WOULD YOU RATHER

Hypothetical (probably) ponderings for your edification

[thetoadwholivedalone]

Friday, Friday, simply must get down on Friday

Which experience Would You Rather have for your Friday night

-A friend you haven't seen in some time is visiting from out of town, so you make plans to go to dinner and a show with them and their family, but a medical disaster pops up and the only member of their party who's available to go with you is their adult baby cousin, Mikey From Yonkers, who doesn't know what cats are and spends much of the night trying to figure it out. They send him with an envelope containing a generous ballpark amount of money to cover expenses pinned to the lapel of his pleather motorcycle jacket.

Dinner is at Rappaccini's, an upscale (one might argue TOO upscale) Italian eatery where all of the entrees are pasta dishes with one giant piece of pasta (one ravioli, one fusili, one giant coiled noodle of capellini, etc.) adorned with whatever meats and vegetables and a jizzy "artistic" splatter of some tasteless viscous black liquid. Beatrice Rappaccini, the owner, stands on a gilded balcony overlooking the dining area, glaring down imposingly while the music system plays her singing jazzy covers of Red Hot Chili Peppers songs.

The show turns out to be in the basement of the prestigious theater that drew you to agree to it; there The Great Spinozzo, a former Barnum & Bailey clown who has since become a pariah in the clowning community for a variety of mysterious reasons, conducts what amounts to a two-hour fire-and-brimstone revival sermon about how society has always worshipped clowns, how the gods of Mesopotamia were actually the first clowns, how the painted face and joyous manner of the clown is the crucible that divides humanity into the delighted and the fearful, and that the latter are the weak who must be winnowed.

Throughout all of this Mikey keeps trying to get you to play Dice ("Dissssssssssssssse!") with him, wherein you each roll two dice and whoever gets a higher roll wins for that round. If you roll snake eyes he'll point and acknowledge it ("sssssssssssnake eyes!") but it doesn't confer any advantage in the game.

-One of your quieter friends- really more of a friendly acquaintance, but when you hear their name your first thought is "Oh, they're cool! Probably!"- invites you to their birthday dinner. It's on the penultimate floor of what you'd always thought was an office building, but this floor, at least, resembles a classic diner; classic except for the waitresses all have nametags that say "Flo" and wear antlered crowns covered in runes. There is one long table that snakes through the dining room, and you find a seat amongst your friend's multitude of diverse and boisterous friends.

On one side of you is Lyle, who had a one-night stand with your friend last year but it's fine, it's cool, he's over it, they're totally pals, it's fine, he's totally happy with his silent, glowering girlfriend who he brought with him, it's fine, he's doing really great, it's fine. He laughs too much, too loudly, at his own Bazooka Joe-grade jokes. On the other side is Tammy, who thinks that everything in everyone's life is a metaphor for The Odyssey and keeps unsolicitedly comparing things to it (all drugs and alcohol are like the lotus-eater's lotuses, every mean person is Poseidon or Polyphemus or Circe, every decision is between Scylla and Charybdis) but pronouncing everything wrong ("Sky-la", "o-diss-USE", "Teal-MATCH-us", "ATHE-na", "Kirk", etc). Across from you is Jave, who spends the entire dinner gripping the table like it's the handlebars of a roller coaster and grinning determinedly straight into your eyes, and whenever someone relates an anecdote they relate a made-up-sounding more extreme one.

The food- all paid for- is typical diner faire, but with good substitutions to accommodate different dietary needs (if you're vegan, for instance, you have more options than just salad). The Flos happily take your order, but instead of classic diner talk they communicate to the kitchen in ominous aphorisms ("Tholdred's flesh, rinsed in the tears of seven widows" "The final virgin's lament before the hungering sigh of the barrow" "Six murdered kings beneath the mountain, awoken by the houndmother's kiss"). When the entrees arrive, your friend, speaking the loudest you've ever heard them, gives a speech about how they're so glad you could all be there for the final year of their teens (you'd somehow assumed they were a year or two older than you) and the significance of the number 19 in Stephen King's Dark Tower Cycle, and concludes it by demanding that everybody close their eyes and repeat the Gunslinger's Oath after them. You never get a chance to speak with them for the rest of the evening.

