UNREMITTING FAILURE

Twenty Lines (THis StoRy MakEs no SeNSe)

This is sentence four: the murderer got away scot free.  He crept up to the house.  He broke in.  He killed his victim.

This is sentence ten: There should have been 1,000,000 pesos in the suitcase.  He opened the suitcase and counted the pesos in the suitcase, and kept coming up one short.  We cannot tell you how this pissed him off.  What good are 999,999 pesos in a suitcase?  He felt like going back, and killing his victim again for screwing him.  So that's what he did.

The murderer has never seen the Matrix.  This makes him feel inferior.  Everybody else has seen the Matrix, but he has never seen the Matrix.  How could he have missed the Matrix?  He would hear people making allusions to the Matrix, and he would kill them.  That's how he became known as the Matrix killer.  Why didn't he just watch the Matrix?  What was stopping him?  He should just put two hours aside, sit down in front of the television, and watch the Matrix.  This way he would be free, but he didn't want to be free.  

Twenty Lines

Yoga Bear headed for yoga class.  He was gay, which is pretty common for bears, and he couldn't wait to check out the crotches on the guys.  "Pik-i-nik baskets!" he said with relish, rubbing his hairy palms together.  He was the only bear in the class, but no one made him feel unwelcome.  There was a skunk in the class too, and that was a different story. 

Yoga Bear was quite lithe, for a bear, and had no trouble assuming any of the positions called out by the instructor, a hippy-dippy girl with hair down to her ass who, if Yoga Bear encountered her in the wild, he would probably eat.  She was just a little too serene for Yoga Bear, who enjoyed yoga but not all the new age trappings that accompanied it.  You would, for example, never catch him using a neti pot.  And he liked raw meat, and beer, and wasn't about to give either up for some crazy idea that eating other living things was wrong.   Eating other living things was as right as sucking cock.

Often, or at least sometimes, at yoga Yoga Bear would hook up with a guy.  Then they would go back to the guys place or the woods and have sex.  "Pik-i-nik basket!" Yoga would cry, which never failed to confuse the guy he was with.

Yoga Bear longed to settle down and marry but none of the liberal states that had okayed gay marriage had legitimized interspecies gay marriage, which was a bummer.  There was so much prejudice out there.  Still, he longed for a committed relationship, but he couldn't see living in an apartment, while his potential partner would probably have similar problems settling down in the forest. 

Let's move away from Yoga Bear for a while.  His story is a cliche.  Even his close friend Boo Boo is a cliche.  Yoga is for losers, there we said it.  And we resent bears because they're one of those animals that can get away with wearing a Hawaiian shirt and no pants, which if we tried that we'd up in jail.   

Shaving (Twenty Lines)

This morning we shaved our nose, just for the hell of it.  Then we rode our bike to work, which we've never done before.  It was nervewracking.  Too many pedestrians on the sidewalk failed to heed our cry of "Get the fuck out of the way!"  But we made good time.  Showed up at the dot of eight.  And immediately turned on the Handsome Family's Amelia Earhart vs. the Dancing Bear, which we listen to like 80 times a day.  We used to play albums, now we play the same song over and over again.  It calms us.  And we need a calmative, because the anxiety is killing us. 

There is an iron-clad rule that some people shall suffer misfortune all the days of their life, and there is a gulf between these people and well-adjusted people that cannot be bridged.  Such people look for hope everywhere, in books, in music, in love, in suicide. 

Once when we were a teenager our friend Larry Shrader took us up in his airplane, and at one point he deliberately let it stall and we plunged toward the earth till he restarted the engine and pulled us out of our dive in a great graceful arc.  He said, "I bet you thought we were dead, didn't you?"  And we said, "Larry, we have absolutely no faith in happy endings." 

We're a lucky person, always have been.  We never get jury summons, and once when we failed to file income taxes for six years it turned out the IRS owed us, thousands of dollars.   We found Mrs. UF, and got to meet Allen Ginsberg, and when we got shitfaced there was always somebody around to put us to bed.   Pity about our head.  We do our best, but as the Band sings, "oh, you don't know the shape I'm in." 

Twenty Lines

Time takes everything away from you.  Everything.  Everything.  Everything.  Everything. Everything.  Everything. Everything.  Everything. Everything.  Everything. Everything.  Everything. Everything.  Everything. Everything.  Everything. Everything.  Everything. Everything. 

Francis Bacon

The renowned art critic Margaret Thatcher famously dismissed Bacon as “the man who paints those dreadful pictures.” But what’s so dreadful about them? Aside, of course, from their subject matter. About this painting Bacon said, we kid you not, "It came to me as an accident. I was attempting to make a bird alighting on a field.” That’s like Leonardo da Vinci describing the Mona Lisa as an attempt to paint a bicycle.   

Great American Legends

American folk legend informs us that Paul Bunyan was a giant lumberjack who wandered the great woods with a giant ax and had to shop at Big and Tall Men Stores and had a giant blue ox named Babe for a constant companion.  As a kid we could buy all of it except that the ox was blue.  They don't make oxen in blue, so unless Paul was in the habit of dyeing Babe, we called bullshit on the whole blue Babe scenario. 

