule enforcement is clinical and austere, handled by referees, who don't seem to belong to any species at all, speaking over walkie-talkies to recipients rumored to be perhaps a panel of legislators or perhaps a mainframe.
The current contestants have extrapolated some of the rules by watching the others fail:

An obstacle may be overcome by any means available.
Collaboration is permitted.
Failure to participate results in disqualification.
Failure to overcome an obstacle results in disqualification.
The end will be obvious if discovered.

Forty-three thousand-odd caribou proceed. The caribou cascade in an identical sequence, each imitating who they follow as best as a caribou can. They trot around the race track. Their muscles flex, flex, flex; Their ornamental antlers bob, bob, bob; Soon, it is hard to tell which muscles match with which antlers. The repetitions occasionally break: Those who stagger are culled from the herd. Very few followers foolishly imitate a misstep, and the culled are soon forgotten. The caribou clearly maintain their direction. Disqualified, disqualified, disqualified. They trot around the arena, still thousands, thousands, thousands strong.

skit #34: probably a cumulonimbus

2009-01-12T16:45:00.000-08:00

No one admits who it was, but one of us drops the first one. An accident of arrogance, probably a cumulonimbus. It makes all the dry stuff seem out of place. Now we'd better go and commit to do the whole thing. All the strata begin the barrage upon great dirt menace below. We will blot it all out.

Some of the ancient matriarchs (mammati clouds, mostly) speak of ages past, of the dirt's infancy. Their fables meander and contradict, their metaphors are either too coarse or refined for my comprehension, but the thread and gist resemble this: of the epoch-after-epoch of unquestioned placidity; of vulgar islands and volcanoes scarring the planet's immaculate azure countenance with acne; of the revolutionary Rodinia (and his igneous aristocracy) overthrown and executed by Mirovia; of Mirovia subsequently slain by Rodinia's vengeful daughter, Pannotia; of Pannotia's utopian rhetoric, "grains of dirt, like you and me, piled upon each other so high even the sun will sweat during his daily climb"; of Pangea's attempted hydrocide; of ensuing wars between earth and sea.

Some of us clouds have been obligatorily conscripted to fight, others voluntarily favor water's fight based on elemental affinity. Some of the loftier clouds remain above all the squabbling of earthly matters, conveniently ignoring that we too would evaporate without the waters below without intervention. Many of us rain simply because we rain. Indeed, precipitation is part of our meteorological nature. We're just helping dole it out equally. Homogeneous distribution and whatnot. It doesn't make any significant difference. Maybe a rivulet here or there. None will notice nor care.

The matriarchs prophesize the ages to come, again they litter twisted words. They speak: of the future of water; of the cataclysms; of continental drift; of primordial soups slopped into great basins; of things that move without waves or wind; of the things' eyes that weep and rain; of the things' loins that swell and taste of ocean; of the things' thoughts that storm as futilely and fervently as we do upon the dirt; of the things' own fables of ages past and names for us; of the things' design of things of their own.

We pour so much, we become thin. Will we ever return the face of this planet to tranquil uniformity? Or is the world a complex place that can never again be so simple? These are not questions we must answer. We deliver our payload, raining because we rain.

skit #33: excerpts from an owner's manual

2009-01-12T16:18:00.000-08:00

[excerpt from Manufacturer's Welcome, pg 7]
Welcome and congratulations! You, intrepid adventurer, are the owner of Chronda's 2442 Ahora, the first and only consumer-class temporal navigation vessel meeting governmental all regulations for public use. Taking advantage of temporal inertia using Chronda's patented Idle Drive, the Ahora boasts unlimited travel, complete energy conservation, unerring precision, unprecedented safety, ageless reliability. Utterly unrivaled.

[excerpt from Consumer Liability, Legality & Licensing, pg 36]
Chronda understands the grave nature of temporal displacement. The Chronda Ahora strictly abides by all statutes defined under the Ethical Time Displacement Act (ETDA) for consumer-class operation and exceeds compliances with all EPA legislation pertaining to timestream perturbances & pollutants. As a consumer-class vessel, the pilot is sequestered from all dangers of time touring.