[thetoadwholivedalone]

America Edition

Happy 4th of July or what have you. Would you rather:

-a bison breaks into your living room one night and eats you, and regardless of where that happened you become a ghost in the White House. You perceive time in the world of the living in a frenetic, disjointed, non-linear fashion, such that if you drift into the oval office in one moment you might witness Trump yelling at a staffer for getting his McDonald's order wrong and in the next you might witness William Henry Harrison, hopeful tears in his eyes, monologizing to himself about the great things he intends to accomplish in his term(s) in office while sending staffers to fetch him more handkerchiefs. You can't seem to interact with the physical world, but occasionally when you see Barack Obama and he's alone he'll look in your direction with a thoughtful, pitying gaze.

There are two other ghosts; there is Bradley, a 13-year-old who died during a field trip in the late nineties, likes Staind and Tony Hawk and thinks that everything else is gay, and there is Gore Vidal, who in death has abandoned erudition and now just witnesses history in the hopes of figuring out who was gay (a lot of people, but almost none of the ones you'd hope) and makes catty commentary about it to himself. Bradley attempts to bully you and make up a juvenile, probably homophobic taunt out of your name; Gore Vidal thinks you're a figment of his imagination and either ignores you or yells at you to leave him alone.

-you reside in a stylized, resplendent version of a prairie homestead out among the proverbial amber waves of grain, living with your beautiful, nameless spouse and children (who do not speak, but communicate their love for you in smiles that convey so much more than words ever could) and enjoying the amenities of a pastoral life with none of the labor. There is a pool and a jacuzzi. This has been your life for as long as you can remember; you know that you have friends and family who come and visit, but when you stop and think about it (but why would you stop and think about it, really) you can't pinpoint exactly when the last time was that anyone did, and it seems like you can only ever reach other peoples' answering machines.

Occasionally you have disconcertingly realistic-feeling dreams where you're confined in darkness, inscrutable machinery clamped onto your mouth, scalp and loins, surrounded by the sounds of metal scraping against metal amidst an unidentifiable liquid rustle of large, organic matter. Less occasionally you have other dreams of standing in the uncannily familiar street of a town far from your perfect home, looking up to the sky and seeing the giant dark orbs that have descended from the angry sky, their surface a tortured mixture of wiring and gunmetal plating and enormous unblinking eyes and retracting-and-expanding lamprey mouths; voices speak from within the orbs in some unfathomable language as the mouths inhale, but they're largely drowned out by the screams of the people and animals all around you as they're sucked up towards the blasphemous things and their gaping mouths.

[thetoadwholivedalone]

The Staff

Choose a WalCorp employee:

-Derek from accounting, who does his damndest to turn every conversation into a discussion of the dream he had when he was 13 where he found an angel in his dad's gardening shed (in the form of an eyeless, terribly, excruciatingly old masculine being moaning to itself as its graying wings molted) and whether or not it really was a dream

-Tiffany the 17 year old reception intern, who took the job because her parents made her and would rather be off playing Griffons (alone, because the friends she started playing it with in elementary school all got drawn away by sports and makeup and boys and college applications) in the hills and fields outside of town. Her character is Nightfyre, a griffon with raven parts instead of eagle parts and snow leopard parts instead of lion parts, who is a vampire, but a good one

-Hank from sales, the "funny guy", who is actually a convict from the post-apocalyptic future who was offered a pardon by the fragmented remains of the US government if he goes back in time, infiltrates WalCorp and prevent it from releasing a plague. Except that Hank Pulaski, bachelor and Poughkeepsie's foremost Bon Jovi fan, feels more real than Twitch Milligan, wasteland scavenger and smuggler, ever did; a garbled message from his own time implied that time might be a closed, immutable loop and that Hank Pulaski always existed (and never succeeded) in the early 21st century; and also he's fallen in love (or possibly just sexual obsession) with Theodore Wallace, the company's octogenarian founder and owner.

