Twenty short pieces
"A big book is a big evil." –Callimachus
[Please do not neglect to check out my innumerable books (a hyperbole; there are seven), which alone justify my continued existence.]
If you don’t peel the orange yourself, you don’t get the good-smelling fingers. A parable.
*
Orwell once said “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face for ever.” This is perceptive, as far as it goes, but Orwell failed to note that the boot and the face would belong to the same person.
*
In 1956, J. Edgar Hoover called rock’n’roll “a definite danger to the security of the United States.” Four years later, Elvis was drafted, Chuck Berry was in prison, Jerry Lee Lewis was disgraced, Alan Freed was unemployed, Little Richard was born again and out of the game, and Buddy Holly was dead.
I’m not here to tout conspiracies, but…isn’t that weird?
That it would take a presidential assassination and a foreign invasion to bring rock’n’roll back to the forefront of the zeitgeist, and thereby destroy America, is also weird. Dropped the ball on that one, didn’t you, Hoover?
*
The only thing we learn is what’s normal.
*
Documents indicate that in the 1980s there was an unprecedented shift in laws and customs concerning custody and adoption. A married couple adopting a child (source: Webster) was perhaps not so unusual even before that time, but by the ’80s a single elderly man could adopt two young boys (source: Diff’rent Strokes) easily or a young girl (source: Punky Brewster) with some difficulty. Nell Harper becomes legal guardian to Joey and Matthew Donovan while their father was yet living (source: Gimme a Break), and Beverly Ann Stickle adopted Andy Moffett, even though his being an orphan was something called a “retcon” that overthrew “several seasons of continuity,” whatever that means (source: Facts of Life). Even robots could be adopted, although some measure of deception may have been involved (source: Small Wonder). Meanwhile millionaire Edward W. Stratton III was able to gain custody of the child he never knew he had without having recourse to the courts and apparently without the mother’s knowledge (source: Silver Spoons), and two heterosexual men could claim joint custody of a kind of Schrödinger’s child that was related to both and neither (source: My Two Dads).
Without this textual evidence, a reliance on mere oral histories would paint a very deceptive picture of ’80s custom.
*
There is the pleasure of novelty and the pleasure of mastery. Between these two pleasures lies only a long agonizing slog.
*
I wanted to leave myself a reminder to remove all these strings tied around my fingers, but I couldn’t think of a way to do it that wasn’t counterproductive.
*
“Everything you’ve been taught is wrong,” says the person who is prepared to teach you new wrong things, all still wrong.
*
Try to arrange it so that your worst enemy is buried, after his death, beneath a very public thoroughfare, Times Square perhaps. It is well know that whenever a pedestrian steps over one’s grave, one gets a shiver; if people are constantly walking over your enemy’s grave, he will go his entire life experiencing continual chills, maddening him, perhaps even driving to an early death so you can swoop in and hasten to arrange his burial.
This only works if you arrange the burial correctly, so don’t mess up that part or he may not die early at all.
*
We always focus on what we can quantify; not because it is the most important but because it the easiest.
*
In 1859, pyramidologist John Taylor pointed out that if you take the Great Pyramid at Giza and divide its perimeter by twice its height you get pi. Inspired by this discovery, I have sought pi in other ancient artifacts, and I have found some stunning things:
For King Arthur’s Round Table, if you divide its circumference by its diameter, you get pi!
For the Aztec calendar stone, if you divide its area by its radius multiplied by itself, you also get pi!
I’m still working on deducing pi from the Gundestrup cauldron, but preliminary results are encouraging…
*
We, who are too embarrassed to pray, send “positive vibes.” Ashamed to invoke even a deist’s deity, we anthropomorphize “the universe” and speak of what (passive voice) “is meant to be.”
We pretend that we have abandoned belief, but we have merely abandoned believing that we believe. We have exchanged faith for bad faith.
*
“Just be yourself”: Bad advice for Hitler. “Do unto others…”: Bad advice for Sacher-Masoch.
*
Talk about bad luck. I had this donkey, and I was trying to teach him not to eat. Wouldn’t you know it, no sooner had he mastered the trick, but he up and dies on me. (Traditional.)
*
Once a guy who worked with kids had me sign a book for him, and he asked me to inscribe therein a “message to today’s youth.” I suggested “Trust no one,” and he told me not to write that. Then I suggested “Read a lot of books,” and he told me to write that.
As I wrote it, I explained to him that I was writing “Read a lot of books,” but what I meant was “Trust no one.”
*
The saddest and loneliest book title I’ve ever seen: Famous Paintings As Seen and Described by Famous Writers.
*
After a car drove up on a sidewalk and hit kids who were not wearing headphone, “the school’s principal sent out a memo to parents reminding kids not to listen to headphones when walking around” (Gothamist 9/13/13). This is not a parable but a real thing that happened but also a parable.
*
The current system is: The government funnels all children into a building where they are systematically beaten up if they purchase the wrong products until they internalize the importance of purchasing the right products. Could our economy even survive meaningful school reform?
*
He leered at me across the dinner table. “What I wanted to tell you,” he said, “is that someday, not too soon but someday, you will manage, at last, to perfect time travel. And you will contrive to travel back in time, just to yesterday. Oh, have some more of the dark meat, it is very tender, all things considered.”
“Yes, it’s quite good,” I said politely. We both chewed in silence for a while; I did not hurry, although I was burning with curiosity to find out what he, my oldest enemy, would say.
“You will arrive yesterday,” he continued at long last, dabbing his lips with a silk napkin he kept foppishly up his sleeve, “in a bit of a state. Time travel must be very disconcerting. For once your guard will be down, I mean was down, and I was able to capture you quite easily. Your end, unfortunately, had to be quick, and therefore almost painless, for I needed the meat to retain its savor.” He began to giggle uncontrollably. “Have you guessed it yet? This meal is my ultimate triumph! We have been feasting on yourself!”
Suddenly he began to froth, and he fell over, glancing off the table, and collapsing into convulsions. Within a few minutes of agony, he was dead.
For, some years before (warned by a mysterious note form the future), I had begun poisoning myself, like Mithridates, a little each day, until, like Rappaccini’s daughter, my flesh was saturated with venom. For years I lived, free from fleas and mosquitoes, laboring towards the day that I would travel back in time to the kitchen of my enemy, and to my greatest triumph.
I helped myself to another slice. The sauce was quite good and I, after all, was immune.
*
I made a mix tape for you. What I’m trying to say is that I loved you in 1994.
