theater of diminished faculties

I figured it was a support group for lycanthropes and the families of lycanthropes, and I’d given up on talking to anyone after the only response I ever got was “But you don’t really think you’re a werewolf, do you?” so the idea of being able to talk about what this supermoon business was doing to me with people who actually understood was too tempting to pass up. Alas, Lobo de la Luna is more of a middle aged dudes club where on the night of the full moon they get drunk on homemade applejack, strip naked and run around the neighborhood howling and knocking over garbage cans. As I watched them high-five each other and talk about chest hair grooming I realized this was not the proper social circle for me and left. I was waiting at the bus stop when the change began. I feel anything else I say about the events of that evening may incriminate me in a court of law.

You and I know everybody else is pretty much fucked up except for us. I’m not telling you this because it’s something you don’t know, but because when I talk to “the audience” like this, I’m talking specifically to you. That’s the problem with the internet: because anyone can read something, everyone thinks everything is intended for them. Some things are not for you. You can try them, you should try them, but if you dislike them, this doesn’t mean they’ve personally failed you. It’s for someone else. That someone else may be you in ten years, or a year, or tomorrow. You could have an epiphany or deal with grief or move to another city or maybe do absolutely nothing at all and the thing that once tasted sour now tastes sweet. Sweet and a little sour, maybe, but you like sour things now. You like when things don’t constantly tell you know you should feel about them. You are now in that thing’s audience, and tomorrow or a year or ten years might change that, but, and I’m talking to you when I tell you this, you don’t have to know who you are all the time.

I may not agree with this tomorrow. I may not agree with it right now. There are two of me, and I am both of them.

It might not seem entirely justified to consider Matthias Nihilartikel’s “Hier gibt es Nichts” a novel worthy of translation, or for that matter a novel at all; begun moments before an alleged stroke ended the life of this critically lauded 19 year old author, the novel consists entirely of those four words. A new translation by Kelly Menope, entitled There Is Nothing Here, attempts to unpack this cryptic work of utter compression through an exhaustive recreation of Nihilartikel’s environment at the time of writing, from a completely historically accurate rebuild of his typewriter to a thirtyeight page consideration of the chair on which he sat (currently on display in Heidelburg as “Nihilartikel’s Death Chair — Do You Dare To Sit In The Seat Of The Void?”) and chapters for each of the four words describing her process for selection, the etymology of these words, the gematrical meanings of these words in both English and German and a series of alternate readings in which she considers how scholars might reconsider the novel were it to consist of other words, such as “Everything is Elsewhere Forever”, “I’m Writing, I’m Dead” and “I Made This Up”. Highest recommendation.

I have installed webcams in the kitchen, just as a goof, and apparently, while I sleep, my kitchen is used as the set for various fairy-tale mishaps and adventures, the culmination of each resulting in some kinda post-freudian cannibalism kick exemplified by foolish kindern being turned into various sweetstuffs — candies, cupcakes, cookies. Years of this resulted in my kitchen being stocked with talking food, pleas for starvation and diet, and the vocal element of this food generally results in my losing my appetite, so the food has piled out of cupboards and across the floor. One night I stayed up, tucked into the broom closet, and burst in on this action, smacking the witch (or possibly evil queen, same dif.) upside the head with a pastry pin, just like some balded bearded ’50s housewife. Bad scene. The fat fucking kids proceed to celebrate their safety by devouring their kin, sticky-sweet screams echoing from their fat fucking stomachs. Later, after explanations and apologies and icepacks, the witch showed me the necessity of her role in the greater scheme of the hidden universe, balancing the collective of fat fucking kids and instilling an obedience in the young through her actions. “You can’t just let ‘em get away with that kind of gluttony, it’s unseemly, and besides, it’s not like the world is hurting from any shortage of these smarmy pigtailed lederhosened jackalopes.” We finished off my scotch and talked politics and art (big Rauschenberg fan, the witch is) and agreed to see each other again, the next night, when I would possibly play less a revolutionary role in the transformation of that eve’s young. The witch and I have grown rather close, sharing interests and sleep schedules, and this is why I am up through the night now. You may have also noticed I’ve put on some weight. This is to prevent me from falling off the face of the earth, for the sky-children call to me, call to places upon my body, whisper of sugarsticky secrets, the taste of the tail, the circle of cycles, hum sweet to sing to me, a to c, in my dreamland memory.

