1.
At one time, my father didn't want any Americans.
You want people who have a certain level of consciousness.
Not interested in watches and cars, but seeking
something that helps them.
This is where the lovers and shakers of entertainment and leisure reside.
He autographed an assortment of personal items
(orange juice cartons, sneakers, and a photograph of the Burj Khalifa)
and posed for photos.
He describes himself as a "gloomy" little boy,
"not the least bit amusing,"
who suffered from hemmorhagic nosebleeds:
"everyone felt sorry for me and left me in peace;
they thought my time on earth would be brief.
My father and mother never spoke to me at all."
When Dad poisoned his tea with five heaping spoonfuls of sugar, my teen-age daughter, Addison, warned him that his teeth would fall out and that he’d get diabetes—one of her periodic public-service announcements denouncing meat, cigarettes, hypocrisy, and other toxins. "It rots your molars like a plate of fried dough." He just scowled at her. He didn’t fret about getting diabetes because he had leukemia, and he didn’t fret about having leukemia because he was determined to be a stoic, and he didn’t fret about failing to be a stoic because he didn’t always remember that that’s what he was supposed to be.
He was, in fact, a run-of-the-mill ventriloquist in a cowboy hat.
Trying to reach him always felt like ice fishing.
Think of the warm relationships that many people already enjoy with their Roombas.
He was hungry, and I was dispirited.
My own life, a relic in itself:
a debut role in a Surrealist play
that featured a giant red radish front center stage.
He mentioned it to the foreman of a construction crew across the street,
and learned that one of the workers had been struck in the head by a fish from the sky.
In one swamp a man had brought a ladder, placed it against a tree, and climbed up to look into a heron nest. The heron stabbed him in the eye as he came level with the nest, and the man, his eye and brain pierced, fell dead from the ladder.
2.
In a gallery, fifty-two pairs of sneakers and a
see-through Rimowa suitcase
filled with neon water guns.
It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764.
That afternoon was the thirty-ninth annual
Butter and Egg Days Parade;
the air smelled of lavender and barbecued meat.
As I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol,
while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter,
the idea first started to my mind:
If Jesus is one of God’s helpers,
and Santa is one of God’s helpers,
and we killed Jesus,
why didn’t we kill Santa?
3.
Being a Chilean poet is like being a Peruvian chef
or a Brazilian soccer player
or a Venezuelan model.
It's extremely impressive to me,
and my heart is the size of a raisin.
4.
From the whoopie-cushion antics of Elon Musk
to the Panglossian implacability of Mark Zuckerberg,
they're hoping to build animals out of bitcoin and code,
anti-virus software.
It exposed Brutal Kangaroo and AngerQuake.
It even exposed McNugget.
This got seven likes -- from, among others,
a Taylor Swift fan account,
a small labor startup,
and an anime enthusiast who went by Jesus Christ --
and zero retweets.
Welcome to the desert of the virtual.
Meanwhile, back in Brattleboro, a homespun and better-beloved hope for humanity
made out of chicken wire and birch bark and burlap
rolls along, through pine-dark woods,
that insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naïve, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the Sixties.
5.
If you sneeze or ruffle papers,
you will DEAFEN THOUSANDS.
Sounds are poofy, slimy, or naturale;
they might need to be slappier, or raspier, or nebby (nebulous).
They are hingey, ticky, boxy, zippy, or clacky;
they are tonal, tasty, punchy, splattery, smacky, spanky.
POPPERS + FARTERS,
SQUEAKERS + MOO-ERS,
SNAPPERS, CLACKERS, and MAGICAL BELLS.
There were SHOVEL SHINGERS
and TUBULAR (PLASTIC) THONKS.
There was a box labelled HOOVES,
which did not contain any actual hooves,
and a box labelled UNDENIABLY MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS,
which contained musical instruments.
6.
Does it undermine the gravitas of the moment to know that Gibbon was obese, stood about four feet eight inches tall, and had ginger hair that he wore curled on the side of his head and tied at the back—that he was, in Virginia Woolf’s words, “enormously top-heavy, precariously balanced upon little feet upon which he spun round with astonishing alacrity”? Does it matter that Gibbon’s contemporaries called him Monsieur Pomme de Terre, that James Boswell described him as “an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow,” and that he suffered from, in addition to gout, a distended scrotum caused by a painful swelling in his left testicle, which had to be regularly drained of fluid, sometimes as much as three or four quarts? (Why is dressinggown, like scrotumtightening, a single retracting word, as if English were steadying itself to transform into German?) And does it matter that when, late in life, he made a formal proposal of marriage, the woman he addressed burst out laughing, then had to summon two servants to help him get off his knees and back on his feet?
He walks into the meeting and doesn't acknowledge the rest of us. There's no eye contact and little or no interaction. The moment I start to ask him a question, his head twitches. You can tell he doesn't want to be there.
It’s like he’s contemplating his life’s decisions.
"If I did every single thing that people asked, we would have a lot of raccoons and sloths.”
Hits have included “cheeseburger lamp,” “emotional baggage” (suitcases with sad faces), and “attractive dinosaur in a tuxedo, looking at himself in a mirror and seeing his reflection."
a doughnut made of porcupine quills
a plate of various alien fruits from another planet, photograph
the rest of Mona Lisa, mostly just one big cliff
octopus riding the subway
octopus doctor performing brain surgery, 65mm lens Kodachrome
a very sad parakeet in a ball gown in the style of John Singer Sargent
cartoon t-rex ‘african grey parrot’ monster, photograph 70mm
Ice-T’s face appears to be melting; the babies look like zombies
polymer-clay dragons eating pizza on a boat
7.
Triumph -- rare, lucky, dull, and brief --
is an artifact of editing:
failure, failure, failure, failure,
a moment of jubilation,
and the story ends.
