December 2010
29 posts
December 29, 2010
We are running out of beans. We’ve slowed down the eating - time was we ate ten a day, then it was five, then fewer and fewer; now we share one every other day - but the end is definitely in sight. Some of us want to count the beans, so we can know how many we have and prepare for the end. Others say we should stop eating them now so we never run out, but wouldn’t that just be the...
December 28, 2010
We sing the Dona Nobis Pacem because we all went to the schools where they sing the Dona Nobis Pacem, or our parents or children went to those schools, or in some extreme cases all of the above. We like to think that we’re praying for peace by singing this song, our voices overlapping in joyous harmony, but in truth we are singing nonsense syllables, rejoicing in the enthralling racket that...
December 27, 2010
My planet is way better than your planet. It has two suns that it orbits in a figure 8 pattern. This means our years alternate in lengths, which is way more interesting than having every year be the same old 365 days (and don’t get me started on those leap years). We also have lots more intelligent lifeforms on our planet - I can’t imagine how you go through life with nothing to...
December 26, 2010
There were no buses or cabs, so I decided to walk home. The snow wasn’t too high, mostly below the tops of my boots with drifts to my thighs. The wind was biting, but I had my hat and scarf and winter coat and felt fine.
No one was out.
The streets were piled high, thick and white; my footprints were the only thing disturbing this new, quiet earth. I began to hate myself for the...
December 25, 2010
You are leaving us, disappearing; your mind is melting away from the inside. We might not even know it based on a short conversation; the last part to go will be your mannerisms, your style, your turns of phrase and habits of speech, grooves worn into you, mental muscle memory that will hang on long after our names, the date, your wife’s face have slipped away forever. But we’ll take...
December 24, 2010
We lit three candles, as we always do at this time - sometimes three, sometimes two or four or even more, depending - but we lit the candles and we waited expectantly, trying not to make eye contact with each other for fear of distraction and nervous laughter, we waited for twelve minutes exactly, as we always do, and once the time had passed we allowed our eyes to meet, as the risk of laughter...
December 23, 2010
We’d met dogs before, of course - dozens, perhaps hundreds of dogs had crossed our collective and separate paths over our many combined years on this earth - but never dogs like these. We knew from the moment we met them that these were special dogs, dogs to be treated with respect. You could see it in the way they carried themselves, the way they entered a room; you could hear it in the...
December 22, 2010
Robert’s favorite pastime was rescoring movies: replacing the music in quiet, tender scenes with biting, atonal horror themes or strident, epic adventure music; backing edge-of-your-seat cliffhangers with soothing acoustic guitar or new age synths and flutes. He’d work for hours on these creations until they were just right, pitch-perfectly discordant, then play them back for himself...
December 21, 2010
I stood at the payphone, so much hotter than anyone should be in April, and told you about what I’d done that day - which was mostly drive - and what I’d seen - I was astounded by the oranges that grew on the street everywhere; you could just pick them and eat them! - and what I was looking at right then, the tourists and their fannypacks and small dogs and ice creams, and when the...
December 20, 2010
You and your friends were always so nice to me; I never told you how much I appreciated that. Of course we never spent any time together; you had each other, and I’m sure there were things that I was up to, all sorts of activities that aren’t coming to mind right now. But I really appreciated how you never went out of your way to tease me or hurt me or otherwise harrass me; you just...
December 19, 2010
I’ve forgotten how to play my old songs, the ones everybody wants to hear. I also seem to have lost the ability to write new songs. I sit with my guitar for hours, and all that comes out is “Wild Thing” or “More than a Feeling.” Then I try flatting something, turning the chords around, and it sounds like I’m trying too hard, like some music school bullshit.
...
December 18, 2010
People - those who don’t either try their damnedest to act like I’m completely normal or just ignore me altogether - always ask me what it’s like to have no legs, and I never know how to answer. It’s not that I don’t understand that I’m starkly, obviously different from most everyone around me, but it’s the only way I’ve ever been. It would be like...
December 17, 2010
I will always be better than you. Better, faster, taller, smarter, more handsome; altogether more prepared for existence, my genetic material far hardier and more likely to propagate itself for generations upon generations. But still, I need you. There are days when I don’t see you, when I’m left alone with my wealth and my looks and my dry, cutting wit, and despite your many flaws...
December 16, 2010
I met the Congressman briefly, before he’d started his first term; before everything else. I was working at an airport Starbucks, my throat raw from hollering “Can I help you?” and “Grande 1% mocha!” I saw him in line and I didn’t know who he was, but I recognized him, either from some news story about the campaign, or just the base, primal recognition of a man of power, a man destined to be...
December 15, 2010
Kenneth and Francis had been living in the woods for some time, subsisting on foraged mushrooms and water sucked from various mosses, when they began to hallucinate.