And in the meantime he was chopping down entire forests and you never hear of him being followed by lumber trucks so what happened to all that timber?  It just laid there, while the wildlife that used to live in the forest cursed his name.

And don't even get us started on Johnny Appleseed, who wandered the country strewing apple seeds and not at the bequest of the government either, the guy didn't even get a paycheck.  He just threw appleseeds wherever he went so that now there are apple trees everywhere, producing little green inedible apples or great big rotten apples that attract bees and how did he feed himself, the seed-tossing idiot?  He certainly didn't eat apples.  Or buy new shoes? 

These stories are great when you're a kid and are prepared to accept any lie you're fed, because you're a little moron.  Then you grow up to be a big suspicious moron like us and your bullshit detector goes off and you say, "Now wait a minute.  How big exactly was one of Paul Bunyan's bowel movements?"  And, "Did Babe the Blue Ox shit blue?"   

The Little Red Pony Condensed (We Read It So You Don't Have to)

Once there was a little red pony.  It died. The little boy who owned and loved the little red pony cried.  There was a great funeral, with the President of France in attendance.  He said, "Ze pony is dead, but I posthumously award him the Legion of Honor."  There were girls there too, bimbos from the nearby ranches.  There was some gratuitous flashing of breast.  Steinbeck, who is said to have written The Red Pony while shacked up in a whorehouse in New Mexico, famously ends the book with the lines, "And so the pony was dead, and yet there's nothing to hinder a heartbroken lad from doing some consolatory shagging." 

Twenty Lines

The Latvian gravedigger went home for lunch.  As he ate his sorrel soup he told his wife, "I am halfway finished with a grave."  She said, "Who died?"  He said, "Nobody."

He returned to the half-finished grave to find the Priest standing by it.  "Who died?" asked the Priest.  The gravedigger said, "Nobody."

That night, at the village dance, the gravedigger said to his friend over a glass of black balsam liquor, "I finished a grave today."  "Who died?" asked his friend.  "Nobody," said the gravedigger. 

The gravedigger's actions started talk all over the town.  "It's bad luck," said one old crone.  "It's a curse and a disgrace," said another.  "Where there is a grave, there will soon be a body," said a third.

The parish priest went to talk to the gravedigger.  He said, "The people are not happy.  Where there's an empty grave, they are afraid there will soon be a body to fill it."

"Superstition," said the gravedigger. 

"What if someone, crossing the cemetery while drunk, falls into it?"

"That would be convenient," said the gravedigger.

Ed Ruscha, Standard Oil Series

No guy can resist a painting of a gas station fire.  His wife could be standing across the gallery shouting, “Help, I’m choking!” and he’d be like, “In a minute, dear.  In a minute.” 

The Sexy Cripple

Marsha is one sexy woman but she uses a cane so I was hesistant to go out with her, because I'm a shallow person and don't want people thinking I had to settle for a cripple.  Not that she's a cripple per se, she merely walks with a limp and like I say needs a cane but boy is she hot.  But I bit the bullet and went out with her and she had a wicked wit and we were always laughing and after a while I forgot all about the cane and the limp, I swear to God.  It was like I didn't even notice them.  Except sometimes when we were meeting new people my insecurity would flare up and I'd think that they thought I couldn't do better than anybody who walks with a limp and needs a cane.  And she could sense this about me, and it pissed her off and she was always making scenes after we got home.  We fought like cats and dogs over her limp.  And I don't want you to think I have something against the handicapped despite the fact that I do have something against the handicapped, for instance you would never catch me dating a woman in a wheelchair.  I'm just too shallow to date somebody in a wheelchair, and would never be able to handle the people who looked at me and thought he had to settle for somebody in a wheelchair.  Although maybe they would think I was a saint, which I'm not, I'm a shallow bastard who would never in a million years date a woman in a wheelchair, no matter how beautiful she was.

Me, I'm not perfect either, I have a Pete Townsend nose and male pattern baldness though I shave my head so that's okay.  And I do my best by her, I hurl her onto the bed and ravage her.  And I don't complain when she whacks me on the ass with her cane when I say something insensistive, or when I interrupt her when she's listening to the handsome family's "Amelia Earhart vs. The Dancing Bear" which is her favorite song. 

If she wasn't crippled, would I love her more?  Of course I would.  No, I take that back.  Because there is in my heart a place of pity that makes me love her all the more, more than if she were perfect, which I suppose makes me a shallow person too. 

If she were laid out flat in bed and could only communicate with her eyes I would still love her, in my way, which is to say I wouldn't stay with her or not date other women but I would still love her in my shallow way, my infinitely shallow way.  I would visit her, and learn to communicate with her, but after a while I would probably stop visiting her and communicating her with my eyes, because I'm basically a bastard who needs a woman who can move even if she can't dance although she can dance, Martha can, in her fashion.  I wouldn't be able to handle watching her paint watercolors with her mouth, with the brush set in her teeth and everybody would say look how good they are and I would probably even buy one but I would put it in the closet, because how would she know if I hung it up or not? 

john currin, the cripple