My man Cyrano, who’s been to the moon (which is like the Earth’s attic, where the god keeps props from olden times and sets for those old miracle gags he used to pull and lots of tinsel), says that Elijah tried to fly by making containers full of the smoke of human sacrifices which he used as balloons. Cyrano tried that same gig using evaporating morning dew. My associate Bomberman has no need for any of that stuff, though he apparently believes in it, cause there’s pictures of both Cyrano and Elijah on his van mural, alongside Lindberg, Earheart, Saint-Exupery, Beuys, Ride, Komarov and Eatherly, all staring upwards, preparing to understand time through a disaster in space,

(3.6.92)
you and i had a child. you were face-down on the bed, and you wouldn’t look at the child. you fell in two places. then you were on top of me, wrapped around me, taking me into you. the child looked at me from the corner of the room and said “don’t be ashamed. don’t be ashamed.” the child was not my child at all. the child may not have been your child. you stood, lifting yourself off me, and the child sopped whisky and sugar into your mouth, easing your bruised inner thighs with ropes of wet hair. the lower half of my body could not be moved by me. all i could do was roll with my shoulder, back and forth, across the small stained bed. when i was not inside you i was confused and afraid. the child returned to the corner of the room and you turned to face me and pivoted forward.

A difference between Nabokov and Duchamp is that while Duchamp was an expert in the game of chess, Nabokov was an expert in chess problems, a difference most people overlook. Duchamp played chess as a coversation while Nabokov designed scenarios in which the discovery of an optimal move was critical to success. This is evident in their work, though to call what Duchamp did work is a misnomer, as his pieces are ultimately entertainments, while for Nabokov the work was a search for what Yeats called “the click of a well-made box” (note, for the record, that I’m stealing this analogy from David Foster Wallace); it is the same satisfaction that I’ve heard mathematicians say comes from a core-level understanding of the path of a problem, yet while there is no doubt a genius at work in the whole of Nabokov’s fiction, I can’t help but imagine Duchamp as the one I’d rather have lunch with.

I was thinking about this the last time I saw Josef, shooting free-throws behind Burge at four in the morning. Josef loved to shoot free-throws as long as I knew him, since we were eight. At night I’d ride my ten-speed as fast as I could down Euclid, tucking my shoulders, lowering my head, racing past his house, where I’d always see him standing just barely within the circle of porchlight, the tips of his keds perfectly symmetrical with the chalk line he’d remeasure and redraw every few weeks, sinking basket after basket. Josef absolutely hated actually playing basketball, however, playing the asthma card to skip out of as much gym as he could manage. If he came out any earlier, he’d end up in a pick-up game, which he’d fake a stomach cramp or ankle twist to get out of, so he usually came out in the dead of night, between the midnight games and the early-morning warm-up crew, shooting free-throws off the line, hitting forty-five of fifty by the time I had to stop counting, as I was on drugs at the time, and too busy imaging crystalline parabolas frozen in the December air to remember what came after fifty.

Something, something, something else, all the things you tell yourself.

A couple friends of mine were working at this campground up on the Mississippi (on the Wisconsin side), so on weekends when I didn’t have anything to do (which was every weekend except my birthday) I’d roadtrip up on Friday after my last class and stay until sometime Monday. In a feat of logistic genius, I managed to have no Monday classes, so it seemed imperative that I make the greatest use of this three-day freedom by stalling my return to Iowa City for as long as possible. Also, being me, I was convinced this girl that worked at the soda fountain had a secret thing for me, which she’d have to reveal if I bought enough shakes and ice cream cones, and I bought a tanker truck worth of shakes that year, sipping through my crazy straw up in the crappy camp arcade tucked inside a school bus on blocks, console Joust and Burgertime and 1941 machines with initials carved in the sides. Being a writer seemed like a really good idea that year.