-Claudia from HR, who's constantly trying to invite co-workers over to drink Fresca and marathon Witchblade, and on winter vacations goes to an abandoned lighthouse in New England to sing an a capella version of the sax solo from Careless Whisper out to the vast grey sea, often impassively observed by a group of seals

[thetoadwholivedalone]

This is your home

Would you rather: -your world, for the foreseeable future, is a maze with garishly orange shag carpeting and paneling to look like wood on the walls. The walls and halls rearrange themselves, or maybe it all just looks the same, or maybe you're just bad at mazes, but it seems like there isn't a way out. At least often enough that you don't starve, you will find plates of food that fits your dietary needs and restrictions; it's fine, it's adequate, it's not great. Occasionally you hear people talking; their words are never clear, and if you approach them or call out to them you hear them rapidly move away, possibly with the hint of mocking laughter in the last snippets before they leave your earshot. You aren't alone, though; there is a creature in the maze with you. It has the body of a bull (I mean, a bovine, it doesn't have any genitals or udders) and the feet and head of television's Kelsey Grammer. You hear it roaring and charging through adjoining halls; the only time you've seen it is in your dreams, which are always of the beast charging towards you in slow-motion through a black void, its face grimacing in determination. Occasionally you come across bloodied pieces of clothing or hair, or perhaps even the splattered remnants of someone who the creature ran down and devoured, and you know that that is almost certainly how one day you'll die. -On a hot July day (it's only been a day, hasn't it? it has to have been a day, days end and this has to end, this can't be the rest of your life but what if it is) you are stuck in a broken elevator with Senator Ulysses Deruchette Terwilliger. Sarah McLachlan's "Witness" is playing on a loop. There is someone ostensibly working on getting the elevator up and running, but all they seem to do is buzz in with the comm system and ask as if anything's happened (it hasn't) and blame you for the break. The Senator, not especially distraught about these circumstances, has a hip flask of molasses that he periodically takes coquettish finger-dips from, sometimes offering a fingerful to you or rubbing some onto his bolo tie. He learned this morning about the concept of lesbianism, and he's happy to drawl at length about how amused and disgusted and aroused he is by it. He thinks that everything you say is hilarious, and that you're saying it to amuse him. He is impervious to harm, and if there is life outside of this elevator he will outlive you and die happy and proud, surrounded by fifteen grandchildren exactly like him.

[thetoadwholivedalone]

Billy and the Meat

WOULD YOU RATHER:

a) you sit by an indoor swimming pool- there are no doors or windows- watching Billy Lipinski swim back and forth. You went to middle and high school with him; you were nodding acquaintances who occasionally shared classes and perhaps even worked together on a project, but you never got to know him or feel compelled to get to know him. He, for his part, seemed to have his own thing going on, worlds away from yours. You don't recall if he was ever actually a swimmer.

After an indeterminate amount of time he emerges from the pool. You are your own age, and he's 18, just like he was when you last saw or thought about him, but with great manful whorls of hair in patches on his upper half. He's dripping not the way you'd expect but in a furious torrent coming down around him, as if he were under a waterfall, and it doesn't let up as he waddles towards you and you kiss (in the most generous sense of the word; both your mouths are loose and limp, so you're really just mashing them together and wagging your tongues around. At least once you feel the clank of tooth hitting tooth). He takes off his goggles and you see that he has no eyes, but you do not recoil.

b) you are an indefinite guest at the suburban home of the butcher and his beautiful adult daughter. You have only pajamas to wear. Each day the butcher, who forever wears an executioner's cowl and communicates only in a guttural, menacing laugh, comes home with his muscular person slathered in blood and an inexplicable amount of dirt and other filth; he watches Young Sheldon until it is time for dinner. Only he may sit at the family -sized dining table, ripping off bits of his raw steak and tucking them under his hood and laughing; you and his beautiful adult daughter (who, like her Papá, has no name) sit barefoot on the floor at the foot of the table, a plate of celery sticks and Cool Whip between you.

If the butcher's beautiful adult daughter has complaints about this life she never expresses them; she sings endlessly, cheerfully, about a boy-prince who succumbed to a fever and the different flowers that each of his adoring subjects put in his casket, all the while cleaning the things her father touched the day before and not acknowledging you beyond a smile.

