Here’s How Marlon Brando Got His Beach Body Back. You’ll Never Believe What Happened Next.

so the weight of our top celebrities weighs heavily upon our overburdened minds. weighty thoughts, to be sure, especially when we can ill afford the extra baggage. so we do what we do, by which i mean we weight-shame them and weight-bait their failings. women come off worse than men, which is the case always and everywhere, but it’s never not negative for nobody.

it hasn’t been like this since time immemorial, because while weight is a fact, our perceptions of it are historically, socially, and culturally constructed.¹ the big were once beautiful, whereas today they’re shamed. except now there’s so much “big IS beautiful” stuff out there, featuring these beautiful people who would be acclaimed beautiful semper ubique et ab omnibus, that is meant to counteract that. the easiest think piece² to write is something dismantling the whole “fat is ugly” ideology that is now probably held only by angry thinspo types and catty old school fashion peopple. it’s easy; it’s shooting fish in a barrel; it’s troll-proof.

except as i’ve written elsewhere, those people still say “beautiful is beautiful,” whether it’s men or women or whatever. those people are all beautiful. the people we’re force-fed (!!!) are always beautiful. the media stream into which we each step but once requires beauty; the selfie allows us to approximate it, control it, perhaps even convey it. i am surrounded by beauty. “we live in a beautiful world,” sings the insufferable chris martin³, and i guess he’s as right as any other cliche-spewing stopped clock.

yet here’s the thing, because there’s always a thing. i can’t say “there’s always a thing,” much less proceed this slowly, in the shit that actually i’m paid to write⁴, but, ermahgerd, who would pay me to write anything at all?⁵ anyway, back to the thing at hand, which is still there, a 5,000-pound elephant in the room: we’re still saying “________ is beautiful.”

when in fact ugliness is a thing that’s possible, and as a possible thing it should be amenable to admiration, or at least admired more than it presently is, when it is at best merely tolerated and at worst pitied. in those dark ages when my father was playing pro football, he was a chiseled 220-pound adonis; by the time he died, he had transmogrified into 300+ pounds of sheer bearded weird. his sister went from homecoming queen to a doppleganger of the mother from “what’s eating gilbert grape.” while not entirely conscious strategies, they were, i contend, their ultimate (i.e., final, last) strategies for surviving a world that does not give two shits about us. because it doesn’t, you know? not for the beautiful, big or otherwise, and certainly not for the unlucky ones who aren’t even that.

so the transformation of marlon brando or orson welles from what they were to what they became, has-been actor/directors now too big to fail or succeed, warrants attention not for what was lost but for what happened. neither pursued a course of steroids or radical plastic surgery or the like as a way of recapturing lost youth already captured on film. they just became something else, like linda ronstadt, like faye dunaway, like kathleen turner. yet of course it’s harder for women, which is the case always and everywhere, so it was worse for those three, but in some ways it was maybe the worst of all for welles and brando because so much–everything!–was expected of them.

but is any celebrity ever ugly? asks the voice in my head that accompanies me always and everywhere⁶. the voice is insistent: brah, your argument here is failing because it’s weak, it’s nonexistent. they’d never run it under a clickbait headline, whoever “they” are. or maybe it’s just that anyone who announces himself or herself, who speaks to me in any way that resonates, isn’t beautiful or ugly, but simply and truly is, and that is can change, at least sometimes…and who are we to contemn those changes, and who are we to contemn staying the same?⁷

i wish i could be more certain or get angrier about matters like this. if my anger were raw and unpolished, i might have a noble purpose: an enemy to be overcome, a foe to vanquish, a wyvern/wereboar/owlbear to slay. but i have nothing besides time and money, with less of both each day, and eventually i’ll become something else, perhaps even the mother in “what’s eating gilbert grape,” and you’ll only know me as that or nothing at all.

–rory calhoun

1. quick aside: i was in this bullshit graduate seminar, which i suppose could’ve been any one of them except for the good ones, and somebody said race was historically constructed (true) and then a bunch of other people chimed in to say that she needed to add that it was “culturally” and “socially” constructed. so whenever i write that something is historically constructed, i tack on those other words too, because why the fuck not? #yolo
2. think pieces used to be called “opinion pieces” til we just collectively stopped using that term because it’s so web 1.0. frank rich, that old SOB, wrote opinion pieces; me, i write think pieces, hot takes, instant responses, five seconds in heaven. srsly brah DO U EVEN LIFT?
3. he also manages to rhyme “bones” first with “stones” and then with “homes” because why the hell not.
4. “paid to write” is pushing it. i’m paid to write the words that go underneath headlines. these words, after being dispatched from my laptop’s lips to god’s ears, are thereafter edited into near-oblivion. based on these headlines, people send me h8 mail, most of it homophobic, either because they assume i’m gay (in which i case i direct them to gore vidal’s multifarious remarks on the subject) or because there’s something seriously wrong with them.
5. e.g., https://youtu.be/FArZxLj6DLk?t=1m10s
6. the truest friend i’ve ever had, a regular old yeller, etc.
7. and who are we to contemn this repeated use of an archaic verb like “contemn?”

Meower Power

If you look at the cats around us, I mean really look at them, you’ll see life as it is meant to be lived. A species as inscrutable as it is ineradicable¹, the cat requires little and demands nothing. It kills and kills² and kills for the same reason that anything happens; viz., because. Killing isn’t the only thing a cat does–it’s everything. And yet that everything isn’t much of anything because the cat merely is, free of the bonds of animal society and whisker-sensing its way through a senseless world of predators³ and prey.⁴

“The wildest of all wild animals was the Cat,” wrote Kipling. “He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.” That just-so story was one of my father’s favorites, and by the bitter end he had fashioned a quasi-religion out of his lifelong study of cats and dogs. Because his own father had been such a rotten bastard, during his formative years he had seized upon some enormous neighborhood tom and named it “papa.” Everything he needed to know about life, everything his own father had failed to teach him, could be learned from observing this cat.

Of course, that everything was just one thing, in fact the only thing: him or me. Because the old tom, which enjoyed eating scraps of rancid food from my father’s hands, ultimately didn’t give a shit about him or anyone else. It bore a hundred scars from a hundred fights and would fight a hundred more before it shuffled off this mortal coil. And why not? “We still shall fight,” declared the jurist O.W. Holmes, Jr., “all of us because we want to live, some, at least, because we want to realize our spontaneity and prove our powers, for the joy of it, and we may leave to the unknown the supposed final valuation of that which in any event has value to us.”

Once upon a time, I worked a lousy service industry job and began saving money to purchase a personal computer. “Give me the money,” said my father. “You don’t need to open a bank account. Once you get about two grand together, we’ll buy the computer.” By then my father had fallen on hard times, but I always expected the best from him, and expecting that was precisely what he expected.

He took the $2,000 and did what any good father would do: he pocketed it, opened a line of credit using my social security number, bought a computer with that credit, and then never made a single payment. I got the computer, which wasn’t a particularly good computer⁵, and I also got to experience the thrill of entering my twenties with ruined credit.