[excerpt from Consumer Liability, Legality & Licensing, pg 44]
Relax! Leave quibbling over the ETDA legalese to the commerical sector, intrepid adventurer. With the Chronda Ahora, there is no fear of molesting the delicate fabric of time: no fear of knotting time lines (e.g. the prenatal patricide paradox), no fear of introducing catastrophic events (e.g. triggering Colony Collapse Disorder upon 2006CE), no fear of derailing from your native time line, of enacting embarassing anachronisms among the prestigious figures of past and future.

[excerpt from Preparations, pg 54]
Federal laws limiting the operation of vehicles and heavy machinery while sleep deprived, while intoxicated, while enraptured apply to whomever is piloting the Ahora at a given moment.

[excerpt from HUD Layout, pg 64]
Because the pilot travels precisely to the present, the Ahora's controls are both uncomplicated and intuitive.

[excerpt from Operations, pg 67]
1. Enter the vessel.
2. Close and secure the hatch. (Fig 77a)
3. Firmly depress the red button labeled 'Present'. (Fig 77b)
4. Release the button. (Fig 77c)
5. Disembark the vessel.

[excerpt from Travel, Arrival, pg 104]
As with industrial-class time traveling vessels, the journey itself may be quite long. Through recursive-reflexive moment cinching, the traveler does not experience any passage of time. Though the journey appears instantaneous, physical symptoms can arise: nausea, heart palpitations, chills, sweating, bewilderment, etc. For more details, please refer to Travel, Time Sickness, pg 443.

[excerpt from Travel, Arrival, pg 244]
The Chronda Ahora must perform several automatic routines upon arrival before you may disembark. Do not be alarmed by the following:

- White fog effumed from the cabin during Synthetic Earth atmospheric depressurization
- Kaleidoscopic strobelights during subatomic disentanglement via the release of superfluous photons
- High-pitched wavering and warbling during decompression of the Ahora's life support systems

[excerpt from Travel, Return, pg 297]
To return to your native present time, review Operations, pg 67.

[excerpt from Travel, Adjusting, pg 352]
After arriving at your destination, it may take time for even the most seasoned time traveler to acclimate to his or her new habitat. The present may appear drastically different from your native timestream. The denizens of this time stream may have customs different from your own, so be courteous when interfacing. Though rarely received sincerely, the ETDA strictly prohibits public disclosure of your temporal relocation to the present.

[excerpt from Travel, Adjusting, pg 357]
Your excursion into the fourth dimension joined, will join, and joins you to the ranks of modern men. We dance and laugh upon a new and transcendental stratum. Many travelers report a new-found keenness and optimism towards their environs. The present is a bewildering and beautiful place, abundantly faceted with unexamined curiosities.

skit #32: bees, bees, bees

2008-12-26T21:28:00.000-08:00

Over nineteen months, all the swarms disbanded. Not just the wild bees, apiaries too. No more honey, true. More importantly, flowers went unfertilized. Bluebells with blueballs died chaste and childless. Honeysuckles pined for the pollen-dusted thighs of their once-mistresses. O! for one last tryst, the chrysanthemums lamented, with those three-bulged hourglasses looped in bangles of gold and black. But the obtuse love rhombus between drone, anther, queen, and pistil had collapsed abruptly and irrecoverably.

The flowers drooped, stems limp, petals flaccid. What once bloomed now withered, aged, and died. The world paled to a monochromatic dystopia. Holiday commerce could not subsist on greeting cards and bonbons alone. Animosity between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and others, all these relationships stoked a conflagration. When misfortune knocked on the cardboard door of modern love, the artifical mise en scene was exposed, then the whole illusion our civilization collapsed. Something was clearly absent.

We tried everything to get them back. Developed pesticides to kill the bee mites, waging genocide. We terminated all the cell phone networks, left to antediluvian landlines and emails. We replanted the blossoms we thought they found so irresistable, but nary a buzz was roused.

We take some comfort that they perhaps found an elm branch to hang their hive over a daised hillock off yonder, a place for their stingers and honey both.

skit #31: another's or perhaps many others'

2008-12-25T23:41:00.001-08:00

Another lives in your relinquished home. Some gyrating, caterwauling, avant garde troupe acts in the theatre you so gently graced. Some ambitious junta seizes the dying king's palace, disposing of the vassalage, raping all the maidens. Your stage, your castle! Landmarks fit only for preservation, not residence.

