UNREMITTING FAILURE

Our Demon Mom

Oh, we can't prove she's a demon.  But we have evidence.  True story: when she was just a little baby, our mom was left alone in a high chair in the kitchen.  All the adults, in the meantime, went into the livingroom.  After a while, they heard our mom laughing.  She was laughing louder than she'd ever laughed before.  Finally her mom, our grandmother, went out to the kitchen to see what she was going on about.  The entire kitchen was on fire.

She made the newspapers.  The headlines went something like, Laughing Baby Alerts Parents to Fire.  They made her sound like a hero.  We have our doubts about this scenario.  We've always suspected that she started the fire with her eyeballs, and then laughed at the thought of her mischief consuming the house.

Why nothing since? Well, either she lost the power of telekinesis, or she only practices it on birds in the backyard of our sister's house.  Our sister and her girlfriend are always finding charbroiled birds in the backyard.  Okay, so we made that part up.  And our mom probably isn't a demon.  But you should see the way she overcooks a pot roast.  No stove could do that.  She's doing it, and she's doing it with her eyes. 

The Year You Were Born, Does It Matter?

A story took place.  The year doesn't matter.  It's neither here nor there.  But the war was over, soldiers were still returning from overseas.  Donald never went overseas, he had a lazy eyes and flat feet.  A two-time loser.  Donald worked at the feed mill.  Ask him why and he'd say, "Your cow's gotta eat."  He drove a 1934 Chevrolet and wore a flat-brimmed cap.  Everybody wore hats then.  Hats were on top of everybody's minds.  They couldn't think through them.  Donald left work early, drove out to the river, and went fishing.  He caught a trout.  It was a big enough trout, but nothing to take a photograph of.  The year was 1947.  This is important. We said the year doesn't matter, but we were lying.  The year always matters.  The year you were born, does it matter?  Donald decided to stop in at the roadhouse for a few beers.  America had the atomic bomb, and Donald had a dollar to blow.  There was some Jap souvenirs up on the wall behind the bar.  Bartender said, "What you up to?"  Donald said, "Fishin'."  Bartender said, "Bitin'?"  It was afternoon in that roadhouse, and motes of dust were floating in the arches of light coming in through the windows.  Donald leaned his elbows on the bar and said, "I caught me a big one."  Bartender said, "How big's big?"  Donald said, "Big.  But nothing to take a photograph of." 

Twenty Lines

He fell in the street.  He got run over by a bus.  He was dead.  He got back up.  He went home.  Marge said, "Dwayne, you look dead." 

Dwayne said, "I am." 

Marge said, "This changes things between us."  

At the funeral home, in the coffin, Dwayne looked up at Marge and said, "Can we be adults about this?"

Marge said, "There's a gulf between us.  Soon to be replaced by earth."

Dwayne sulked through the funeral.  He couldn't pay attention to the things people said about him, he was so busy trying to come up with witty rejoinders to Marge's comments.  He looked at his watch.  Ordinarily, he'd just be getting off work.  He couldn't stop thinking about Marge, and her obstinate unwillingness to overlook the minor fact that he was dead. 

A little voice told him to look on the positive side.  Soon he would be in a better place.  He sat up in the coffin and said, "Marge, could I have a word?"  Marge, who was sobbing, stopped and said, "I don't think this is the time or place."   

Today Is the Day of Our Office Pizza Party

We won't be going.  Enforced conversation over pizza doesn't seem like a good time to us.  We have one coworker who starts every conversation with the words "I used to be a Marine," another who has a beard and wears sweaters that make him look like he just teleported in from a lobster boat in Maine, and another who hasn't spoken a word in 16 years.  Say something to her and she responds with an eerie giggle that makes you think she has a bunny rabbit boiling away in a pot on the stove at home.  We suspect it has something to do with the fact that most of us are editors, who are a poorly socialized lot on the whole, very withdrawn and prone to fantasies of taking high-powered rifles to rooftops and shooting innocent passersby.  We're not meant to collect in one place and have a good time.  We're meant to lean over solitary manuscripts, and then go home to our spouses/love dolls.  The silence at our office parties is deafening.  Everyone eats their pizza, and nervously eyes the person sitting next to them, and calculates in their head how much they're saving on lunch.  We'd sooner spend the money on lunch, and eat it alone at our desk, while silently calculating in our head how much money we just wasted on lunch. 