But I never held it against my father, for the same reason I don’t hold it against the cats, ferocious killers of the desert bandicoot they may be. In both cases, this was all they could do because it was the only thing they could do. Were I reduced in size, Richard Matheson-style, to the point at which my beloved house cats could realistically hope to make a meal out of me, what would stay their claws? Certainly not the enslavement of domestication that binds our dogs to us. Nor any inward-dwelling feelings of love, because what is love of another thing to a cat that “walks by his wild lone?”

So yes, my father scammed me again and again, and on those occasions when I confronted him about it–those occasions when we came to blows over it, and he invariably prevailed with some kind of sucker punch–it just was what it was, that lesson he had learned decades earlier: him or me. “If it came down to you or me,” he once told me, “I hope to hell that you’d want it to be you, because that’s how the game is played.”

A cat understands this because that’s all a cat can understand. It plays no favorites, and its gameplay is indistinguishable from its predation. It will bide its time for as long as it takes, because what is time to a creature that needs nothing and no one? Him or me, the cat is thinking, and so am I.

1. I mean, look what’s going on in Australia, for cryin’ out loud: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/10/22/australia-cull-feral-cats/74376614/
2. Guess you should have evolved a little faster, lesser bilby and desert bandicoot! Westward the course of empire takes it way, amiright or amiright?
3. Things larger than the cat.
4. Things smaller than the cat.
5. It was plagued by power supply and fan issues.

–Jim “Garfield” Davis

Some Sex Scenes I’ve Written

Sex scenes, particularly those composed by hetero American-white cismales, are just this side of unbearable, which is why I’m glad nothing of the sort plagues the fiction of Flannery O'Connor¹.

But, much as you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, you can’t write literary fiction without including this bullshit.² For reasons that continue to escape me, people³ want to read about relationships that culminate in sex, as if the former weren’t bad enough on their own.

I mentioned O'Connor because she wrote dialogue that rendered people as they are, not as we wish they were. Conversations are stilted and awkward, characters quite obviously ignore what other characters are saying…this, to me, is the essence of human communication. “Only connect,” urges Forster, but life, like Craigslist, is all about missed connections.

Whenever sex happens in fiction, no matter the genders of the characters or the type of relations they’re about to have, I can’t shake the fact that I’m witnessing a bit of just-so wish fulfillment. To me, the truth of sex is the emptiness experienced moments after its conclusion. You know what I mean: the lonesome spell when you realize your fondest hopes of self-gratification through other-directedness yielded the same result as surreptiously stimulating your genitals with the spine of a textbook while your fellow second graders focused on sadness, ennui, and good old-fashioned intra-class hatred.

Even so, I need to make sure I have some steamy sequences on hand for My Big Commercial Sell-Out Project™ (date and advance TBA). Here goes:

The Two of Them “Hey, what’s up?” “Not much, what’s up with you?” “Just hanging in, what’s up with you?” “Not much, like I said. Anyway…” “Yeah, I feel you.” “I’ve got about twenty minutes.” “Cool, I need to run in fifteen.” And then they had sex.

For Better or Worse The couple lived in a small apartment and they both worked jobs of some kind. Neither job was satisfactory but it was just for now, right? We’ve all been there. Anyway, it was around 11:30 p.m. one weekend night when they just bumped up against each other on the not-quite-queen mattress and box springs they shared. Something led to something else and by 11:36 p.m. they were both in the cramped master bathroom, cleaning up.

Long-Distance Love They had met (virtually, at least) on a sex site and exchanged dirty texts and e-mails for a few months. They fancied themselves kinky and open-minded but this was pure fantasy; in truth, they were both vanilla and desperately in search of the “traditional picket fence thing,” as they called it. Eventually they got a hotel room–the richer of the two paid for it–and the sex they attempted to have just didn’t do it for either one. They left it at that, and so will I.

Five Shades of Beige The commuter obsessed over the latest bit of safe, socially-sanctioned erotica that had hit the shelves, reading the various books in the series in especially conspicuous places. Perhaps a kindred spirit will see me reading this and strike up a conversation, thought the commuter. Eventually a kindred spirit did precisely that, only it was a bedraggled and altogether worse-for-wear old person who received the cold shoulder. The old person, who was actually a somewhat famous professor, was deeply wounded by the snub.

Polyamory They had a polyamorous family, which is a very good idea in theory. Depending on the month, there were either seven or eight of them, none of whom were ever attracted to the other. To compensate for this lack of attraction, they passed the time by writing arguments in favor of polyamory, few of which ever mentioned sex. The benefits were obvious and manifold: polyamory could destroy patriarchy, ease the environmental burden imposed by single-family living, improve child-rearing, and so forth. It couldn’t get any of them off, though, which in this one respect made it precisely like monogamy.

1. Enoch Emery’s fursuiting aside, I suppose.
2. Fellow Pennsylvanian John Updike is the king of the genre, having won a lifetime achievement award for his belabored blowjobs and (at-least-in-retrospect) exceedingly misogynistic male-female couplings: https://literaryreview.co.uk/call-me-sukie
3. My beloved mother et al.

–zac efron jr.

Against Grading

“You talk to me about grades. Grades are bullshit, son. What the fuck does an A mean? A B-plus? BS, SOL, NFL, WD40, who cares. Show me an A human, a B human, whatever. I never read a book in my life and I’m still sucking wind.” –my father, 2013

When I’m around friends and colleagues, the talk inevitably turns to matters of merit: high-powered new jobs, prestigious fellowships, and publications in elite journals and university presses. Even among those pursuing the disinterested “life of the mind,” everything and everyone is ranked and sorted, with the cream rising to the top.

As someone who has spent many years studying education reform measures, I find such talk unsettling. The point, it always seemed to me, was to change the world, not to weigh and measure it via reified standards that otherwise bear no relation to objective reality. But my friends can’t help themselves, and sometimes neither can I: we’ve risen in this pretend meritocracy thanks to our good grades and test scores, and we perpetuate its existence through our praise and criticism.¹

It’s a truism among libertarians and conservatives that increased public education spending will not yield improved student outcomes. The principal metric for judging “success” in this regard is a school’s aggregate performance on various end-of-grade examinations. Criteria that are not as amenable to measurement, such as student comfort in better-furnished schools, are less worthy of consideration.

However, even those on the left and center-left advocate at least some testing. Barack Obama, for example, recently supported a pledge from a group of school administrators to reduce “unnecessary testing and test preparation". So then: how much testing is necessary?

My answer, informed by a decade of teaching and research, is that none of it is. Testing–end-of grade exams, intelligence tests, college boards, graduate school entrance examinations, professional certifications–is one of the mechanisms by which an inegalitarian status quo is maintained. “Inegalitarian society,” observed Jacques Rancière in Hatred of Democracy, “can only function thanks to a multitude of egalitarian relations.”

And so all of these indicators of quality assume career-defining significance. End-of-grade tests tell education experts whether the poor are competent to enter polite society. Scores on college admissions examinations determine the fate of middle-class students who cannot depend on “legacy” privileges at elite universities. Scholarships and fellowships serve as badges of distinction for graduate students seeking elusive tenure-track appointments. At each stage along life’s way, grades and scores separate wheat from chaff, worthy from unworthy, us from them. Most importantly, such honors are assumed to be equally open to all, and obtainable through a combination of innate potential fused with assiduous labor: “If you’ve got what it takes, we’ll take what you got.”