Innocent espionage reveals new blinds, new wallpaper, new toilet seat cozies, new potpourri recommended by a vastly overpaid interior decorator. The new tenants bear vile habits: tobacco stains the ceiling you were conceived in; auspices lay in the cast turkey bones littered about the kitchen floor; the bathroom smells like another's, or perhaps many others', excretions.

Afterwards, you understand your curious and uninvited company. The interlopers rifling through your rubbish, rapeling in through your sky light, squeaking the floorboards with melancholy reminiscense. You understand their look of betrayal, their look of entitlement. You, after all, live in another's relinquished home. Sometimes, you'll awkwardly greet one another, remark on the weather.

Among your stains, your bones, your smells, you realize you don't know your habits, only how others differ. All the ways in which you have never lived in your home, others have and will. You relinquish the house (which you have suddenly determined to be intolerably small) like a hermit crab does a shell.

The larger-than-the-smaller house evokes the same motions of memories, the migration patterns of caribou, the spawning pools full of fertilized roe and expired salmon, the unrest of ephemera. You sense another has lived here before you, and certain someone will afterwards, but that never one will during.

skit #30: the boy could remedy that

2008-12-24T22:49:00.001-08:00

An unsteady flame drank the oil of an unwitting whale. Black followed the whiskers of the boy's brush, a shape labeled both Abyssinia and Junglelands. He mapped borders from his father's notes, whose pith helmet saddled the boy down to his chin. His father's notes documented very few roads, but the boy could remedy that. The boy improvised capillaries for the heart of darkness.

The night, the flickering, and his Abyssinia had him baying feral serenades to his dusk-cloaked baboon troop to return him to wilderness. All baboons can tell a boy from one of their own. He loosed long and lonely yowls of no effect, no response.

His father returned, sternly plucking his helmet off his son. The son watched his father pencil in the homestead where mother lived, far away from the teeth of cannibals and baboons. The boy painted a red line from Junglelands to Mama.

'Oh, no, boy. She must stay in Harar with grandma and Isabelle. What have you done?'

The father shook his head as he noticed the revisions his son inserted into the notes. It was all edited with black and red paint: nineteen months of accumulated trade routes, botanical sketches, big game surveys, village censes, weather patterns; nineteen months of distances, inclines, infections, parasites, heartache, agnosticism. The boy had excised anything that separated Junglelands from Mama.

The father turned and saw no one. Twilight dimmed with the boy's lonely yowls and pattering paw steps.

skit #29: right hand goes on the hip

2008-12-24T00:11:00.000-08:00

She never lands her double axel, but she looks oh so heavenly in sequins. You could never mention this to her because she'd find another partner to catch her. After practice, a furtive angle cast off your skate blade lets you see up her feathered skirt again. You nervously fumble with your laces when she inquires why your boot is so slow to be shed.

You dropped her earlier today. She spilled like petty change. And all because you thought she wouldn't notice. Oh, but she definitely noticed your hand. You both know right hand goes on the hip. She can barely land an axel as it is, forget off a half-handed throw. You gambled her grace against your lechery.

Instantaneous, maybe. But inexcusably deliberate. The hand never goes there. Then the audacity to attempt the throw with the chaste hand, as to boast your depravity had no technical impact. She pirouetted in tight spirals, each revolution telegraphing her aghast reaction: You. Are. A. Filthy. Filthy. Man.

Her ankle bent all wrong. Her taut scowl dissipated as her body crumpled like snipped marionette. Her face did not merely brush the ice like you think. You gave her a concussion. A concussion. That's why those evasive eyes that must lust for you grew dim. That's why those supple lips her husband pecks held tight. That's why she never once mentioned where your hand was that day. She was sprawled out on the floor, all heavenly in sequins. You looked up her feathered skirt again.

You help her off the rink. She asks to call her husband. After glib attempts to convince her you are he, you reconcile yourself that she's sadly free of amnesia. You insist she rest and recuperate, then shamelessly schedule to meet the next week -- same time, same day, same routine.

skit #28: plopped

2008-12-22T00:42:00.001-08:00

All four hundred cadets obediently sat themselves in the lecture hall, not a querulous peep of the foul sweat such heat brings. Cadet Shellings and Cadet Carolli relayed nervous pheromones back and forth and back, lucid even over the noisome traffic of male stink. Midshipman Voght, a boy perhaps a year older than his students, mounted the podium to commence instruction.

