be enough to destroy my happiness. But on my rise out of the dustbin of notability, I would hit this wall: the fond recollection of that happiness. The commemoration of a kaleidoscope of emotional states reroutes every thoroughfare; my fate is a beltway flanked by an overpass. What I need is a touch of karma, a demolition job, a gravel road—Alzheimer’s.
Laughter Is the Best Toxin
Let us outline the future of smiles, the upshot of every dimple display. Wouldn’t one rather have early wrinkles from stress and toil? Then at least there would be some appearance of a tangible goal, a point of respect for personal sacrifice. Instead, only a tombstone that reads “Here lies one who laughed himself to death”—needle in a haystack for the unfortunate family searching a cemetery of millenials. As president Garfield’s assassin chose a gun with an ivory handle because he knew it would look good in a museum exhibit, so do we embellish naked merriment with granite tributes to the placid soul.
Maximum Greatness
The secret of achievement? Moderation in nothing—but diet. Minimization of joy comes afterwards, the side effect of a dead social life. For what is there to talk about among friends without a meal between you?
Subaerial
Dirt . . . a gust of wind blows it into my eyes, it gets stuck in my boot grooves and I tread it into the house. Dirt . . . one descends to the bottom of the sea, hoping to find an answer, and one finds only clumps that fog up the water. We put mulch down, saying we want to prevent weeds from growing . . . when really what we want is to forget the dirt, our origin and destiny. One watches children playing on the beach, slapping mud together to build sandcastles, and realizes that we ourselves are constructed from this same playdough. Dirt . . . my only point of contact in-between volcanic churning and meteor showers, it shields me from upheavals and downpours. Though it follows me everywhere and is the closest thing to myself, I cannot even return to it when I die—my corpse will be too full of chemicals. Made of the blood of Tiamat’s second husband, I cannot seep into the dirt but will need to be separated from it by a casket to prevent polluting the earth’s excrement.
The Dispassionate Relation
“We’re such good friends!”
“Yes we are. The best.”
“I never expected to find someone like you. So generous, so much fun.”
“Nor I you.”
“We’re more than just familiars, aren’t we?”
“I would say so.”
“I mean, we just have so much in common.”
“We’re never at a loss for something to do together, its true.”
“You want to know something strange? Whenever I think of you I get hot-blooded, but seeing you for the first time in a few days, I turn white as a ghost. I don’t understand it, you just get my nerves going.”
“That is strange. Maybe you’re just thinking of that Ford 302 we’ve been working on. Picked up a crankshaft damper for it, by the way.”
“Did you have to bring that up now?”
“Why not?”
“I’m trying to have a serious conversation and all you want to do is talk shop.”
“Sorry. I thought you liked getting oily in my garage.”
“I do. It’s a good excuse to get away from the wife and kids.”
“Oh yeah, how are they doing?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Well, it’s just that I so seldom ask.”
“You have never asked.”
“All the better reason to ask now.”
“I still don’t understand the relevance of this.”
“I’d only like to know something about your previous history, your life outside of us and all that.”
“Please, no! Friends simply don’t talk about those things.”
“I’m getting a bit confused as to what we are supposed to talk about.”
“Us, of course!”
“Could we at least add a few more of us for good company? I’d like to show a companion of mine what we’ve been working on.”
“Oh . . . hmmm . . . no, I don’t think so. I’d be terribly jealous.”
“I see.”
“You seem upset.”
“Its only that I don’t know what to say.”
“Just promise me you’ll never move away, friend.”
“If we don’t finish that engine I won’t have a choice.”
***
If friends had always to be reassuring one another of their friendship, in what direction would this take them? —The bed, the dueling grounds, or the firing squad. If they don’t change sexual orientation they turn violent—against one another or the world. Either they agree upon a number of paces because their conversation can’t match the instinctive connections of erotic love or parenthood, or they strive to live up to Sentiment by proving their bond in a struggle against everyone, betraying their country not for a higher cause but a lower one, unwilling to sacrifice their pact with another individual for servitude to the collective. All this is why friends do . . . a relationship’s silence in regard to itself keeps it outside the bounds of nature, so long as there is no blushing involved. Abashment is as lethally persuasive as gregariousness.
Profound Tourism
Imagine a merchant who amasses wealth with an eye to posterity, desiring only that flocks of people will someday migrate to his native city to retrace the paths of his caravans. Ignoring the museums and decorative architecture, his ideal pilgrims look beyond the superficial. They are only concerned with what made everything else possible.
Now imagine a capitalist with foresight. The Wallflower on Wall Street: “Perhaps these price movements represent not company stocks, but the shuffling feet of their followers.”
The Deepest Bond
Orgy of friendship: each elicits a position in every other that would not have been possible between only two. With none of the jealousy involved in gathering your affairs together in one bed, friends can be replicated to the limits of room space, or until the motel investigates complaints about the chorus of angels in 118. And all you have to sacrifice is . . . the friendship.
Grooming
Unconditional love would be confined to a religious theme were it not for our pets. —What? A mother’s love? But that is the most dependent love of all . . . a triumph of antenatal depression, spanking, and Oedipal frustrations.
The Middle Way