I have always loathed this process, but I followed it through to its logical conclusion. I sought the highest marks on all of my exams, and took some measure of pride in achieving them. When I worked for Kaplan, I taught test-taking strategies to the affluent and semi-affluent in order to improve their scores. I earned extra money by tutoring law students preparing to take the Multistate Bar Examination. However, and much to my surprise, my dissertation advisor disdained the idea of punishing the students with oppressive grading standards and let me do as I pleased during my time as his teaching assistant. His attitude was refreshing: our roles as educators were compromised if we allowed ourselves to be dragged into lengthy debates about whether some student’s half-assed in-class essay deserved a C+ instead of a C-.

After I became a professor, I began to distance myself even further from this performance-driven model. I wrote and spoke openly about my willingness to give high grades to students already disadvantaged by the high costs and impersonal character of university education. My students would spend the rest of their lives being humiliated, scorned, and dehumanized by their superiors; why should I, tasked with developing their interest in a particular subject, contribute to this cycle of discouragement? Grades, it seemed to me, were less about saying “this student is prepared for the next step” and more about telling employers and graduate programs that “this student can be used with certain assurances that due diligence has been done in hiring or accepting him, as evidenced by his grades”–and I wanted no parts of that.

Soon after my article about grade inflation appeared in The Atlantic, I realized that the entire notion of academic and professional merit had to be jettisoned: simply giving As to students wouldn’t do. The response to my essay was swift and furious, as a multitude of well-meaning educators wrote to tell me that I was lowering standards, coarsening discourse, and otherwise contributing to the breakdown of western civilization as we knew it.² These commenters, many of whom rose to whatever positions they occupied by stockpiling merit, remained curiously unaware of their own personal stakes in this drama.

Arguing against well-established conventions such as tipping and charity is akin to tilting at windmills; critics will quickly adjudge you to be cruel or deluded for asking them to take a second look at mechanisms that undergird capitalist society.³ But the existence of academic merit, which perpetuates an inegalitarian hierarchy in the midst of the “level playing field” to which so many express fealty, is pernicious–particularly since it is defended by almost everyone who has experienced some measure of success through acceptance of the status quo. In other words, merit may be among the most difficult privileges to check: If Distinguished Professor Ruggleteapot earned his bones by writing award-winning books and securing thousands in grant money, surely anyone can; you’re just not trying hard enough, young fellow!⁴

Students entering public school find themselves at the beginning of a long process during which their value will remain forever in question. At each stage, bad marks or an insufficient list of honors could lead to them being discarded, capitalist debris left behind as the storm we call progress blows their high-achieving peers into an ever more competitive future. The solution, as I see it, is not to transform everyone into a Rhodes Scholar or Phi Beta Kappa; rather, it is to abandon the fixed idea of a meritocracy to which these eager beaver high achievers have devoted their lives. Instead of ranking one another by various orders of accomplishment, we must stop testing and grading so that we can advance together as learners invested in a common enterprise.⁵

–l. ron hubbard jr.

1. “He naturally despised the club that *did* take him,” wrote that stiff old fuddy-duddy John Galsworthy. Like srsly bro, if you earned good marks, you also know how they meaningless they are. If *we* could do it, then surely anyone with similar preparation and cultural capital could do likewise, so yay for our towering intellectual accomplishments. “You’re genius,” to quote the peg game played at Cracker Barrels all around the US of A.
2. I’d like to believe the Snuggie, the Ionic Breeze, and the menu at Burger King have done far more damage in this regard. Not to mention the rampant racism, sexism, and wealth inequality. Not to mention that at all.
3. Like, uh, dudebro, I mean…we live in the world, y'know. That’s just how it is. Accept it. Grow up. You’ll understand when you get older. For serious; you will. I’m not just whistling dixie. It’s a jungle out there and so forth. The best we can do is hunker down and try to bear up against the unbearable. Then we’re dead and it’s lights out, amiright? Eternal rest. Peace out yo.
4. Helpless grad students, stuck playing this not-so-great game, learn to internalize that bullshit. Many respond by lying about how hard they’re working and procrasturbating round the clock, slowly ticking away the lonely hours–this as each year lost to lamentable lucubrations leads the learner further into limbo [editor’s note: jesus christ that sentence]. Ah, academia: where the egos are huge and the stakes are minuscule.
5. Well, that or we can scrap the lecture, shitcan most of the faculty, and just force all non-genius students into wretched online classes where, once the FAFSA money clears, the “educators” can pretend they’re educating and the “students” can pretend they’re learning. At the end of the day, some people will get meaningless pieces of paper that entitle them to nothing in particular. What a future, huh? I can’t wait, true believers!

Origen Story

And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.

His disciples say unto him, If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry.

But he said unto them, All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given.

For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it. Matthew 19:9-12

While Origen was conducting catechetical instruction at Alexandria, a deed was done by him which evidenced an immature and youthful mind, but at the same time gave the highest proof of faith and continence. For he took the words, There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake, Matthew 19:12 in too literal and extreme a sense. And in order to fulfill the Saviour’s word, and at the same time to take away from the unbelievers all opportunity for scandal,— for, although young, he met for the study of divine things with women as well as men,— he carried out in action the word of the Saviour. Eusebius, Church History, Book VI

Once upon a time, o boys and girls, I was alleged to have done a thing, a thing which made me neither boy nor girl. It was, you know, a difficult decision, reached during the same process of ratiocination that yielded my Commentary on Matthew.

The heart filament of the teachings in Matthew–how else should I put it but that, “heart filament?”–is oneness. Not twoness, not threeness, not fourness. In spite of that, human imperfection necessitates a “coming-together” of unfinished beings, the pairing motivated by impulses we can neither totally understand nor completely control.

The flawed twoness of the human condition was overcome only by the One, which in its essential glory (i.e., in the glory of its essence) produced One from One. Mary, whose seed grew without germination, was only half, and what she unbegot was, in its corporeal form, merely the other half, though elsewise and abstractly it was One. Get it? Got it? Good.

But at least that transaction was pure, as distinguished from every other terrestrial encounter, which always amounts to a kind of rape. Between woman and man, man and man, woman and woman, adult and child, animal and human–what else could it be but rape, which presupposes inequality, an imbalance, one entity wanting or needing it more than another?

In the marketplace, the assembly, the flat fields with grain as far as the eye can see: what is every interaction but a rape? When there are two, one takes from the other. One wants it more; the other less–and so when there are two, one loses and the other wins. One enforces his or her will; the other is forced and submits.

To be a teacher, which I had long dreamed of becoming, I believed that twoness was a liability. Duality implied desire; “it is not good to marry” even as “all men cannot receive this saying.”

The world I knew, which is a world you feckless postmoderns must study through a mirror darkly, was a world of men. Women were acted upon; women were never safe. To act upon a woman–Lucretia, Helen, Europa–was ipso facto to rape, for it could not be otherwise. “Action” in every circumstance was rape, and “inaction” was not-rape…but, as the teacher noted, not all men could understand this.

The world you know, a world in which I’m dead, is still the same, albeit with some cosmetic distinctions: air conditioning, parking lots, chili dogs, Pierce Brosnan as James Bond in Tomorrow Never Dies. It remains a raping society, in which men, overcome by concupiscence and stupefied by thousands of years of abhorrent cultural conditioning, rape women and other men.