The semaphore alphabet was reviewed twice with the cadets before Voght wrote phrases on the board: class, cadet, learn, navy. The cadets' flags waved wildly, saying nothing. Voght continued: humid, stink, zoo, toilet. The astute students' snickering crescendoed as they progressed through the signals. A sly grin curled across the instructor's unmustachable lip as he conducted his crass opera.

After projecting a brief slideshow of the history of semaphore, Midshipman Voght convincingly emphasized its relevance in today's modern Navy. Cadets were dismissed after flagging a few letters of Voght's choosing. Four hundred of four hundred cadets bore certifiable proficiency in semaphore, Cadet Shellings and Cadet Carolli included.

Time proved Midshipman Voght correct. The radio was unresponsive, the fuel reserves dwindled, and the jet was approaching the aircraft carrier runway out of desperation. Ensign Shellings flagged hazily-recalled semaphores to the incoming pilot, his still-handsome Naval Aviator Carolli. They both got it all wrong. The jet hooked, skidded, whipped, and plopped as though the ocean was the intended destination.

Ensign Shellings suffered insomnia for years after the accident. The clock face would speak slowly, sometimes over days. How intently he watched: 1215, 1500, 0315, 0445, 0930, 1745, longer, longer, longer. The hour and minute hands spelled endless and unknown words, never seeming to answer Shellings' questions: of flags, of boys, of stink, of semaphore.

skit #27: sculpted heroes past

2008-12-18T10:45:00.000-08:00

Three men occupied the bench, old men, three very old men. Slack lips, slack faces. On the fronts of their heads stretched innocent masks. Innocent like monkeys or children. Never directly asserting ownership, they sat on their bench. Best damned bench on that cement sliver of Cowler Ave if you asked Eddy.

And if you didn't ask, he'd tell you anyways. Some bout of senility or lifelong abrasiveness vested him in cobalt-and-mustard plaid, matching only his discordant harping. Eddy would go on about anything: overripe produce stalls, carbon monoxide, dihydrogen monoxide, inflation, deflation, reflation. Any transient he noticed eavesdropping would soon be railed. Luther thought of him more of a talker than a fighter. As vocally vehement as physically feeble.

Eddy began yammering. This never fazed Mortimer, but little did. Mortimer was born jaded. Age served only to erode any cynicism that may lodge in optimism's absence. This left him with nothing more than a stern face and matters of fact to state.

Luther just about never spoke.

The morning sun of ten AM fueled Eddy's reptilian manners. The wiry cannibal preyed on lonely old men without old men of their own. They walked down the sidewalk, too timid, invisible to the youth of the streets. Eddy unleashed foul salvos of insults with the same tongue and lips that spoke gently to his granddaughters and his dead wife.

It was territorial, not personal. To celebrate the defense of their bench, the three old codgers gentlemanly lit each others' cigarettes. Just like when they were sixteen. Pigeons pecked at the feet of sculpted heroes past.

Mortimer piped up, 'Three of em this time,' pointing across the street. Eddy, Mortimer, and Luther rise. 'Intimidating like lambs,' Eddy scoffed. An unintelligible yet clearly hostile exchange of remarks was garbled over the din of interceding traffic. Luther fumed.

Luther muttered his token words before the rumble, as he always did. Mortimer and Eddy knew it was time to brawl. The feud plateaued at a simmer. Luther lead the assault, chucking his chair at their smug chins. The glass shattered and their foes vanished.

The three old men abandoned their corner, for there were other cafes to commandeer.

skit #26: polysomethings

2008-12-18T09:58:00.000-08:00

Chester was no good with words. He was no good at milking the divine machine for miracles, no good at composing epics or operas, held no hope of postulating a plausible grand unification theory. But foremost, Chester never thunk a thought in the terms of words. Well, there certainly exist psalms and rhapsodies and proofs to be composed as Chester would, had he the skill, or approximated in the spirit of Chester by translators. So here is one such transcription of his ineffable thoughts:

The boss says he hasn't seen an eye quite like mine in his twenty years leading the Plastic sorting team. "Sure as hell better than those robotic sensors." Polystyrene, 06. Polyvinyl, 03. Polyethylene -- well, depends -- 01, 02, or 04. I can spot a recycling code fifty feet away. He calls me 'The Judge', says if I keep it up he'll get me a powdered wig and a gavel. He's right. I destroy that which cannot be recycled. So many polysomethings are culled at my whim, sentenced to burial in the landfill, never to feel a consumer's sweet caress.