You are free to leave the house, but outside there is a circuitous labyrinth of interchangeable locked two-story homes. If you knock on a door, one or some or all the members of a nuclear WASP family will stare at you from a nearby window, fascinated and terrified and apparently unaware that you can see them. If you manage to break into one, you find yourself back at the butcher's home

[thetoadwholivedalone]

Until death do you part

CHOOSE A WIFE

Esperanza Giordana Montparnasse: indistinctly of some Romance-language-speaking nationality; she plays the violin at every possible opportunity and brings it everywhere. She will never make eye contact with or directly address you or any other person. She speaks entirely in violin-based metaphors, and her idea of talking dirty is to describe how physically handsome various 19th century male violinists were. She is seven feet tall.

Madeleine Aballister-Shmacke: forever in fancy full-length dresses, with a faint wind constantly billowing her mocha-brown hair. She talks in a sultry, melodramatic Lauren Bacall voice, getting super intense and angry for no discernible reason whenever interior design comes up; devoid of political opinions. She insists that she was not Intended to have a day-job. Her eight-year-old son, Abacus, whose father died in a cheese-tasting accident, always wears a bow-tie, never speaks in your presence, and hugs you whenever he sees you, not letting go until you push or pry him off.  Abacus ​grows up and goes to college and eventually gets a family of his own and dies, but his mannerisms as described never change. Upon reaching puberty he almost immediately shoots up to two feet taller and becomes intensely muscular- "roughly the size of a barge", one might say. His facial hair will only ever amount to a few rattish, pube-y wisps above the corners of his mouth. Madeleine will frequently caress his biceps and rhapsodize about how strong and prosperous he is, comparing him to various generals and kings.

Both wives are 38 years old, forever.

[thetoadwholivedalone]

Bring me some plantains, brother

WOULD YOU RATHER:

a) No longer have to (or be able to) pay for any food, clothing, prescription medicines or household consumables, but in order to acquire them you'd have to ask the air and then Hulk Hogan would come lumbering into wherever you were, mustache-first, eyes bulging, glistening with sweat and not speaking a word, and arduously, with a lot of roars and heavy breathing, poop it out. It would come out dry and for all intents and purposes clean, although if it was an individual item over $20 it would come out in a moist pink membrane that you'd have to take apart with your bare hands. The things would vanish after 24 hours, and they would be useless to anyone who didn't witness them come out of the Hulkster's butt. If you attempt to apologize or explain he beats you up.

OR

b) Live in a world where at the end of every rain dollar bills of various sizes and your favorite food served the way you like it come fluttering gently down from the sky, the Republicans continue to exist but their attempts to affect public policy and federal law never last for more than a day before it fizzles, and every time you go outside you're guaranteed to see at least one instance of an interspecies animal friendship. BUT. You are married, forever, to Donovan and Matthilde.

Donovan is a 29-year-old white dude with a beard and a bun who grew up in Menlo Park but talks with a fake cowboy accent and dialect. Matthilde is a 22-year-old who grew up in Portland but decided she wanted to have an Icelandic accent. She wears nothing but flowy dresses that are basically giant loose tank-tops/pillowcases with arm-and-head-holes adorned with birds or flowers. She dropped out of art school when a teacher tried to encourage her to draw or paint things that weren't birds or flowers, and while hitch-hiking through Humboldt she met Donovan, who was touring the coast with his guitar, crashing parties to explain feminism to college freshman women, and it was love at first sight.

They have a band which has gone through many incarnations and been retitled with many different Thomas Pynchon quotes- the two of them have remained the only constants, with their egocentrism and inability to handle criticism constantly alienating different bassists, drummers, accordionists, etc. Donovan writes the dumb, faux-philosophical lyrics; Matthilde mostly takes some molly and then dances along with her eyes closed, sometimes uncoordinatedly banging a tambourine, and maybe once an album she sings a song. Your parents love their music, and it's pretty much all they want to talk about when you see them. Their surprising wealth of fans (which keeps them financially afloat, so they never have to work) views you as a parasite and regularly send you e-mails disparaging your looks and your perceived lack of worth.