I could not overcome my twoness, so I abandoned it. I castrated myself with a gelding knife and brought a swift end to the ordeal. In so acting, I opened myself to the sort of criticism that attaches to anyone who seeks an alternate course, who abandons the status quo to those hardy unfortunates still willing to thrash around in it.¹

My act, like every human act, was a failure: from two, I became none. But my noneness was better than everyone else’s self-aggrandizing something-ness. Even in your world, which dreams of brute equality between & among twoness/threeness/fourness², you cannot escape the fact that some have more of a particular aggressive quality, while others have less. You might make your rape more civilized, but your new gender derivations categorized as “more masculine than not” (whatever that means) are still just euphemisms for “rapist,” some worse than others, still halves trying to enforce their wholeness on the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

Alas, my noneness, achieved at the tips of a double-pronged blade³, did not remove me from the ranks of those who act and those who are acted upon. I waged intellectual battles against my rivals, suffered abuses at the hands of foes both past and present, and inflicted the innumerable hurts no living being can avoid.

The dream, or at least my dream, was to complete my work and then die. It was a thoroughly practical dream, and I achieved it. Heaven beckoned.

Thereupon I discovered that the concept of heaven, about which I had written and lectured extensively, most directly comports with the description provided by modern theologian David Byrne: “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” “It’s hard to imagine,” Byrne continues, “that nothing at all could be so exciting, could be so much fun.” Believe the conventional wisdom: nothing lasts forever, and it is what is.

Enough about me; I am no longer anybody. You are still here, still a part of this ugliness, though maybe not for much longer. It will never make sense, all that hating and killing you’ve done, but at least it will be over.

1. e.g., the Desert Fathers, those silly fakirs, rolling on the dirt floors of their caves and hermit-holes to stave off the onset of a nocturnal emission. What heroes they were, what athletes for the One! But in their madness, certainly no more divinely inspired than my own, they merely reaffirmed the endless, exquisite torture posed by desire. Desiring beings can either damage others or torture themselves; there is no way out.
2. Owing to your generation’s expanded field of vision, you have recognized that there are many possible pair-combinations, many more classifications of human, an infinite set of classifications even…but it seems to me that these classifications are still insufficient on account of their over-reliance on that humanity, of their reveling in it. Are they not?
3. A not entirely pleasant experience for those who have undergone the process. To be blunt–yours is a franker time than mine–a eunuch tends to accumulate smegma and other debris at a higher rate than those who are still “functional.” Eunuchs do not often fully extrude the penis, thereby causing that waste matter to accumulate in the folds of skin. I leave a more detailed discussion of this matter to your natural scientists.

–orwen elvenborn

What Do These Mean?

Most Likely to Get Voted Off the Island

I think of myself as the person Most Likely to Get Voted Off the Island whenever I am at any social function. This is because I’m a conversational dud, and my face doesn’t give anything away either. I don’t have “a warm smile” or “kind eyes.” I’m like a one-way mirror – you know someone creepy is on the other side, but all you can see is yourself.

You would think I would compensate by doing tasks – chopping toppings for the pizzas, volunteering to be on the decorating committee, setting up the A/V equipment. But I don’t really want to do these things, and I don’t have to, so I don’t. I go off and read instead. Or, I go off intending to read, but I dick around and play little games in my head instead. The games are more interesting to me than most people are.

There was an autistic boy at the last social gathering I went to, a wedding and he was part of the family. He asked people blunt things, and only talked about what interested him (mostly airplanes). I saw him on the way to breakfast and said “good morning” but he said nothing back. He just kept walking alone in the tall grass that was wet with the morning dew.

Yellow Rose and Pie Tins

I was already running late to work when I had to stop behind the school bus that always stops to pick up the little handicapped girl. I’ve been stopped behind this bus before, and it’s always a tedious process – the bus stops, opens a big wide door, slowly lowers this ramp, one of the girl’s parents wheels her onto it, itslowly lifts her up. Long lines of cars form on either side of the street but no one dares to honk to tell them to hurry it up.

This morning as it was happening, I looked around for things to make me less bored. In a front yard a single yellow rose was growing, and aluminum pie tins were hanging over planted things, I don’t know why. The tins kind of made it look like a crazy person lived there.

All of us thought, again, how sad it was that the little girl was handicapped.

I waited as patiently as I could, but then it seemed as if the bus driver was being extravagantly leisurely, just because he or she could get away with it and nobody would dare to honk. I inched forward conspicuously, as if to say, “Let’s get this show on the road!”, the next best thing to honking, and part of me felt bad for doing this but most of me was already thinking about other things.

What do these mean?

A guy on my crowded Metro train pointed at my tote bag with all the buttons pinned to it and said, “What do all these mean?”

It had been a rough morning. I had not put on my make-up – my “face” – yet. I had sort of been glowering all morning, nursing all my petty hurts and cosmic injustices. I was not prepared to engage with anyone. Plus, again, it was a crowded train, and I felt self-conscious. So I chose the shortest answer possible.

“Musicians” was the word that came from my throat, thick with disuse.

“Classical?” he asked, even though it was clearly Björk on most of the buttons.

The guy looked kind of like David Foster Wallace, who is a writer I like. His brown eyes were genuinely curious. Why? Because he’s one of those people who “wants to know everyone’s story”? The buttons weren’t that awesome. Surely it wasn’t because I looked “hot,” sitting there with no face on yet, frowning down into my book.

“Alternative rock” I said without elaboration, and looked down again, as if he had said something harassing, ostentatiously ignoring him and shutting the door to more questions. Out of my peripheral vision I looked at the pattern of manufactured rips on his black jeans.

I hunched my shoulders stiffly, almost like I had some sort of problem. I prayed he would get off at the next stop and he did.

If I’d had some wine in me, I would have told him about the Björk exhibit I saw at MoMA in New York City with my sister, how I was glad I went but it was ultimately disappointing. I would have told him that one of the buttons was from a showing of “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” at this cool moviehouse where they give you props and sometimes have themed menus to go along with the show; I could have recommended the place in case he’d never been there. I would have told him that one of the buttons was from my sister-in-law’s play at the Capital Fringe Festival, and another was from a Harry Potter party, for which I took an online quiz that determined I am a Hufflepuff.

I never feel “ready” to interact with anyone. I’m pacing in the wings, rehearsing my lines, fiddling with my ill-fitting costume. Sometimes the director calls me in cold, and I stand there blank as a stranger. The real show will happen sometime but not right now.

Certain topics

They tell you not to write about certain topics if you want to be a “cool” writer. Love, for instance. They tell you love is a subject for smaller minds. Love is treacly and mushy, gaudy valentines with gold-foil Cupids playing trumpets on a heart-shaped doily.

Self-pity, too. Too many people want to play a tiny violin, to share their “sob story” about that time they loved with the purest of heart but were rejected or betrayed.

Sure enough, these are the things I think about when I listen to certain music that could be cynically described as manipulative – the kind of stuff people use for movie scores, to make you cry.