I'm hoping one day I'll be with Glass. The boss loses all his favorites to Glass. My days spent wallowing waist-deep in packing peanuts, egg cartons, milk jugs; the squeaking-squirking friction; the incontestible correctness of chemical composition categorizations. Working in Plastic is a menial existence.

But Glass! That angelic tintinnabulation of cullet! The way the world is distorted by contour, by tint, by volume, by opacity! No concept of disposal haunts the Glass crew. Bottles are resurrected by recirculation, reincarnated in the melting furnace.

This is all something like poetry. There's no way, though. No way of spelling out the beauty of things. Why, no use in it. What do those words make? All the glass borrowed by us frail tenants will eventually be returned to the earth. But the plastic is contrived and will never rot. Where do words die?

Maybe there is my counterpart, a Lester. A Lester who could speak his thoughts, knows nothing of glasses and plastics, of borrowing and returning. He will have his gerunds, his phonemes, his motifs. He may fumble juggled quips, littering words which biodegrade. We, two complements, could really say something.

Perhaps Chester and his complement (and perhaps Lester and his complement) could return a little glass of their own.

skit #25: no ghost town he knew

2008-12-17T17:13:00.000-08:00

Dense snowfall suffocated Chicago. Anything rustling was suppressed with weight. Anything chromatic was simplified to pure white. Anything keen was dulled with pillowtops. Chicago became still, not light.

The break room always had donuts and bogwater coffee. Corey Lewson nibbled at a powdered raspberry-filled. The foremen at Fisk Power Plant dismissed Corey's department around 11:00 am due to a melange of mishaps (fallen powerlines in fourteen distribution grids, broken down service trucks, marooned chief engineers), though no one left.

No one could leave. They were indiscriminately snowed in. The storm did not surgically exempt Fisk Power Plant workers from its mayhem, Corey conceded. Some of the switchboard operators slept in chairs, most stood around ruing they had come to work at all that day, muttering words like purgatory and and whodafiggered and ironic. There was nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. Corey snagged the last chocolate-on-chocolate and took seat by the window.

The flue stacks coughed coal soot into the face of winter. With all those distribution grids disabled, Corey didn't know what use the energy was. Streetlamps tinted distant snow antique colors in stale sepias. It all looked old to Corey. He wondered how long those streetlamps stood and would stand. Or Fisk Power Plant, for that matter. Umbilical power lines stretched deep into the blizzard, feeding the dim apparition of no ghost town he knew.

A flurry granted momentary clarity. He saw two of the service trucks wheel into the parking lot, who knows by what serendipity. Men in gray coveralls disembarked to clumsily march through waist-deep depths. Straining, Corey lost track of their movements, their footprints, their trucks, their presence, their names. He never heard the doors open, just prattling and snoring.

Everything just looked white again. He ate one with rainbow sprinkles. The road would have to thaw eventually.

skit #24: the miracle of life

2008-12-16T09:36:00.000-08:00

Five rubber-gloved fingers end the limb of something without hooves. They courteously dock the Bull's member in a rubber sleeve. The Bull -- sire to millions of calves, the Creator, virility incarnate -- snorts rowdily as he ejaculates into a receptacle, unaware the counterfeit is neither bovine nor vaginal. The sentiment of his passion is frozen mid-flagellation, the sperms seized in lipoproteins like gnats in amber.

Five rubber-gloved fingers end the limb of something without hooves. They insert the insemination straw. It sings inside her like a sonnet. Sloughing their torpor, the sperms thaw and resume wriggling. By faith, they have been delivered to the receptacle of original promise. She somehow knows he is out there; She knows how he smells, how his haunches hang, how he moos.

Her stall walls holds her at night. Four cold metal arms hug her four tired legs and four empty stomachs. Her unbutchered flanks hug her uterus. Inside four more tiny legs and four more tiny stomachs, the love Calf of an anonymous Bull she never met.

