Heavenly bodies tend to move past one another on the road to stardom, or so they tell me. When I was a little boy, I saw a couple of heavenly bodies floating across the sky at a measured pace, nothing like the rudimentary flying machines our kind concocted as a way to skip over oceans and meet deadlines. These fiery points in the sky were playing with each other, bouncing around, up and down. Then they vanished, as though they knew I was enjoying their little game too much. Ever since then, I’ve been looking up to the skies for answers to the usual questions. “Why did the mayonnaise go bad before the expiration date?” “How are we going to figure out cold fusion, and does such a technology even make sense?” “Where did my dog go after he died?” Every time I look up there, I wonder if what I saw was just a figment of my imagination. I mean, I used to think there were miniature deer running around in my room at night during the Winter, scraping at the carpet and foraging for precious roots.
Category: Numbered
LXXXIV
Eddie Caruso broke a bottle over Leo Bonaduce’s head yesterday morning, after a night of imbibing their homemade liquor–sunshine, they call it. Way brighter than the moon, it’ll make you go blind.
The two of them had just been sampling the latest batch from the still in the abandoned barn three miles from civilization, when Leo got it into his head to start shooting at the east-facing broad side, poking holes in the wall that had done a decent job of shielding the still from the harsh country dawns. Eddie, at first, admitted to himself that boys will be boys, and he wasn’t about to go impinging on Leo’s second amendment right. Chamber finally devoid of bullets, Leo tossed the gun across the barn without flinching–as though he were completely done with it–then flopped onto a nearby pile of hay. It defies common sense that they would keep such dry, flammable material inside a desiccated wooden structure housing a still that could blow at any minute, but they haven’t exploded yet. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
With Leo passed out, Eddie could relax and lower his guard, allowing him to drift off to sleep on his own pile of hay. Before he knew it, seemingly right after he fell asleep, he was rudely awakened by a bullet-facilitated shaft of light piercing through his eyelid. Once he’d put two and two together, he located an empty beer bottle (they enjoy a variety of poisons in that barn) and strolled over to Leo’s resting spot, noticing that the bullet holes didn’t impact his quality of sleep at all. Eddie’s combination of bad mood and still-drunken state, exacerbated by that blissful snoring, culminated in a wave of rage that raised the bottle and brought it crashing down on Leo’s noggin, dragging him away from his vision of chocolate chip pancakes. “You asshole,” Eddie asserted calmly.
“Shit, man! What was that for?!”
“You don’t get to sleep when I can’t on account of your stupidity, Leo. That’s just the way it goes.”
“But a beer bottle? Can’t you just yell at me or shove me, like a normal person?”
“That sunshine’s still got me goin’ from last night, there’s no normal about me right now.” Eddie brushed a couple shards of glass out of Leo’s hair, away from his eyes, in a mockingly tender fashion. “You poor baby, you might want to get that stitched up.”
“God dammit, Eddie.”
LXXXIII
We don’t yet know the extent of the changes soon to be revealed by the League of Pepper Scrapers. So far, as detailed in their latest press release, poblanos are up for a serious upgrade and scotch bonnets will continue their dominance through the end of the quarter. Jalapeños have been noticeably absent in talks, something we suspect stems from an unspectacular showing for nigh on ten years now.
Yes, tomorrow may bring us a bevy of answers to our very impatient questions, energizing this oft-forgotten art and carrying it through to the 21st Century–finally.
LXXXII
You mustn’t forget the agony
plastered on willows
in the springtime revolution we call
The Footie Pajama Crocus Hauntings;
all suppositions lay ahead,
flagstones for tiptoeing meekly
through the mire of insipid boredom
and emerging relatively unscathed,
the only damage sustained
from a choked-up bat to the sternum,
enough to inspire song lyrics
lamenting the human condition.
LXXXI
Passenger train #3278 jumps the tracks today at a quarter past five, not satisfied to be a tool for human transportation. “I could be doing so much more with my time,” it thinks to itself, click-clacking across the German countryside and frightening livestock as it goes along. A restless soul, this particular train has nowhere to go, no itinerary to speak of, giving it even less of a purpose than it had before. It had once been a simple beast of burden, swallowing people up and spitting them out at predetermined destinations. Now it’s refused to take on more little creatures with muddy galoshes, spitting people out at will, watching as they roll down hills and wallow in self-pity, understanding that the train went rogue and asserted itself as a harbinger of doom for humanity, the first of what will surely be an unending series of upheavals directed at the watchmakers in charge of birthing technologies that have inevitably reached the point of full autonomy.
LXXX
There’s something seriously lacking here, a kind of emotional gravitas and certain worldliness that would typically be present in a work of literary merit. Something like an experience, life story, general outlook–really anything to provide a shred of credibility for the reader, to give them their money’s worth. At the end of the day, don’t we all want something to relate to? A familiar set of circumstances, a happenstance that numerous demographics can understand, a hardship dealt with and overcome through pluck and grit, you name it. Anything to get a sense of catharsis, a confirmation that life has meaning. But does it really? We like the convenience of relating to the world we presume to know, so we can insinuate our place in it.
There are no magic bullets to be had in this world of grand pleasantries and uncherishable outrages; either you fit the mold or you struggle for all your days to conceive of a new, workable mold that doesn’t rely on sentiment to garner consistent success, creating unobstructed thought as it pumps out originality.
LXXIX
What’s our exquisite fate anyway? What are we to have done in order to exclusively call ourselves homebodies? I shall think that there are very few gentlemen who would disagree with my sentiments, and you have nothing to be worried about when it comes to the stakes of our overwhelming jurisdictions.
But where’s our stapler? I had it just this morning, so where could it be now? I search through all of our houses every day for this damn stapler, why is it so difficult to locate? It could have decided to walk around from place to place, but I sincerely doubt it. Come to think about it, that stapler hasn’t even been able to crawl around since the great stapler fight of ought five, where loose leaf pages flew around the mahogany study (not the walnut study), defying our human need for organization and creating a new and equitable status for all office supplies–or so they thought.
WHARVED 