UNREMITTING FAILURE

Twenty Lines

We had Matty's birthday party in the park.  The kids knocked the shit out of the pinata.  We pitched horseshoes.  The kids attempted, in their half-assed way, to play crocquet. 

Meredith and I weren't talking. Ever since we'd murdered the next door neighbors, an awkward silence had come between us.

It wasn't guilt, I want to make that much clear.  And it wasn't fear that we'd be caught by the police.  It was something else, some knowledge between us that made it impossible for us to communicate in a healthy and open way.

Perhaps it was the knowledge that that we'd murdered the Olivers, but we should have murdered the Bakers.  If anything, the Bakers were a bigger pain in the ass.  They had lawn parties that went on way too late, and their hedges were the embarrassment of the neighborhood.

Of course we knew we couldn't do it.  The neighbors on one side of you are killed by an axe, that's awful.  The neighbors on the other side of you get killed by an axe, that's suspicious.  And maybe that's what we were feeling.  Like we'd murdered the wrong neighbors.  You only get to kill one set of neighbors, if you don't want to arouse undue suspicion, and we'd blown it. 

Matty fell and skinned his knee, and it was a major to do.  There was blood, but not gouts of it, and I can honestly say that both Meredith and I were disappointed. 

 

Love vs. Hate

The Ku Klux Klan marched by our house when we were kids.  This must have been 1964, 1965.  We sat on the bench on our front porch and politely watched them go by.  We didn't have to be scared, we were white.

As a matter of fact, everybody in our home town was white.  Talk about preaching to the choir.

Later, when we reached drinking age, we would go to this bar in Taneytown, just across the Mason-Dixon Line, to drink.  In the urinals were stickers that read The KKK Is Watching You.  Why the KKK would want to watch us take a piss was a bona fide mystery.

Speaking of urinal stickers, in the VFW in our hometown there were stickers in the urinals that said Take a Piss on Hanoi Jane.  Jane Fonda's face was on the sticker.  We would take our revenge out on the sign-in book.  If you weren't a member, you had to sign in.  We always signed in as H. Rap Brown or Malcolm X. 

People love to hate, it's what we do best.  You put all the love in the world up against all the hate and the hate is going to win hands down.  We hate Republicans, cops, judges, politicians, and prison guards, and we hate them with a vengeance.  We have hatred in our heart.  More hatred than love, probably, and that's the sad truth. 

Twenty Lines

I, Fred Noonan, being of sound mind and body, hereby wish to finally reveal the truth about what happend when Amelia Earhart and I crash landed our plane on a desert island.  At first we were full of hope.  It was only a matter of time, or so we thought, until a search party found us.  But we waited and we waited, and hope dimmed.  Then the Japanese showed up.  At first we thought we were saved.  Then there was talk of us being spies, and suddenly we were prisoners.  Amelia tried to explain that we were simply aviators flying around the world, but it did no good. 

What can I say about what happened afterwards?  She talked a lot about her childhood.  She recalled running barefoot across a meadow by a river, her arms held straight out by her side, pretending that she was an aeroplane.  There were bluebells in the grass, and the sun was shining, and it was summer of course, and she was nine years old.  And at the end of the meadow she saw a fox, which didn't scare her.  Nothing scared her, she said, even as a little girl.  And she chased the fox into the forest and lost it amongst the trees which she skirted, still in her bare feet, and still pretending that she was an aeroplane.  But she got lost, and then she got scared, just a little, but she found her way out and the sun was lower in the sky and she ran home across the meadow and found her dog Jerry sitting on the front steps of her house and she said, "Jerry, someday you're going to be my copilot!"

And then she hummed a song from her childhood, one that she used to hum to herself as she lay awake in bed wondering what the future held for her.  Little could she have guessed.  They had her kneel.  She was smiling. 

Twenty Lines

"The only means which is granted us to express our contempt for life is to accept it."  Jacques Rigaut

I wasn't there when my house burned down.  I was in Toledo, Ohio, trying to get my mother into a mental hospital.  She hadn't left her bed for a month, and had some pretty nasty bed sores.  My older brother who lives with her and does nothing for a living finally called me and told me he didn't know what to do with her.  So I go to Toledo and call around and while I'm doing that my house burns down.  In the middle of the night.  Who knows, I might not have gotten out alive.  My cat survived, it went out the cat door and hunkered down in the backyard to watch. 

Meanwhile, my mother is saying the craziest things, Hitler's legs are in the closet, and she doesn't even recognize me half the time.  She's taking forty valium a day and there are prescription bottles all over the place, on the tables by the bed, under the bed, in the bed, under her pillow.  She has always been the nervous sort. 

Meanwhile my brother is taking almost as many valium as she is, which explains his colossal uselessness when it comees to handling the practical side of anything.  He sits in front of the television, watching cooking shows and reruns of Mr. Ed.  So I've got to try to talk him into a rehab, which is so much wasted breath, the two of them have been doctor shopping and ordering valium via online pharmacies and the house is like a pill factory. 

