Category: The Brain… It Bleeds!

(Actually, that’s too much feeling.)

Penelope Scottenrot Terwilliger the third was having a grand old time at the grande dame’s ball. There were pickle skewers and rounded hamshanks, really all the most appetizing of hors d’oeuvres (yeah, I had to look it up, so that shit’s getting bolded and italicized!) and other snackables. Really, just the classiest. Everything was in gold, because gold’s the best color, really goes with everything. Penelope Scottenrot Terwilliger the third (PST3 for short) had nothing better to do, couldn’t imagine anything more enjoyable, honestly!, than doing the foxtrot and lazy zambeezi with, oh, let’s see, there was Jorge Jagabolt Smith and Uncifer Von Scooolp and “Jellaby” Marcos Contigue, to name a few. Was there a furniture factory somewhere that churned these fellas out like hotcakes on a treadmill griddle? Only difference was the color of rose their boutonnière happened to be. PST3 groaned inwardly (outwardly, a delightful burst of sunshine, always, and you’d better believe it MISTER!) as “Crumbcakes” Gorforzoola pressed his moist dance card into her (thankfully) gloved hand. “Once more around the mulberry bush,” she thought.

Still, it was less taxing than rappelling down the canebrake on some questionable climbing cord or dodging slumbering hippos in the mudflats. The life of a spy! One of these knuckleheads surely knew where the Excel file of questionable accounting practices was living, some thumb drive in the shape of a skateboard or 20-sided die, no doubt.

(And a Lion in the fruit bowl!)

Look, no one wanted the kind of dreadful occurrence or happenstance that went down last Thursday. Everyone was depending on someone else to rein in the madcap antics that went a little too mad. The consensus view was, I’ll flee in panic and YOU (someone other than me) deal with that THING (it was a little hazy, it being dusk) over there! There was a definite supermajority of folks who had decided that these kinds of perilous doings were not for them. Not even with a free stuffed tiger and/or coupons for a 64 oz. Slurpee. If we were ordering pizza, we’d all be going for pepperoni and olives, with no one even quibbling about not liking olives, that’s how unified people were on the terrifying blank that consumed at least 97% of our full attention (one or two of us did get distracted by something shiny, briefly, while running for their life). It was the kind of moment where, if this were a basketball game, we all tried getting the ball in the same basket, but only one ball could go through the basket at a time. Yeah, chokepoints were a real issue, let’s say, in the mad rush to, as one mind, flee to the so-to-speak “exit”. Ultimately, this was probably the deciding factor in 75% of us being consumed utterly in some mysterious and unverified (by government agents and news journalists) way. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, I guess, especially when you’re all trying to eat it at once.

(But never those!)

There was a kind of hardscrabble unworthiness to the banker Reginald Kirk Plummings, a sort of wheezy cheerfulness that left others ruminating on mistakes and bad breakfasts. Yup, people often walked away thinking of eggs that were just a bit too runny, toast that arrived too late, soggy and limp. The butter never goes on as well and when the knife bursts through the bread, well, let’s not speak of it. “Reggie” to his “friends”, but never to his mum, who always called him Reginald Kirk or Reginald K. for short. You know, although it seemed like a good idea at the time, the mustache had been the wrong way to go, facial accoutrementwise. But, and this was mostly due to the way the human brain encourages one to keep digging in spite of the huge heap of nothing already found, R.K. went all in on the mustache, even curling up the ends (or trying to) with the very cheapest and oiliest of the hair goop. A Dapper Dan Man he wasn’t. Yes, Plummings had the misfortune of being the type of person, not hated exactly, but simply generally unwanted by those around him.

Oh, it wasn’t all bad. He did enjoy his evening sudoku and mug of mint tea (when he remembered to drink it and hadn’t left it, forgotten and cooling, on the kitchen countertop). His umbrella, he was quite fond of it. And nothing quite got his blood nearly going like watching the squirrels race by on the telephone wires outside his flat.