I drive in my car and listen to this music, and it makes me think about the time I packed up my things and drove out to California for a boy who ultimately did not want me (except for sex), and how much I loved him, and I cry and it feels profound but I could never write about it.

–Christie Chapman 4 Life

Small Talk

You know what I l-u-v? Small talk. It’s my fave. By which I mean it’s not, because I’m a feckless Linklaterian Gen X-going on-millenial Slacker and can never be anything but insincere or sarcastic when I’m sharing my deepest thoughts with the world.¹

But I have this big, stupid face, on which resides a permanent insipid All-American rube’s grin, and that means people want to talk to me about pets, (grand)kids, the weather, and so on. I want desperately to chat about real stuff, anything that would help pull me out of the ocean sea in which I’m drowning DiCaprio-in-Titanic style, but that’s never on the prix fixe menu.

So I’m writing this entry, which isn’t a piece of low/high art like all the other sophomoric garbage on this site, as a vade mecum for intrepid sorts wishing to converse with me about the non-topics of the day.

Let’s take it from the top, shall we?

The Weather: Yep, it sure is either hot or cold. This is either unexpected or it isn’t. It reminds me of this other time we had the weather. I liked that weather. I disliked some other weather. We don’t have weather like we used to because the weather’s always changing now. So is everything else. Seems to me the only constant is change, ha ha ha.

Your kids: Wow, that thing your kids or grandkids did is definitely a thing that kids or grandkids can sometimes do. In spite of that, it’s really awesome that these people you’re related to have done it, even if it’s banal as walking or spitting out a couple incoherent phrases. Also, it looks like they’re getting very tall/big, even if they’re small for their age, and they grow up so fast, even if they’re immature pieces of crap whom I know you secretly detest. Anyway, this was certainly something we talked about, and both of us will likely remember having done so for however many minutes it takes to load up spider solitaire and get back to the serious business at hand (pun intended, ha ha ha).

My private life/health: Well, you know how things on the home front can go. One week they’re up, and the next week they’re down. I have good days and bad days, but as long as the good ones outnumber the bad, what more can you ask for? As for these other, more probing queries of yours, I’m afraid I can’t say anything but “it is what it is” and hope you’ll make of that what you will (or won’t; hell, I’m not the boss of you). I also want to thank you for shaking my hand and then telling me about this difficult-to-shake cold you’ve got. It was downright neighborly of you to infect me as quickly as possible so that I can focus my future efforts on healing, recovery, and infecting other co-workers. Oh, and I’m sorry to hear that your 99-year-old parent passed away. What a tragedy. Only the good die young, amiright? Billy Joel undoubtedly thought so, ha ha ha. I referenced “Only the Good Die Young” by Billy Joel because that’s a popular song and both of us are likely to remember its chorus, which contained the words “only the good die young.”

Pets: Ah, my pets. What can we say? Our pets are our babies, and they’re so much like us. They do the strangest things, especially when they’re sitting like people. I saw the pictures of your pets that you posted on Instagram/Facebook/Twitter/YikYak. They were swell and I’m sure I either liked them or thought about liking them. No matter what I did, I almost assuredly knew they were there, and that’s what matters, insofar as anything about this particular topic matters even a teensy weensy bit.

Romance: Hey, you know what they say about men/women–can’t live with ‘em and can’t live without 'em. I’m doing one of those two as we speak, and I can assure you that I harbor the same mild disgust for the selection I’ve made as every other human on this wretched planet. If I have a wife/husband, here’s where I’d refer to her/him as “the ol’ ball and chain.” Please feel free to do likewise, perhaps heaving an exasperated sigh in the manner of an overdramatic, put-upon paterfamilias from a 1980s sitcom. I definitely know the feeling. I mean, I definitely know a feeling, and maybe it’s the same one you definitely know. Or even if it isn’t, let’s pretend it is and then get back to staring at our computer screens or the water cooler or whatever we were doing when the cruel hand of fate caused our paths to intersect.

Our city: Have you gone to that trendy new restaurant in the part of town that used to have poor people but now only has awful ones? I probably had a good meal there a couple weeks ago, by which I mean I’m not willing to endure the intense social pressure that would be brought to bear on me if I characterized that twee, overpriced suckfest as one of the worst aspects of consumerist bloat–“affluenza,” if you will–afflicting our late capitalist era. Anyway, that part of town sure is different than it once was. Pretty soon nobody will go there because it’s too crowded.

In conclusion: Hey, it’s been nice talking to you. Nice enough, anyway. We should do this again sometime, by which I mean you should refer to this script whenever you feel the urge to communicate with me. I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading it just as much as I enjoyed writing it.

1. Not that I’ve ever shared anything resembling a coherent or meaningful thought with my peers…unless, that is, you’re willing to be extra charitable and give me credit for all those bullshit assessments of the careers of ex-pro athletes I write because because because.

–ol mencken

Against Labor Day

prepare yo’ self, ‘cause september 7, 2015 is coming whether you like it or not. with it will come a bunch of jpegs and .gifs and other bullshittery on social media, all of which will serve to remind you of the noble contributions of the valiant pullman strikers et al. who forced tubby, soft-handed¹ draft dodger grover cleveland to sign legislation creating the holiday. yay for labor and yay for just resting, knowumsayin?

i mean, i’m a lazy piece of garbage just like everybody else, so rest means a lot to me. it’s everything to me, really, because it’s the time that i, a lazy, entitled piece of garbage millenial (too lazy to pick up my pieces of garbage lol lmfao roflmao roflmaocoptersaurus rex), sit around thinking deep thoughts: JUST WHAT DO SELFIES MEAN? HOW MUCH HAS [INSERT UBERCELEBRITY DU JOUR] CHANGED OUR CONCEPTION OF THE COGITO? IS THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY DEAD?²

so yeah, i’m restful and wasteful. unlike andrew marvell, i never hear time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; instead, i’m just left thinking and thinking 'til there’s nothing i ain’t thunk, breathing in the stink 'til finally i stunk.³ and what good is that, huh? the worst thing a person can achieve, particularly in an era in which he is utterly powerless to alter his fate, is a sense of self-awareness, leading inevitably to an inflated sense of self-importance. i matter, i deserve better than this! you raise your consciousness only to lower it by squandering lonely hours gazing at a shiny, irrestible iPhone 8, the one with the texturon™ screen that bores a hole right into the heart filament of your being.

it’s too late to go back, of course: we’re all well and truly fucked, prisoners of an endless cycle of self-reconstruction⁴…which is why, on labor day, we should pause and think how it could’ve been different. we could’ve still been fending for ourselves in the forest or chained to the workhouse table, our bodies breaking and our lives slowly ebbing away, but without a second thought.⁵ without a first thought, even: we would accept death because it was the only conceivable end. now, when you’ve got a bit of leisure, “time for your self,” don’t you want to keep accumulating more of it? a few more hours, days, months, pretty pretty please? for us, death isn’t the end, because the end is leisure. death is just failure.

you’d rot away by 40-45, unhealed by antibiotics and unsaved by a social safety net, but in the end you’d be doing a public service because the best thing you or i or anybody else can do is to shuffle off this mortal coil without raising a big fuss about it. labor that culminates in death rather in leisure is not a tragedy; no, it is life itself, the unobserved life, which perhaps isn’t the best life but how would you know the difference?