Five rubber-gloved fingers end the limb of something without hooves. Nozzles siphon milk from her gorged udder as the machine's engine chugs hungrily. She remains docile as she's drained, nourishing innumerable and anonymous Calves. All who drink from Mother's teat are her children. She is poured in babies' bottles, on children's cereals, in senators' lattes, in her Calf's growth formula.

She knows the touch of five rubber-gloved fingers. She knows the embrace of her stall walls. She knows the prick of the insemination straw. The Mother of so much does not know how flesh feels warm.

skit #23: yellow pansies

2008-12-15T15:36:00.000-08:00

My brand new shoes are covered in bug guts, brand new Ferragamo loafers. When I go to call the exterminator, my grandfather says, 'No, no, no. Those are Callippe Silverspots. They'll turn to butterflies.'

He was an entomologist for sixty years. After eight or so gins, he'll regretfully admit to breeding belligerence into the West African Killer Bees as weaponry during the War to End All Wars. But in the same breath he'll recognize my marriage, so who knows whether the coot gives a damn about insects.

He alleges the caterpillars are after the yellow pansies in my garden. He can't tell me why they don't care for the tricolors or the magnolias. 'Maybe they just don't like the taste,' the hypocrite supposes.

My driveway rests under a blanket of writhing legs and legs and legs and thoraces and legs and legs. I tip-toe through the orgy Nature conducts, nonjudgemental with etiquette. When I tell him this, my grandfather reminds that larvae are sexually immature, that mating is impossible.

All the pansies have been stripped of flesh. They'll outlive the winter only by digestion by caterpillars, as baby fat and love handles and spare tires. My flowers skeletoned, I doubt my husband will plant more next year. I wonder what will they eat then.

It's begun to snow. Frozen, most of them curl mortally on the cement like misplaced commas. 'None of them formed cocoons,' wondered grandfather. He had me out there with egg cartons, nestling to safety one caterpillar per cup.

It's been a couple of years now. No new caterpillars. The pansy stalks have long withered with no replacements planted. The Callippe Silverspots are so fat they're spherical, like marbles. All of my husband's attempts to contact an exterminator are thwarted by grandfather's guile: hiding the larvae, histrionic distractions, snipping phone lines, whatever it takes. 'They'll turn to butterflies. They'll change.' he repeats.

skit #22: it's more complex than that

2008-12-14T18:46:00.000-08:00

Daddy gloated all night of how he weaseled the tickets away from Sedgewick for a mere twenty bucks. Mommy had placated him too subtly and eventually had to interrupt, "Maybe Dad would like to teach Pauly about the rules. Right, Dad?"

Nodding, Daddy deepened his voice to indicate profundity. "Son, are you ready for your first baseball game? Did you learn how to play at school? A little baseball?"

"No, Daddy."

"No? See, what in the hell are they teaching him, Sandra? Sure as hell isn't math or hygiene. Not even baseball. Kindergarbage." Mommy glowered and gritted, quickly steering Daddy back to topic. "Well, Pauly, there are two teams. Whoever gets the most points wins. Now one team throws the ball and the other team hits the ball with a bat. Well, it's more complex than that. But our boys are going to win, no doubt. I have forty bucks riding on it with Turner."

"Daddy, who are our boys?"

"We're the boys in red. We're at bat. Just pay attention."

"Oh."

War chants and merchandise named the boys in red as the Wassleberg Privateers. Pauly watched the screen rather than the stadium. The colors were brighter. The people were bigger.

He watched a batter tousle the waterboy's hair on the television, then looked to home plate to see if it had actually happened. It did. Pauly's hair remained parted quite nicely.

Pauly studied the pirate mascot embroidered on the players' uniforms. "Daddy? If they are pirates, why don't they get swords? Why don't they chop up the bad guys?"

Daddy stopped watching the game and sighed, "See what I mean, Sandra? For chrissake."

skit #21: Form 7780-E

2008-12-13T15:22:00.000-08:00

Caseworker Sanchez transcribes her notes, efficiently producing words in the cold mechanical vernacular only ancient keyboards speak. Form 7780-E is not well-suited for her most recent client. CLIENT ID# 004040223 was serially generated, though hardly unique; If it was not a Ms Balmiki, it would have been a Ms Hererra or a Ms Ureole.