I wouldn’t say it was a good life or a bad life. It was a life. It might have been sad but for Reginald’s profound lack of self-awareness and one day a piano fell on him and he died.

(No, the other one.)

Yesterday, there was all the time in the world. It was just puddling up in the backyard, on the front porch, in the rain gutter. Some people left it out by the curb in the hope that the garbagemen would come by and scoop it up with that week’s trash. Others just walked stiffly by, as though by not acknowledging it, somehow that extra time would just vanish away. One man slipped in some time and found himself, for what seemed to stretch out into a pinpoint of eternity, flying backward through the air. Although to call it flying is somewhat generous. He did hit the ground eventually and all his dozen eggs (after another seeming eternal moment) crunched all around. One girl and another girl and a boy (children like all the others) snuck out when their parents weren’t looking and had a timeball fight. The boy had a quite attractive mustache by the time the parents finally dragged them inside, for showers or baths most likely. Time doesn’t wash out very well from clothing, unfortunately. One block had an opportunist who tried to pack the time away in several of those cheap, white, styrofoam coolers. Many years later, long forgotten, he opened them up to find all that time had just seeped away. “Where has it all gone,” he cried.

Today, there doesn’t seem to be any time at all.

(We’re not talking jello now, people.)

You’d think there was, like, this religious decree or something, given all the places the jam’s showing up. This is no APPLE jam, now. That’s never not apple sauce. We’re talking strawberry rhubarb; some kinda weird peach/orange marmalade hybrid (still we’re counting it); lemon and blueberry; spicy habañero + some other fruit, I can’t tell, too hot; lemon marmalade, too, but limes are right out for some reason, no one wants green jam, I guess; and finally just some straight-up strawberry, boring as sin, but always tasty somehow, both with chunks-so-you-know-it’s-real and chunks-without-so-you-knows-it’s-not.

There’s a depth of feeling, a passion, a real love of jam that kinda permeates the place. But permeates, that’s just really not a strong enough word, you know, for what we’ve got going on here. Smeared maybe. Or shoved. Splattered, even, sometimes signifies given the kind of, whaddayacallem, morse code or braille scattered about underfoot some days. That would be some trick, I’m thinking, if you could pick up some kinda coded messages (or flavor) from tromping on the sticky floor. It almost might be kinda worth it… Nah.

Let’s get real here. Jam’s not for eating in this place. OK, let’s say you’re an ant: THEN it’s true. Jam is, in this place here, more like an observation, a libation, like those old dead Romans used to do, just spilling some of that old wine on the dusty floor to get some gods’ heads to turn away. (Never toward, man, that’s NEVER good.) There are times when I’m standing barefoot–or even worse, socks–on the sticky floor, not really thinking, more like just trying to drink a cup of coffee and not think, when it seems like toast is not so much a thing you eat as a staging ground for jam.

Let’s just say, I’m glad they’re not drinking coffee yet.

 

Once there was a frog who sat on a log. It was a brown log. The frog liked to call it his b-log or “blog”. The heron who smoked a pipe nearby thought that was a little too on the nose and decided to call the whole thing off.

Moral: Sometimes you gotta get out while the getting is good. Or even mediocre. Or, let’s not kid ourselves, when it’s pretty terrible. Really, isn’t that just the thing? How easy it is to just dump something online, no matter how good or bad it is. The internet, basically weaponized Tourette’s. Which, ok, it’s funny for a little while, but eventually it does get a little old…

(Why was he incurious?)

I’ll tell you why. Because.

You might think, because of his name, that Incurious George is a monkey. Nope.

Oh boy. Here he comes. Incurious George. Not getting up to any hijinks at all. Not needing to be rescued by anyone in particular, but specifically not some guy in a hat.

Incuriosity: not a word. You’ll be surprised to know. Especially because it is.