1. according to the accounts of various 19th century baseballers who met him, that is. former white house press secretary dana perino’s description of modern washington dc manhood is also enlightening: “I remember thinking that there just weren’t that many men I was interested in around Washington. Most of the guys didn’t look like they’d ever worked outside a day in their lives — soft hands, limp handshakes, pale skin, and pudgy middles.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2015/04/07/dana-perino-explains-why-guys-in-washington-are-undateable/)
2. lawlz
3. i’ve fulfilled my dream, admittedly a small and unimportant dream, of mashing up “to his coy mistress” with this: http://genius.com/Violent-femmes-country-death-song-lyrics
4. what could be more navel-gazing, more gross (in the abstract, anyway) than the idea of therapy? the notion that YOU matter so much that some service worker has to help YOU sort out all of your shit, which is the same shit everybody else is dealing with, meaning truly awful shit but also meaning just life, because life is awful, who cares? plus, uh, your life? get real. life is ten million times worse for those truly unfortunate people who aren’t in that air-conditioned manse you call your home away from home.
5. instead of “pumping iron,” a vain and futile pursuit, i could be stacking hay bales or pulling a plow or some such thing.

–oman buckwild

bye bye tim tebow, we hardly knew you

“When I was young, I felt the tide of aspirations undefiled. But manhood’s years have wronged the pride my parents centered in their child.”

well alright alright, that was then and this is now. now is when you realize: the people no longer love you, by which i mean the decisionmakers, the money men, the folks who truly matter in this sorry world of ours. your dream was to play in the nfl, the BIG TIME so to speak, because that’s what you were meant to do. destiny, amiright?

but now it’s done. a final cut, the unkindest cut. you’ve prepared, though: you’ve performed circumcisions, or so the public record says. cut after cut. where did all that holy prepuce go?

you had some abilities; i had some abilities. yours were worth more than mine, of course, because everybody loves a baller and far fewer people care about a recaller. we both have backup plans, except (again) yours are worth more than mine. you can deliver the sports news and i can deliver the mail. in both cases we’ll be able to (required to?) maintain excellent tans.

maybe you or i will make a comeback. the fans love a comeback. your whole career was a comeback–you even had to come back from winning the heisman. it was all downhill from when, tim tebow? i’m fascinated by that: when is the precise moment at which you understand that that’s it, stick a fork in me, game over, man? i suppose it’s when you can look and see the whole field, except every receiver is covered and the pass rush is bearing down on you. you could break for the sidelines–you have good speed, not necessarily game-changing but surely sufficient, 4.6 speed–or you could hold onto the ball and brace for impact. you fumbled a lot, because you always opted for the former; others had to tell you when to quit.

i always knew when to quit. nothing’s easier to write than an “in memoriam” for a fallen friend, some empty eulogy filled to the brim with humbug and bullshit. “no man is happy until the end is known” and ten thousand other clichés, all of which are true because they’re too insipid to warrant falsification. you’re a name that was, not a name that is, and your time is going going gone. whereas i came and went, hurting no one and helping myself as much as i could, for all the good it did me, for all the good it does anyone.

the funny thing was: you won a playoff game. you were there; you led a team; you failed anyway. that’s the best kind of failure, because it had to happen. they–“they” being everyone who counts, those top dogs holding the heavy jack–saw that you didn’t have the right stuff. yet everything about you cried out the right stuff. the ONLY stuff you could have possibly had was the right stuff; you had no other stuff.

the people who believed in you, ma and pa and all the tebow cousins, will slowly realize you didn’t have stuff, right or otherwise, and they’ll think, ‘shit, i thought tim had the right stuff, he sure seemed like he did.’ but you disappointed them, and that’s fine because everyone expects to be disappointed. had you succeeded it would’ve been worse: they’d have hated you, and their hatred would’ve been diamond-sharp, beautiful, forever. but now you’re just tim tebow, a failure sorta, a failure at the thing you’re known for: he was great at football, he failed at football.

to be one thing for a while, for ten years, only to eventually realize the gears are kaput, the engine’s shot…you ask yourself why and the universe says why not. then you drink some clamato juice and it is what it is, it isn’t what it isn’t, what else could it be? well alright alright

–owen wilson

My Review of My Autobiography

Just Life: Memories of One Bro’s Existence, 1982-2015. By Oliver Lee Bateman (Self-published, 2015). Pp. 312. Electronic, $24.95

As America’s resident expert in the growing field of myself, I was excited to see the publication of Oliver Lee Bateman’s narrative of his life to date. “Now Oliver Lee Bateman: there’s a name I know!” I exclaimed, eagerly diving into the review copy I had provided to me. However, my excitement turned to disappointment as I slogged my way through this tedious collection of family photos, childhood writing samples, term papers, e-mails, tweets, and Instagram uploads. All memoirs are exercises in narcissism, with the author presuming that he or she is an important enough personage to write about, but at least some memoirs introduce readers to worlds beyond their own. Just Life, on the other hand, consisted of little besides hackneyed, predictable plot devices. It (almost) goes without saying that I’d encountered it all before.

In spite of that, a few sections warrant mention. The seventh chapter, “Amounts I Have Weighed,” takes us on a journey through Bateman’s various weights, with special attention paid to the years 2004 (when he yo-yoed between 185 pounds and 240 pounds) and 2006 (when the author, on a quest to eat twenty Burger King Quad Stackers in a single sitting, reached an all-time high of 265 pounds). “What I think is most interesting about weight,” Bateman writes, “is how much it can fluctuate. First I weighed this much, and then, as circumstances changed, I wound up weighing either more or less.”

“The LiveJournal Years” chronicles a handful of unconsummated romances that played out entirely via comments made to Bateman’s pseudonymous Xanga and LiveJournal blogs during the early part of the 21st century. And “Some OKCupid Ghostings,” though dense and probably only of interest to Bateman specialists like me, recounts the myriad one-and-done dating experiences of 2008-2009; I had forgotten that Allison F. and Bateman had met for coffee at Mocha Envy on August 6, 2008, and it was nice to realize that those 45 minutes of idle chitchat served some greater narrative purpose. Bateman’s two-date romance with Allison M. was equally scintillating, as evidenced by hot text such as “hey did you like that date?”, “yeah it was ok,” and “maybe i’ll c u when i c u” (which would make for a great title to an Usher song, bee-tee-dubs).

“Helpful Hints” offers readers a taste of Bateman’s hard-earned, homespun wisdom. Apropos cutting costs at the 7/11, he advocates “[getting] a Big Gulp cup and filling that sucker to the brim with coffee, maybe cutting it with a bit of ice to prevent the straw from melting, and passing that off as a soda, because a 42 oz. soda is way cheaper than a 20 oz. coffee.” But his advice isn’t limited to gas stations and caffeinated beverages: “If you’re really trying to stay on top of things, I’d advocate keeping an eye on your dog’s rear end at all times. When you see that pup’s pinkeye starting to pulsate like a quasar, you’ll know it’s time to get Fido outside. Take my word for it: this is a fast, easy method that ensures you won’t waste countless hours walking your canine in a circle.”