Virility

We worry about our virility.  After all, we're not six anymore.  So we do what we can.  Drink lots of ginseng, stockpile Cialis, start our morning with a heaping bowl of Honey Bunches of Onan.  This is what comes of getting old.  Hair starts to grow out of your ears, you find yourself browsing the senility aisle at the pharmacy, and your penis spends lots of time crying, "I've fallen and I can't get up!"

Actually, it's not that bad.  We haven't had no complaints from any of the imaginary women we've made love to lately. 

Still, you can see it all, over the horizon. 

Our problem is we don't see ourselves falling in love with women our own age.  We still like the younger models.  Who look at us and think, "Doddering."  This could lead to complications.  Now that we're sort of single again, we've aged out of our preferred market.  We've reached that point in life where the pursuit of younger women is perceived as creepy, or even worse, pathetic. 

Then again, we do pathetic well.  Some women even find it endearing.  These are generally the types of women who like to start fires. 

Twenty Lines (Excalibur for Beginners)

There is a sword in a stone.  How it got there, nobody knows.  Nobody can pull it out. 

There was a Frenchmen who arrived from France and guaranteed he could pull it out, but he couldn't pull it out. 

Nobody can pull it out. 

The town drunk swears he pulled it out and put it back in, in the middle of the night when there was no one around.  Unfortunately, he is unable to repeat his feat.

Gradually, people stop trying to pull it out, because it's futile.  It becomes yet another piece of horrible public sculpture. 

One day Gandalf from Lord of the Rings hears about the sword in the stone.  He goes to the place where it sits and tries in vain to pull it out.  Somebody says "No wonder you couldn't pull it out, you're from the wrong epic." 

A man from America comes.  He produces a gun and says, "Show me the trick, see."  People with their hands raised finally convince him there is no trick and he says, "No trick, savvy.  That ain't playin' square, see."

Meanwhile, King Arthur, who is not yet a king, has a crying jag.  The slipper, no matter how hard he tries, won't go on.  He wears a size nine and the slipper is a lady's size four, tops.  This peeves  him to no end, and he tears at his ball gown in impotent fury.   

Twenty Lines (Synopsis of the Latest Theodore Dreiser Novel)

He had clambake hair, a pooty-pooty mouth, and six fingers on his right hand.  He was a Libra baiter.  There was no room in his vocabulary for words.  When he met his fate, his fate, disgusted, kept on walking.  There is no perfect way to sum him up, except to say that he was an express train running from too little to too late.

He walked to the lake.  He didn't like the lake, it was too hairy.  A little train ran around the lake, to give little women with parasols a chance to air their cheekbones.  He hopped on board the train, sat down next to a little lady, and said how de do.

The year was 1892.  The World's Fair was coming to Chicago.   He intended to be there, to hawk his new elk-skin umbrella.  Rain started to fall, and the lake hair got wet.  He got off the train, walked to the nearest hashery, and ordered a plate of organ meats. 

He intended to go places, and he would happily drown cats to get there.  There was an ambition in him, an ambition as American as the exploding U.S.S. Maine.  He had tried cutting hair, peddling restorative potions containing laudanum, stocktrading, and selling subscriptions to ladies magazines.  But there was a sadness in him too.  He stood at night at the foot of a streetlight, wishing his life was being lived on the other side of one of the lit windows of the family houses running up and down the street.  He wanted a wife, it didn't matter whether she could further his career or not, to take out to the theater or strangle.  