“Kenneth, Francis,” said the mole, drawing himself up to his full five feet (short for a man, but quite tall for a mole), “welcome to my Wood. How may I be of service?”
The two friends gawked openly, not...
December 14, 2010
You can tell a lot about a man by the movies he watched as a child. Not just how old he is - which can be misleading; I adored The Wizard of Oz and Easy Rider - but the kind of relationship he had with his parents, his opinions of women, his moral code, etc. It’s often hard to tell whether one’s movie choices are swayed by his personality, or whether one’s very moral fiber is hewn by the...
December 13, 2010
Sabrina’s flower shop, Flowers Flowers Flowers, was out of its signature item, i.e., flowers. Her suppliers had been griping for weeks now - customs issues, farmer strikes, what have you - but today, for the first time, she was about to open the shop with no stock whatsoever. She thought long and hard about what she might be able to sell instead - after all, she had this coveted storefront...
December 12, 2010
My VCR is broken. I carry it with me everywhere I go in case I meet somebody who knows how to fix it, but so far, no luck. I ask everyone I see if they know how to fix a VCR, or even just help get the tape out. It’s an important tape. It has the finale of Dallas on it, which I’ve only seen twenty minutes of, and I need to see the rest. The second thing I say after “Do you know how to fix a...
December 11, 2010
It’s hard to know where to begin sometimes. Do I rip the claws off and start cracking them up, pulling the meat out with my fork? Do I crack open the torso and see what’s going on in there? Perhaps I should start with the antennae as a sort of appetizer. I probably won’t feel up to the legs once I’ve been eating for a while, so maybe I should start there, ripping them off one by one and...
December 10, 2010
I know you’re wondering why we called this meeting. It’s not often we all come together in a group; last time was the incident with Spitzer’s family … situation. Most of you weren’t here then, which is just as well.
We’re called here today under very different circumstances - right, Spitzer? There’s not much to say, so let’s enter this meeting...
December 9, 2010
Everyone knows Tyrannosaurus Rexes eat everything, so the Apatosaurus was nervous, but perhaps not as stomach-churningly petrified as he should have been, faced as he was with the slathering, drooling, toothsome gaze of a hungry Tyrannosaur. He hoped she might pass him over for a mouthful of the small mammals scurrying between her feet, or a wing off the Archaeopteryx perched in the tree to his...
December 8, 2010
The police came, as they always do, a minute too late to do anything or help anyone, instead resorting to their time-honored tactic of questioning (bullying) those of us who were there when they arrived, which is to say the victims, the very people who had summoned them to this dark, unpleasant place to begin with.
Did we answer their questions? We did, to the very best of our ability, which in...
December 7, 2010
It’s all right in a boxcar. You meet interesting people, hear wonderful stories and songs, and every day when you look out the door you get a different breathtaking view. Sure, there are days when you don’t eat, and you feel your teeth rattling in your head from incipient scurvy, and you can’t fall asleep for fear that if you do you’ll wake up dead and penniless. But...
December 6, 2010
I thought about you for so long, wondered what could possibly have become of you, even looked for you once that was possible. When you finally turned up out of the blue, a simple phrase in pixels on a screen betraying the fact of your existence, it was a short road from dropped jaw to phone conversation to casual electronic acquaintance. How did we go so quickly from the desperate, sad...
December 5, 2010
I was born with the gift of speech. Although I had a baby’s brain, unable to form even moderately intelligent sentences, I had the ability to speak a large number of words, if not the capacity to understand them, at birth. My first words, spoken upon exiting the birth canal, were “transfix obligatory ghostmelon.” Those in the hospital room thought they might have been...
December 4, 2010
I was not born with the wires in my head, nor do I remember the events that resulted in their installation. I remember a childhood without them, but it’s not often that I think of it. I prefer to stay in the present, connected as I am to everything I might ever want to know. I prefer to stay in the present. The wires in my head might seem strange, but I assure you that soon they will be...
December 3, 2010
I know accounting sounds like a dull, safe job; the kind you take for a steady paycheck if you have the personality of a shopping bag. But you have no idea the kind of shit that we see on a daily basis. We see everything, whether you think you’re hiding it or don’t know that you should be. We see your mistakes and failures, large and small; we see your affairs; we see your embezzlements;...
December 2, 2010
We safari through the wildest terrain, befriending baboons, chastising chimpanzees, and terrifying tigers. We navigate the most barren of deserts, squeezing water from cactus roots and burying ourselves in sand to stay warm at night. We have traveled through space, far beyond this piddling solar system.
Every day we climb a mountain.
But this has been our longest, cruelest journey:...
December 1, 2010
I love the sandwiches here, don’t you? I know you work here, so you probably get sick of them - you probably ate one every day for the first month you worked here, and now when you smell them on your clothes at home you have to suppress the urge to gag - but you have to admit, they’re excellent sandwiches. The bread is thick and crusty, but not too doughy; the fillings are very...