Alas, most of the book drags on, much like Bateman’s own inexplicable existence, and Just Life seems unlikely to find a place among such canonical works of personal remembrance as The Education of Henry Adams and Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, & How Baseball Got Big. At best, Just Life is just okay: over-long and meandering, lacking any kind of deeper purpose, but not really hurting anybody, either. At worst, it confirms the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt. All too often, I paused in the story to ask myself, “Who the hell does this guy think he is?”

–Oscar Berkman

Most of What I Write is Trash

My presence among the writers of anything is anomalous. I don’t know anybody, don’t care about jack squat, and have nothing original to say. I arrange words that don’t mean anything in exchange for $$$ I won’t spend. There were maybe a couple moments when I almost broke through¹, or could’ve broken through², but I don’t know what I would’ve broken through to much less what I would’ve done when I got there.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” is alway everybody’s question. People start playing this role or that role in their early to mid 20s, and then they grow, literally and figuratively, into them. I never wanted to play a role; I never wanted anything but silence. Role-playing involves a lot of dissembling, “Oh I’m blah blah blah, whatever, et cetera”–wanting to the “king shit of fuck mountain,” to steal a mellifluous phrasing of Bob Odenkirk’s. Eventually you’re wearing these big baggy-ass Dockers khakis and playing golf with the boys or drinking PBR in a 50/25/25 tri-blend t-shirt in some $3000/mo rental in one of the “acceptable” cities while doing your best impression of Steve Buscemi doing his impression of a teenager.

I never thought I’d grow up–never minded the process, I guess, but never thought it would happen–and yet I have in spite of every indication to the contrary and now I’m shrewed/blued/tattooed because on any given day I have no reason to live. Not a reason to die, which is the sort of thing first responders and G.I. Joes and other real American heroes have, but a reason to live, to move forward, to accomplish something. And for what, y'know? So I can tell some tweedy professor that I’m publishing with such-and-such a press or impress some hipster manqué³ by telling him or her that P4K is running an essay of mine?

As for friendships and the resulting conversations, they’re no different than writing: mostly work and mostly trash. “What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.” Yeah, wutevz, Big Aristotle: a friend is just someone who, whether encountered randomly or at an appointed hour, will waste your time. Talking to a person, even if it’s the best talk you’ve ever had, requires such exertion that when you leave–which you’ll have to do, because everyone leaves and everything ends–you’ll never want to do it again. “Great chat bro, hopefully I’ll never see you again, even though I love you like a bro.” “Yeah broseph, it’s been real, it’s been fun, but it hasn’t been real fun.”

But back to the writing: what do we write about when we write about writing? In most cases we–meaning me and you–write literary fiction, which is just softcore porn for nerds⁴. At any rate, we never write nothing because we can never say no. It’s always type type typing away, with nary an idea of great import or export to convey.

I suppose I could write about the horrendous abuse that characterized my childhood and early adolescence. There’s $$$ in them thar hills, even if ain’t much, even if I’m not sure where exactly I stack up on the Publisher’s Pain Scale⁵. I’m a dudebro, inescapably so, with a voice and a face and a body that fit nowhere in the grand scheme of things. I suppose you might even think I’m interesting–provided that your definition of interesting is different, and much looser, than mine.

“I, I, I,” the cogito, the I’m so cool,“ is what’s best and worst about male writing, especially dudebro writing, and also why we need no more of it. I can’t pitch a piece or an article or a book with any sincerity because WTF, there’s been several thousand years of dudebro work paving the way: Cicero was a dudebro, Jesus too, Melville and Whitman…dudebros all. Plus writing isn’t cumulative the way science is, except for maybe when you’re plagiarizing somebody (quick quiz: can you spot all the phrases I lifted almost wholesale from other, better writers in this short essay? a No-Prize for the winner!). Can writing be said to have gotten any "better” in the past 100 years?⁶ Nah, writing can only ever be different, not better, and there’s nothing different about what I’d write-on-demand from what, say, Wallace Stegner or Richard Yates or Dan Duchaine or Louis L'Amour or Kevin “The Secrets THEY Don’t Want You to Know” Trudeau has already written.

What I mean by all of the foregoing, which you won’t read because I don’t matter &c., is that there’s no good reason for me. Based on current market conditions, there’s probably no good reason for you, either. Which makes me wonder why people kvetch about “Obama death panels” when it seems like those Futurama suicide booths could go a long ways toward thinning the herd of failed, feckless millenials.

1. “Abercrombie,” the “Abercrombie professor.” Lots of lawlz there. But ultimately nada, zip, zilch: just another thing that reaffirmed some preconceived notions. Good for me.
2. I interviewed to be on some reailty show, but nada, zip, zilch came of that, too.
3. Isn’t that every hipster, in the full and complete sense of this moth-eaten, dog-eared catchall term?
4. If this stuff were as good as what J.D. Robb, Inc. and Diana Palmer, Inc., wrote, it would sell a heckuva lot better.
5. Undoubtedly high by white cisgender male standards, and progressively lower as far as other identity categories are concerned. If I have any “complaints” about the abuse I received, it’s that, far from forcing me into a bunch of prepackaged & balkanized categories of self, it made me into a Patrick Bateman-esque empty shell (Bateman!), a veritable humanzee (Oliver!) among the higher primates. The latter doesn’t have as much cash value as the former, since it’s far more difficult to conceptualize and is unlikely to elicit sympathy from anyone. “So an asshole was raised by two assholes to be an even worse asshole,” readers (i.e., those brave souls who read more than 25% of a book they’ve purchased) will say. “Well fuck you, asshole!”
6. There’s a real Bloom-and-Lasch-y cottage industry built around describing how it’s gotten worse, and while there might be a germ of truth to that because writing demands focus and the future is one of multitasking (at which women admittedly far outshine men, on the aggregate), that work, which I read at an age when I wasn’t prepared to appreciate its deeper implications, now strikes me as a lot of elitist sour grapes.

–Ovain Bielsemeyer IV

The Virtual University

The virtual university was located at the corner of real and world. It was in the business of amazing people. It was where the future started today. It was a place without limits as well as a place where you could push your limits. It was different on purpose; it was where everybody counts; it was imagining the impossible. “Live unbranded” read their trademarked logo, which was a $.

The virtual university didn’t have any students or faculty because who needed them. Those boring old mopes and pajama-clad scrotes only got in the way of creating your best self and daring to dream. It didn’t have classes because you needed to learn at your own pace at your own place, a place that let you take charge of the now and supercharge the forever. It did have a 150,000 square foot gym that had cost $100m to build, because education was a vacation to find your vocation. It paid its legendary football coach “Herc” Broadsides almost that much to coach the 85 uncompensated mercenaries who drew capacity crowds of virtual alumni to its 200,000-seat KFC Double Down Athletic Megatorium.

The virtual university had thousands of actual administrators: assistant deans and assistants to the assistant deans and assistant dean’s assistant’s assistants. What they did was anybody’s guess, but it certainly wasn’t nothing. At the very least, they created things like the Strategic Plan for Growth, the Mission Admission Statement, Initiative 2020, and the Dynamic Interdisciplinary Research Brandcast. Each of these ambitious programs was outlined in a PowerPoint presentation so hollow and amorphous that it was faultless, as virtually perfect as the virtual university itself.

