Attenuated Superlative

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A Letter to My Mom Written Backwards

            Thanks Mom! Love you,

          I’m not angry, just unsettled; I’m not unsettled, just angry. Anger isn’t settling me down. Sorrow isn’t settling me down. I still have to live my days and lead my life, some days feeling half-insane for loneliness, and the only hope for redemption is all the other people at the cafe acting oddly too, driven half-insane for loneliness too. But their half and my half don’t match, don’t align jagged edges, and nobody can take the time and pain and patience to rub the edges together and dull them to a match. Instead we all trade weird looks filled with an uncertain mix of longing and self-loathing, a heady mix. The fumes go to my head.

          And it’s as I’ve observed, everywhere you go there are people identical to you experiencing their own version of the same half-crazed longing and self-loathing which a certain kind of mild yet severe loneliness provides. But suffering doesn’t get you anywhere, there is no crown for it, you don’t get a medal or pop out a surprisingly erudite and accomplished first novel full of a true and originally expressed yearning which brings a tear to the jaded book reviewer’s eye. You don’t get inspiration from suffering: you get inspiration from grinding, grinding jagged edges until they are dulled and manageable. Grinding your time into a kind of jagged focus which in its dullness provides a stable place of routine and compulsion suitable to work. 

          It’s easy to tell yourself the suffering and the grinding do the same thing, accomplish the same ends, get you to the same place. Both entail a kind of introspection which allows for an easy blurring. But the grinding is the real work; the suffering just feels intense and deep and the isolation can make you paranoid, and the paranoia can make you conceited, and there is an ego-stroke in conceit and paranoia which can cyclically justify the intensity and make you think the isolation is an asset. It’s a way to tell yourself that you are important, that’s what’s happening to you is important. It’s not that it’s unimportant. But it’s not helpful.

            Dear Mom, love you with every part of my heart that can understand love.

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The Perils of Peristalsis

As yoga class kicked off the audible sounds of stomach rumbles and digestive processes depressed and horrified all those in attendance, none more so than the yoga teacher who strived to create a class of solemn peace, inclusivity and interconnectedness but now was so thoroughly disgusted that, unable to immediately identify the individual responsible, she roundly castigated the class “You have RUINED the sacred energies running up and down the sacri and pelvi, I cannot tell you how long this nauseating reminder of our body’s inner functionings will continue to demoralize me and the rest of the class but it will be measured in months, not weeks. You are welcome here no more demon!”

Shamed, I slowly rose and rolled up my mat, the hot glares falling upon me on all sides, conscious of so many minds simultaneously and unprompted by anything else but my filthy digestive works imagining my spontaneous human combustion, and suddenly another soft but clearly audible sizzle ripped across the room destroying any semblance of inner peace and meditation anyone might have found as my digestive acids at work and my stomach muscles kneading in and out in a reflexive rippling as they worked the food particles into their constituent molecular units and smaller still, and every other yoga student present, young, old, male, but mostly female, ugly and cute, well-toned, beautiful and accomplished as well as whining, chubby and confused, they all began hissing at me with curled lips and angry expressions, and the mob sentiment which was unleashed was unmistakable and I grew concerned for my continued safety.

Nevertheless I continued my normal routines when departing from yoga including placing my yoga bricks neatly in the stack by the altar at the side of the room, placing the weird long side pillow thing in its stack, neatly folding and placing the blanket in the stack with other blankets when much to my dismay again a denuding and enervating crinkling or sizzling or prickling sensation ran through my stomach and lower organs and bowels, and the accompanying sounds filled the room, overpowering the sounds of the singing bowl and the gong which the yoga teacher had begun frantically beating in hopes of drowning out my unbecoming, unseemly, and deeply intolerant sounds which threatened to destroy the very basis for yoga in our civilization and all others, overpowering the strident and angry mutterings and asides of disgruntled disgusted and disenchanted yogic students, overpowering the reflexive namastes and audible sighs on all sides, until overcome by a mounting rage the class gave up trying to ignore me and turned their withering full attentions on me, flinging bricks at me which went whistling by my ears and knees, hisses and lion’s breaths turning into full-throated yowls of wrath, downward facing tigers and low cobras looming at all sides, straps whipping and stinging my feet and ankles, and a bloodthirsty screaming arose harpy-like on all sides, the instructor and classmates now rising from their mats to give immediate satisfaction to the undeniable urge to destroy utterly the source of these unforgiveable sounds.