Table of Contents of "Hitler's Bellbottoms"

1.  The Myth of the Wart

• Scratching It
• Its Dream Life
• How It Earns Its Pay

2. Trans-Cohesion in a Syncopated Time Zone

• Special Needs Unit
• Learning How to Stand Still While Moving
• The Horrors of Slurry in the Mouth

3. Species Color Coordination

• No No Nanette
• Mean Bean Syndrome
• Evolving Towards Pinstripes

4. A Case of Rolling Stones Tongue

• Bellbottoms in the Bunker
• Morally Bankrupt Lips and Tongue
• Savage Tonsils

5. Celebrating Your Inner Insides

• The Mauve Gall Bladder
• Hitler in the Boom-Boom Room
• On Any Given Day, Your Shadow Could Be Mistaken for Hitler's

Shaving

We're a very thorough shaver.  First we shave with downward strokes, then with upward strokes, then with sideways strokes, and then we go into a fit and just slash the razor across our face willy nilly, like the killer in a slasher flick.  It's a good day when we don't cut off the tip of our nose.  But we get a close shave, never mind all the bandages, especially in the region of our adam's apple.

We don't shave in front of a mirror, we shave in the shower with our eyes closed, because the sight of the razor makes us nervous. It's a real provocation, that one of the first things we do every morning is draw a sharp razor across our neck. Especially as seeing how the early morning is the worst part of the day for us, having just awakened to the fact that we're alive and sentient and have to go to work although going to work is an act of insanity.  It's not easy, being expected to do an insane thing five mornings a week so as to appear normal.  We should do the sane thing and stop going to work and face the consequences, which is that everybody would think we're insane. 

We're at work now, and counting the hours until we can go home, i.e., we're sane.  I.e., insane.  Our head itches for some reason.  Soon we'll eat a protein bar and drink a double shot of espresso and later we'll go to the gym, where we'll lift immense weights for no good reason.  Oddly enough, the pointlessness of the gym seems like the only sane thing we do all day, go figure.  Sometimes we work out at the same time as a guy named Steve Austin, which just happens to be the name of the TV character The Six-Million Dollar Man.  Steve's strong, six million dollars strong in fact, so he's a case of life imitating art.  You should see him throw those weights on that bar.  He can chest press three of us.  He has bandages on his shoulders and his elbows and even his hands, so the lifting is taking its toll.  Sometimes we compare bandages, his from lifting, ours from shaving.  We always win. 

 

Used Record Stores

People who buy vinyl annoy us.  We find them pretentious.  We want to hurt them emotionally, by saying something hurtful to them, but we can never think of anything.  This makes us mad.  They go to their used record stores and they buy their used vinyl and they go home and play said used vinyl on their record players, which went out with the Ford Pinto, and they are impervious to our feeble attempts at slander. 

We know a guy who paid about $25,000 for his record player, no shit.  Him we really want to hurt emotionally, but it's his money and if he wants to spend it on a record player, who are we to say boo?  But boy do we want to hurt his feelings.  It's the most amazing thing you've ever seen, his record player.  It has ancient-looking tubes, and a kind of string that supports the tone arm, and you get the idea.  We wish we had one just so we could pretend we were a spy behind German lines in WWII, because that's what it looks like.  The natural question is how good a sound quality can $25,000 buy you?  We've heard his record player, and we can't tell the difference.  But then again we're the type of person who can't tell the difference between a $10 bottle of wine and a $100 bottle of wine, so there.  The point is that we're a plebian.  We don't have discerning tastes.  Subtle differences are lost on us.  Which is another way of saying we're low class, which is a good thing, because it means we don't have to spend all kinds of crazy money to satisfy our ears or our nose or our eyes or our palate.  They'll happily take in the cheapest swill imaginable.  Cheap sound swill, cheap drink swill, cheap food swill, cheap TV swill.  We don't require clarity or definition or a good nose on our bottle of plonk, which we don't drink anyway.  We don't need HD.  We don't need a 4G phone.  All we need is love, which we're willing to pay up to $25 for a hooker.