The one problem with the virtual university was that it remained tethered, at least in theory, to whatever the university had done before it, all the moribund mortarboard-and-gown Hogwartsing that struck outsiders as being so 1200-and-late. The lingering referent, with its connotations of the three Rs and the illiberal arts, can’t be effaced–not yet anyway; we don’t have the technology. But god, if it could: a university divorced from its old-timey tweed coat and pipe smoking function, floating aloft in the free air, nothing but slogans and strategery and sweetheart deals for the lucky stiffs who work there…

“We don’t dare to dream,” read the Virtual University’s Mission Admission Statement, “we prepare for it.”

Bro.

–Eeyore Bremen

A Wee Walk

The retired man stepped outside of his house on a brisk September morn to take a walk. There was a nice trail through the woods near his home. Sunlight filtered through canopies of green leaves, dappling his path. The man took in a couple lungfuls of that crisp early autumn air, and then he actually said “Ahh!” like someone in a story.

He was prepared to enjoy it. He was prepared to set his mind at ease.

He walked for maybe three minutes and then his bladder began to feel tight. At first it was just a minor thing, something he could try to ignore. Then it was heavy, like a burden. He had recently started having prostate issues, so he had to pee-pee all the time. “Wellllll…” he said out loud, “there’s no one around. I’ll just pee in the woods right quick.” So he peed in the woods right quick, then continued on his way.

But uh oh, only a minute later he discovered that some kind of bug was sucking on the back of his left knee. “Gah!” he hollered, swatting at the sucker and killing it, smearing its bug guts across his hairy skin. “Got ya!”

Then he felt bad, as if he had messed up his karma by killing the bug. Then he inevitably started to think about his own death, and that was a bummer. So he forced his mind off of it.

But then he thought about how he was forcing happiness when he was supposed to be out here taking it in earnestly, communing with Nature, getting his retiree exercise in his shorts and his white sneakers and his ball cap like a dude in an AARP magazine that mysteriously started showing up in the mailbox once you hit a certain age. Maybe a dude in a photo under an article titled, “Heart-healthy tips ‘n’ tricks!” He was not supposed to be forcing it.

The sun rose a tiny bit, and he felt too warm underneath his tucked-in polo shirt. He tried to stick to the shade. He stubbed his toe on a rock and swore. Good, no one was around. Only the trees heard.

His mind strayed to his wife in the nursing home. He forced it back.

Some joggers going in the opposite direction approached and jogged on by, without making eye contact or saying hello, even though the retired man had made eye contact and smiled. His blood boiled; he hated how people nowadays ignored you. Usually they ignored you while yelling at their dogs for pooping on the neighbor’s bushes or something like that. He thought: “This is what civilization has devolved into: a society of people who don’t acknowledge one another, but instead chastise captive animals for being animals.”

He had remembered to put on sunscreen, like some other man in a stock photo for an AARP article about skin-cancer prevention. But man, the sun was really high in the sky now, and the lotiony white gunk was mixing with his sweat. He didn’t have a mirror in his fannypack, but he was sure he probably looked like a freak. Like one of those guys in that Michael Jackson “Thriller” video, a zombie or a ghoul or something like that. It burned a little.

A minute or so later, he had to pee-pee again, so he did that one more time. He remembered when his grandson used to call it “going wee-wee.” He chuckled a little bit at that. Then he tried to remember the last time he had seen his now-teenage grandson, who was at college. He said, “This little piggy went ‘Wee, wee!’ all the way home.” Even though it didn’t really follow what he had been thinking about before.

He got to the part where you can see the brook and the little waterfall but he forgot his cell phone with the built-in camera in it, dang it. He would have to settle for remembering the scene, but dang it, it would have been a cool thing to post on Facebook. His grown daughter had told him to start posting more stuff instead of just links to reviews of books about the Navy. “I want to see stuff from your everyday life, Dad.”

He was nearing the end of his walk when he realized he hadn’t consciously enjoyed any of it because the whole time he had been worried about dumb little stuff. His bladder, his physical discomfort, nagging worries at the back or front of his mind. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – he hadn’t been freed up to think about anything altruistic or philosophical or Dalai Lama-ish like he’d planned.

And now he was tired and sweaty, and he just wanted to go inside and fix a glass of lemonade and sit at the computer and read reviews of books about the Navy, especially from when he was in it. He would try harder to enjoy Nature tomorrow, if it didn’t rain.

As he neared the front steps to his house, he thought: “This walk has been a metaphor for my entire life.” He realized that he had accomplished something by walking in the woods: a deep thought! It was hardly profound, but it would have to do, because he didn’t have much time. But at least when you’re dead you don’t have to pee.

–C. Chapmenz

Rocko-Meats

Said the truck in front of me.

Rock-O Meats. Rock O’Meats. Rock o’ meats.

Rock-a-bye meat baby.

Letters. The lines and curves form a meaning. My brain forms a meaning.

There is no inherent meaning.

The day I realized that each person has a different perception was the day I stopped writing. Why bother, if your words are only doomed to be misunderstood?

A butcher’s attempt at branding causes me to envision a muscle-bound Irishman, maybe punching at carcasses in a meat locker somewhere, hence the nickname.

“Rock’s the name!” my imaginary pugilist gargles in a brogue. “Rock O’Meats! Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!”

Pow-pow. Ol’ Rock jabs at the sad sack of flesh that used to be a cow, and you hear the tinkle of ice crystals falling on the concrete floor.

“Pow-pow, cow.”

Rock thinks about how some words rhyme. He thinks about how poetry that rhymes is intrinsically inferior to poetry that does not, because your choice of words for the ends of each line is far more limited when it has to fit a pattern.

He thinks: “Why am I here? Among all this meat? Because somebody imagined me into it? I don’t seem to recall ever having had free will.”

I imagine him suddenly performing a balletic prance across the frozen storeroom and exclaiming in surprise, “Mercy me!”, just because I can.

Everybody is the God of somebody.

–C.L. Chapman

His Mysterious Ways

He was an arty kid from a non-arty family. He liked to write, and his family didn’t get it. “What are ya doin’ up thar?” they’d holler up the stairs while watching the football game. What he was doin’ up thar, of course, was writing.

They thought the things he wrote were weird, or morbid, or immoral. He sometimes used bad words and wrote about sex. His stories didn’t have happy endings.

His family all agreed: If they could bring just one book to a desert island, it would be the Bible. It’s the only book anyone needs.

“But the Bible has bad words and sex in it,” he would sometimes dare to point out.

“The Lord has His mysterious ways that our little pea brains will never understand,” they would reply, and they’d leave it at that.

What kept him going was the thought of all the other writers out there – not just the famous ones whose books he read over and over again, but the ones just like him who had yet to be discovered.

He would go to the Barnes & Noble in his hick town and look at the mural above the Starbucks café: Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, all those guys. He imagined himself up there, in some Barnes & Noble of the future, and a kid like him looking up. A never-ending chain.

One day when he decided he was ready, he submitted some stories to contests. He felt nervous but also excited each time he licked shut an envelope flap – finally he was reaching out to his brotherhood, his true kin. He hoped they accepted him.

They did not. He lost every contest he entered. Finally he stopped entering them.

Our little pea brains will never understand.

–C. Chapman