Incurious George was incurious about so many things: noodles, 17th century Turkish literature, why the bus is running late, that girl at the end of the bar, sassafrass, the reason why the joke is funny, metaphysical nonsense, artificial intelligence, the bones of the foot, why the sky is blue, what the king god is thinking up there on the moon, video games, what’s for breakfast, the benefits of clean living, sartorial inaccuracies in BBC period dramas, the difference between bourbon and whiskey, why it’s sometimes spelled whisky, grunge, different types of metal (geologic), different types of metal (musical), what’s going on with that Baader-Meinhof thing where once you learn a new word you start seeing it everywhere, juice.

One time, a child was born. Let’s say it was a girl (it could’ve easily been a boy). She was cherished by her parents. Literally nourished by her mother’s milk. Her parents poured all of their hopes and dreams and love into her. Not all at once, but slowly, moment by moment, day by day, through the slow accretion of time. Sure, those parents messed up, they sometimes got angry or cranky or dismissive of her, but for the most part, what they did was good and true. And even from that first moment, she felt things so deeply, joy and sadness and anger and fear and happiness and laughter and crying and all the rest, there was so much. Eventually, from listening to her parents talk to each other and all the people around, she decoded language (it doesn’t matter which one) and shortly after that she began to speak her own words. She grew hair, fingernails, toenails, and teeth. She also grew up and out and up and out. At some point, she figured out how to stand and walk and run and then EVERYTHING changed. She didn’t have much to worry about, but sometimes her parents were terrified that something would happen, because she was so unconcerned and that’s what parents do. Everyone who was a part of her life loved her and left a little piece of something with her. And sometimes her parents worried about all the money they were spending, but, you know, it was WORTH IT. She soaked it all in. Soon, she went to school, where her teachers did the best they could (and sometimes not their best at all) to teach her some of what they knew. More importantly, all the children around taught each other about how to be friends and enemies and how to be alone and how to be together. Yeah, it was a big old mess of complicated feelings and ideas and some of it was good and some of it was bad. It all happened at the slow pace of time, as one minute clicked into the next. The parents got sort of used to not seeing her all the time, but it was still sometimes painful. They missed her fiercely, sometimes, at random moments. All of this takes time to talk about, because it happens for all of the other children too. So, anyway, she was loved, which is the best we can hope for, right? She LIVED. One day, a man with a gun shot her and 20 or so of her classmates, killing not just her, but all of the love, hopes, and dreams that had been poured into her. That was the end. Her utterly unique presence on this earth was completely and utterly ended.

Everyone who knew her wept.

Multiply times 20.

Multiply times 52.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

A) In the distant future, they all got tired of weeping. They rose up. They fought to end the mad slaughter of children and grown children.

or

B) They never stopped weeping.

(For getting stuck in places.)

Orpheus looks backward. *Spoiler Alert*

Adam and Eve eat the apple. *Spoiler Alert*

Odysseus comes home. *Spoiler Alert*

Hamlet/Othello/Macbeth/King Lear/etc die at the end. *Spoiler Alert*

Ahab dies at the end. *Spoiler Alert*

Anna Karenina dies at the end. *Spoiler Alert*

Jane Eyre marries that rich dude. *Spoiler Alert*

Frodo destroys the One Ring. *Spoiler Alert*

Darth Vader is Luke’s dad. For reals. *Spoiler Alert*

Beowulf kills Grendel and his ma. *Spoiler Alert*

Spoilers don’t exist.

(I’m not talking about the basketball team, sorry.)

Zombardo the Wizard was stuck up in a tree. It wasn’t a pleasant place for a wizard to be, especially not one with a mild fear of heights (acrophobia) and a mild fear of cats (ailurophobia) and a mild fear of being caught up in a tree (dendrophobia). You’d think, being a wizard–and yes, there was a cat stuck up in the tree with him–that he could just whisper up some magic words and, poof!, be down on the ground or have turned the tree into a statue or made the cat float away like a balloon. Unfortunately, all this mild fear made those magic words slide right out of his head.

Zombardo sighed and gazed down at all the magic words piled on the ground.

“Nothing good can come of this,” he sighed.