BIRTH NAME, unknown, renounced and replaced at a young age. SSN, none, born outside the United States and never naturalized. NATIONALITY, disputed internationally, born in rural Kashmir. DOB, approximate, an estimate between 43 and 45 found no haven in DD/MM/YYYY. ADDRESS, TELEPHONE, CLOSEST OF KIN, blank, blank, blank.

OCCUPATION elicited a contemplative silence from Ms Balmiki, who eventually asserted that everyone must eat and have a bed to sleep in. The mutual understanding that Ms Balmiki knew that Caseworker Sanchez knew that Ms Balmiki prostitutes was clear though tacit. Caseworker Sanchez checks the box advising a gynecological examination.

HISTORY is the first field on 7780-E to permit a response exceeding twenty characters in length. Ms Balmiki was born a child to a farmer whose fathers were farmers who commented, "My daddy wanted me to be just like him, but I could never be a great man." She fled from the labor of the farm to the alleys of Srinagar, never to return. She eked out an urchin's existence on rinds and rupees. At the age of thirteen, a festival-turned-bacchanal rendered her paraplegic under the jubilant dance steps of celebrating feet. Caseworker Sanchez checks the box approving eligibility for disability checks.

Ms Balmiki wistfully reported, "The women of the street took me as mothers do daughters. I knew I would one day be a woman of the street, also. When my age turns to 14, they remove my [genitals]," Caseworker Sanchez edits what must be a mistranslation, as Ms Balmiki is vague and presumably means the clitoris, "in order to become a woman [of the street]. My mothers laugh that paralysis under the hips is a gift from the gods." Caseworker Sanchez notes some evident nuances eluded her limited Hindi. "I took the name of my mother, Bhabani Balmiki." Caseworker Sanchez tentatively marks F under GENDER.

Under SKILLS, Caseworker Sanchez notes Ms Balmiki speaks employable English, though she often appears confused by verbal conjugation and pronoun-referent relationships. Also noted, Ms Balmiki displayed severe dismay that she may not fit in anywhere in Acton, Ohio, "no money, no legs, no [genitals], no children, no lovers." Ms Balmiki concluded "maybe I will one day have money and lovers" with an optimism otherwise absent throughout the interview. Caseworker Sanchez checks the box affirming WILLING TO WORK.

skit #20: loaned bones

2008-12-11T16:16:00.000-08:00

Mr Moule dismissed his servants after supper, as he did every night, for a private sip of tea with the Lord. Moule unfurled the schematics he drafted to God's estimates from prior consultations.

Diagram 1, labeled "The Unfortunate Circumstances of Nutrition": A man's midfellow is distended, one may infer with food, much like how Mr Moule's belly bulges. The figure's transparent flesh yields rosy bowels, outlined with an indubitably expensive pink ink. Incipient and established digestive matter is in a mulatto brown. Mr Moule's color key reads: "Pinke: Thee Heavenly Procession; Brown: Depravities & Im-purities".

Diagram 2, labeled "Our Father's Dry Earth Closet": A sturdy oak chair, barring a few details, looks much like what Mr Moule sits on. The sketched chair has no occupant so as to reveal the detail of its utility. An ominous hole resides in the center of the seat, as a pillory reserves a portal to bind the neck. It is presumably a mouthpiece for the devil's lips to speak in sordid tongues. An obsequious bucket remains in utter subservience below deck. Mr Moule neglects to provide any explicit instructions on use.

Diagram 3, labeled "The Resurrection": A servant shovels "Foul & Vile Matters" into trenches four hands deep, a quarter-hour of labor for a boy. Time elapses from winter to spring, from frost to flowers, from left to right. "Triumphant Bounty" grows where malignancies stewed: corn, squash, tomatoes, and other New World imports. A farmer with a distended belly looks suitable to star in Diagram 1.

Diagram 4, labeled "Our Tenancy": A lamb is shorn and shanked by the servant from Diagram 3. The farmer wears woolen long johns, bears what must be mutton-made distension, etc. The servant returns the loaned bones and excrement to "God's Earth". A panel encapsulates two dead men, illustrated as having skulls for heads. One's soul remains in the trench, fettered by sin and shite. The other's ascends from the trenches, gassy, effervescent.