I can’t play pool for shit, which is lame, as both my brother and my cousins play serious pool, so I figured that summer I’d work on my pool game, but my friends weren’t into pool at all. They were smoking a lot of pot, drinking a lot of tea, and playing a lot of go, which is not a bad way to spend a summer, but when they were high these guys would take hours to finish one game, as they ruminated and pontificated and generally held court before each move. Eventually I found three Filipino kids with candy stuck in their hair who could just barely see over the table, which is probably a worse way to learn pool than just playing by yourself, but these three kids would triangulate the table, find the perfect spot, and sink any shot they managed to hit hard enough to reach a pocket. I ended up losing more games than I won that summer, and I’m kinda glad my friends weren’t there to see my constant defeat.

One of those kids lost an eye that fall, and the last time I was at the camp I saw him and his brother and his sister, all three of them wearing eyepatches even though he was the only one with a missing eye; the little sister kept switching her patch from one eye to the other, and would hold it up while we crossed the street to go get shakes.

“So what’s this, then?” said the maltshop girl. “You got a wife I don’t know about?”

“No. This is my gang. Anybody messes with me, they mess with the
Magnaye family.”

“We’ll burn you!” said Eyeball.

I’m tempted to write some more about the maltshop girl, but all she did was laugh, and say goodbye when I left, and that was the last time I saw her, or the Magnaye kids, or my stoner camp friends. Though I know that can’t be right, not really, not in the way time actually took place, but that’s how I remember it, and I’m a writer now, so I guess I can remember it any way I want. All I do is remember things now, only I can’t remember anything.

every always grubby money hungry to try to keep away the failure-ghosts, selling plasma and eating rice and bagels i stole from work, blankets in the backseat and the scalp shaved short to get by when there’s no five bucks left to shower at the truckstop, days spent at the library and nights spent in the parking lot out by the river where the cops won’t bother, scrub out blood and feces, dead in the eyes, afraid to sleep, selling off books and cds until i reach my ascension weight, years lost like this, anonymous factories and the smell of cold grease and shaved metal and spray-on coolants to shoot into the press ever few minutes, the feeling of the gloves on my fingers and the safety goggles on my face and the plugs in my ears to silence the endless stomp of the press, living on farmer’s market day-olds, filled with the feeling that i had fallen through the cracks of what is acceptable, become unclean, that an inability to manage anything beyond daily survival confirms that i need help, that i’m fucked up, that i need to check myself into a ward before somebody does it for me, my laces split and tied together and duct tape holding together my shoes, the smell i can’t wash away. i am still who i once was. don’t kid yourself.

“From at their.”
“It nests and cycles.”
“The air-loom, morphic engineering.”
“This snow is not real.”
“Signals in their cell-phones, kill signal.”
“Boundary violations will be dealt with in the most severe manner.”
“I don’t think I took enough. I’m not feeling anything.”
“Do you remember ever feeling anything?”
“Would you care to register your comment to the recorder?”
“All sequences will require verification by Gabriel and Guardian.”
“The sound of your voice has been hollowed out from within by
corrosive diction.”
“Shots of a demonic movie, heaven-black, like the shell of a beetle or the rot in the wound. It’s late at night and nothing else is on
and you’re too tired to change the channel. It enters through the eyes, the floodgates of heaven.”
“You’re paranoid.”
“What did you say?”
“You’re paranoid.”
“Are you saying I’m paranoid?”
“No, I didn’t say that.”
“Fuck you, Rissa! Your life is too complicated!”
“As though these things can be measured.”
“I have done everything wrong. I need to start over again. One more time.”
“There’s something to be said for consistency.”
“Believe me, if I had an answer for any of this I’d tell you.”