The room grew dark as ancient yogi spirits answered sacred summonses from the besieged yoga instructor to come fight the last final fight of spirituality versus carnality (which fight naturally would seek to eliminate such platitudinous binaries and false dichotomies) and they whisped around in ever increasing tornadoes of pure prana, evil laughter and backwards-audio voices chilling me as I picked up my water bottle and fled, vowing never again to eat a peanut butter sandwich an hour before yoga class.

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Spheroids and Sundaes

The earth’s core is a dense ball of chocolate and vanilla ice cream, near gelato in richness and consistency, swirled into asymmetric half-spheres clutching themselves tightly; the chocolate and the vanilla stay distinct and do not melt into a muddy brown. The sphere is immense and perfectly rounded by the immaculate revolution of the larger sphere, which echoes itself in its chilly semi-solid interior. This dense ball of ice cream exerts a magnetic field through the rotating polarity of the chocolate and vanilla, and this is how compasses work, and also why most compasses won’t work correctly in an ice cream parlor.

The mantle is composed of a fluid, roving mixture of hot fudge and hot caramel sauce, and unlike the earth’s core these disparate liquids do combine and separate, recombine in varied ratios and consistencies. They move in a gentle roving sludge and while some purists prefer just hot caramel and other purists prefer just hot fudge, the true sugar aficionado views both stances with disdain. Do not trust those who in their fanciful pursuits of narrow pleasures miss the obvious gluttonies right in front of them.

The earth’s crust is obviously a chocolate magic shell, which explains the occasional tremors and temblors felt by the inhabitants, the repercussions of giant spoons striking and penetrating the shells far away, gouging out pieces of chocolate, irregularly shaped and poised at the brink of either melting or breaking into smaller, irregularly shaped pieces.

Our cities and towns and bridges and skyscrapers and suburbs and exurbs and taco trucks and oversized ten-commandments monuments are little more than chopped peanuts, jimmies, rainbow sprinkles, sliced pineapple. Bits of twix bars and reeses peanut butter cups for those showy mansions owned by the extremely successful and insecure. Snow falls in whipped cream, marshmallow sauce flurries; a cherry on top can only be a heaven no one will ever reach.

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Alligator and Mallard Involved in a Hookup Sex Situation

           Alone at home on a slowly dying Sunday afternoon, Alligator, stretched out on the couch, reaches for his cel phone, changes his mind, picks up the newspaper and tries to read. A few minutes later he inches out an arm for his cel phone, this time picks it up, looks it over, reads a message. Puts it back down. Alligator will not call Mallard, Alligator will not be the one to first text Mallard.

           Mallard is at the lake, splashing around as you might expect, but it’s not play at all, it’s all business. He harangues and finagles, eagles and beagles wear translucent green accounting visors and crunch lollipops and numbers, finally his arugula salad arrives from the deli, delivered by a sweaty tattooed pigeon bike messenger. Mallard gobbles up the arugula, he’s not thinking about Alligator at all.

           The sun goes down. Alligator pours himself a drink. He reads the newspaper, still distracted. Mallard is drinking too. He’s at the bar. He’s the center of attention, shouting and joking with the bartenders, pretending to be mad at the other regulars, shoving his entire beak into a wooden bowl filled with popcorn and kernels fly everywhere. Everyone cracks up and Mallard stands tall in his bar stool, wings outstretched, preening. Soaking it in.

           Alligator is good and drunk by now. This is a mistake on Sundays but it sure happens a lot these days. Finally he gets a text from Mallard. “What r u up to right now. wanta come over.” Alligator slowly gets up from the couch. Goes into his bedroom, opens up a drawer. Puts on his sock garters.