I finally get my mom into a regular hospital, where hopefully they'll begin to detox her and treat the bed sores.  My brother is relieved she's out of the house because her craziness was beginning to bum him out.  The yard is a mess, the house is a sty, there are twelve count them twelve empty pizza boxes stacked on an easy chair in the living room.  My whole family is crazy.  I'm crazy.  I stay in Toledo an extra two days, to handle chores and clean up a little, despite the fact that I've got to get home to handle my wife's funeral arrangements. 

  

Culinary Horror

Friday night we went with Mrs. UF to the Burger Joint, where we ordered the Cuban.  It's not just a burger.  It's a burger topped with pork and ham.  It was a revelation.  The pickles and special Cuban sauce made it for us.  But it's a wonder vegetarians didn't spatter us with blood as we left the restaurant.  We'd have deserved it.

Then Saturday night the two of us went to Pho DC, a Vietnamese restaurant on H Street.  And something, some imp of the perverse, caused us to order the beef soup.  It doesn't just come with beef. It comes with beef, brisket, meatballs, tripe, and tendons.  We've never had tripe, much less tendons, and we had to have them suddenly.  It was a mistake.  The meatballs were like eating red rubber balls.  The tripe looked like white seaweed and wasn't bad, on the chewy side and not slimy, but the tendons had the consistency of snot and were more or less impossible to swallow.  We had to watch in envy as Mrs. UF enjoyed her spring rolls with rice vermicelli while we tried to choke down a foodstuff that made raw oysters look like filet mignon.  Afterwards we felt faintly nauseous, but proud that we'd forced ourselves to eat something that must people would run from as fast as their legs would carry them.

Next week: the Chinese restaurant that serves chicken's feet and jellyfish!

tendon--only this looks far more solid than what we ate

UF and Rudi, Relaxin' at Camarillo

Here's Rudi and yours truly on Mrs. UF's sofa.  That's Mrs. UF's copy of The Corrections on the top of the sofa, not ours. You won't catch us reading that guy.  We're reading 4 Dada Suicides, a group study of Arthur Cravan, Julien Torma, Jacques Rigaut, and Jacques Vache.  It's entertaining, and we understand every ninth word! We especially like this description of Rigaut by Georges Ribbement-Dessaignes: "Rigaut, a particularly disorganizing intelligence, proved to be a Dada among the Dadas, that is, he demoralised whatever came into contact with him, and had not a little to do with the ruin of Dada; in short, he did wonders." We should aspire to as much!

 

Twenty Lines (Where We Work)

The janitor's cart sat, abandoned, in the middle of the bathroom.  The janitor himself was nowhere to be found. Perhaps he'd had to rush off to the bathroom.  We don't let the janitors use our bathrooms, we make them use the tiny, cramped, and dirty bathrooms situated in the basement.  They wouldn't want to use our bathrooms anyway, they are too clean.  The janitors prefer a dirty little sty, that's the kind of people they are. 

There is a woman here whose only job is to paint offices.  Somebody moves out, she paints the office. She wears a white uniform spattered by off-white paint.  We make her go to the bathroom in the basement too.  She wouldn't know what to do in the luxury of one of our office bathrooms.  She would panic, and it would be unfair to her.  No one can accuse us of wanton cruelty.

I'm working on a design for an elevator bathroom.  You get on at the first floor, and when you get off at the seventh you have relieved your bladder.  

Nobody here speaks to the janitors.  I stared at the empty janitor's cart, then threw everything on it on the floor.  That would give the fellow something to do when he got back.  They do so little, janitors.  They scrub and they cry, and you have to tell them to shut up. 

Twenty Lines (The Murder)

I decide to murder my spouse.  He's a real jerk.  I could always get a divorce, but that sounds like a lot of work.  The question was, how to do it.  At first I planned to club him over the head with frozen leg of lamb, and then eat the leg of lamb, thus disposing of the evidence like in that Roald Dahl story.  But who knows how many cops are readers of Roald Dahl stories.  Then I decided to shoot him, and make it look like a robbery gone bad.  But that would involve buying a gun, which could be conceivably be traced back to me.  There was always poisoning, but it would have to be some kind of sophisticated poison that couldn't be detected during an autopsy.  I could always search the internet, but dollars to donuts the police would seize my computer and find evidence that I was doing research on sophisticated poisons that couldn't be detected during an autopsy.  Then I decided,  who cares if I go to prison, I'll strangle him with my bare hands.  Or drug him heavily some night, and smother him with a pillow.  Here he comes now.  He is carrying a wrapped frozen leg of lamb.  Obviously we are thinking along the same lines.  I say to him, "How do you know your average homicide detective isn't a reader of Roald Dahl stories?"  He says, "I didn't think of that." I say, "There's probably a lot you haven't thought about."  And he says, "You have a real jump on me, don't you?"  

Alessandro Botticelli, A Young Man Being Introduced to the Seven Liberal Arts

Let's see.  From left we have semiotics, Herstory, deconstruction, comparative religions, gender studies, post-structuralism, and Baudrillard studies. 

 

Pigeons

We like pigeons. They’re the boulevardiers of birds.  They can fly, but they’d just as soon walk like everybody else.  One pigeon'll say to another, "I'm flying over to the park, you wanna come?" And the second pigeon will say, "No, I think I'll walk.  I could use the exercise.  Besides, there's an orange foot polish in the window of Storner's I've been thinking about buying."