In conversations Donovan gets huffy when accused of being privileged, and regularly rants about how being an artist and a dreamer is harder than being POC or queer or trans because there're no parades or hashtag movements for people like him. Matthilde eerily echoes his various talking points. If you try to argue or debate with them about anything Donovan reacts as if you're frothing at the mouth and constantly tells you to calm down, whereas Matthilde just gives you a condescending smile and then boops you on the nose or pats your hair.

They will never have sex with you without your consent, but if you try to so much as kiss anyone else you will be pulled away, like a disinvited True Blood vampire, and the only sex they'll have with you is Handmaid's Tale-style while Donovan whispers his lyrics in your ear as poetry.

They smell, at all times, like old, cold TV dinner curry.

[thetoadwholivedalone]

Sic Itur Ad Astra

WOULD YOU RATHER:

1) Have a team of space explorers remotely (via skype) at your command- you cannot go into space and they can never come to earth- who regularly send you beautiful and thoughtful but functionally useless gifts. Kalan-Xyr, their commander, frequently accidentally calls you "mom"/"dad". But the only way to financially support yourself is by working as a telemarketer for a broom company. Most of the people you call are senile. You share a cubicle with Curtis Washerman, who constantly eats makeshift casseroles of Cheese Whiz, hardboiled eggs and diced Slim Jims. He bonds with customers over the phone through bigotry- his favorite words are "cuck" and "beta"- and whenever he makes a sale he does a dance routine to "Here I Go Again", most of which is making karate moves in your direction while he glares at you. He will never leave or die.

2) Each day a team of 4-5 horses of various sizes, colors and breeds silently attend to you, carrying out any of the following tasks (and naught beside) on your behalf: filling out financial forms, playing the piano, feeding dwarf hamsters, and preparing cold half-sandwiches. They are never the same horses. In their idle moments they give you a look of vague disappointment. Every 15-30 days there will also be a mule with a bow-tie who can help you get dressed and deliver anything to your work that you forgot at home. Your friends and family will all talk about the horses in uncomfortable euphemisms and snide quips, the way people in mainstream 90s shows talked about homosexuality. Once a year an acquaintance who you'd rather not interact with will have a breakthrough where they give a heartfelt speech about how they've come to realize that the horses don't make you a bad person, just an inferior one, and then one of your other friends, touched by their compassion, will start dating them and eventually marry them.

[thetoadwholivedalone]

Mutability and Eternity

WOULD YOU RATHER:

-have the ability to shapeshift into any nonhuman form, but everyone in the world becomes an obsessive Limp Bizkit fan, even birdsongs sound like their music, and within twenty years a dystopian Durst-governed world-state takes power OR

-be impervious to age and disease, and be able to share that with up to three people and two animals of your choice, but whenever you're physically intimate with someone an indestructible, inescapable apparition of Ted Cruz manifests to stare at you and grin, unspeaking (although if it goes on long enough he starts to emit a febrile, whimpering giggle), close enough that you can feel his wet, hammy breath on your face. The others you have gifted immortality also share the Cruz visions when they are intimate with anyone.

[thetoadwholivedalone]

The Basics

WOULD YOU RATHER

a) live in a world where Donald Trump typically doesn't exist, except that under the full moon you become him and wreak havoc

b) live a utopian existence, with all of your dreams fulfilled and only as much conflict as you need in order to experience the satisfaction of overcoming a challenge, but you frequently have vivid (so vivid that you often wonder which world is the dream, and which the reality) nightmares about watching your loved ones die around you in a horrendous apocalypse

c) have the ability to heal and, once a day, resurrect by laying on hands, but everytime you do some randomly selected person you know (maybe a kid from kindergarten you've forgotten, maybe your child) transforms, permanently and in both body and mind, into a gray swan

d) have the ability to reverse the weird relativity of time (i.e. in real life, searching for your keys for what feels like a minute turns out to be seven, but working for what feels like an hour on a slow day turns out to be closer to ten minutes; in this case, you'd be able to switch that around), but whenever you see a non-human animal you (and only you) hear it whispering threats and insults at you.