A Story That Talks About Talking Is Like Chatter to Chattering Teeth, and Every Set of Dentures Can Attest to the Fact That No..

A story that talks about talking is like chatter to chattering teeth, and every set of dentures can attest to the fact that no …

JAROD KINTZ, BENSON BRUNO

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

A story that talks about talking is like chatter to chattering teeth, and every set of dentures can attest to the fact that no …

Copyright © 2011 by Jarod Kintz, Benson Bruno.

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-3935-7 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-3936-4 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 07/19/2011

Contents

Letter to the Editor

Preface

3

Organs

3.1

Shame. Self-Exhibition. Good Porno.

3.14

Good Videos Are Hard To Find

3.141

Jogging with Crum in the Park

3.1415

Booked On All the Talk Shows

3.14159

Shouting amongst themselves

Love, I love it like an airplane loves a helicopter, but not as much as a bat admires a butterfly

Seeing

I am the mouth that represents the People’s Republic of Chin

The Courtier

X=EIT (Please solve for Y)

Pain

Ten fingers wouldn’t dare try lying to eleven toes

Distinction

I plead the Fifth—Beethoven’s symphony, that is

The Conversation

What makes you think I’ll share my pudding with you, Jell-O Brains?

Against Bicycles

How many groups of 17 syllables have died so that haikus might live?

After The Law

When I think of you, I immediately think of something else

Conspiracies

I’ll siphon your tears with an eyedropper

To Construct a Defense and Comprehend it Without Fear, and to Prove that the Side of the Prosecution is the Irrational Straight Line to Disaster

You’re yelling at me with your facial expression

Judgment

The hotel was as empty as my heart

Shoes

The spark that lights my flint-colored boxers on fire

Escape

T-shirts now available in dustpan format

The Hair

Bottled-up rage, sold by the shoe-full with an earful of noseful for your halitosis toes—but not on Tuesday

Tomatoes

Dance like there’s nobody watching. Or filming. Never mind that creepy guy in the corner with the camcorder. Just keep dancing.

33 Steps Away From Recovery

The sky was as blue as orange could get. I love sunsets at noon, and forks disguised as spoons.

Doughnuts

If you share your soup, I’ll share my wisdom. I brought a spoon, but did you bring a pen? How are you going to take notes, you fool!

Anatomy of a Relationship

Yesterday’s gone like bubblegum and shoes made from hollowed-out kittens (limit two per order, please)

Geometry

Remix

X

How many scarecrows make up a murder?

Breakfast

Death isn’t black or white; it’s red, like an orange

Trash

The elephant in the room is a hippopotamus disguised as a rhinoceros who may be a lover of bestiality known as politics

Travel

I’ll breath into a paper airplane, so my written words can find voice and sail on the wind to your butterfly ears

The 100 Meter Dash

How many how manys does it take to change a man named Mr. Lightbulb?

People Who Are Praised As Being Beautiful

I have a watch shaped like a coffin, because the time of my death will be 3:33, verse three

Llamas

I am the coconut in the pineapple (together we can!)

Plumbing

The prisoner cares about four places: prison, the past, the future, and grandmother’s shed

Noses

You’ve got to think about what you bring to the table, before somebody else brings you to the table—as dinner

Africa

Beer on my shoulder is beer on tap, provided I’m turned around and you want to get my attention

Europe

Pigs are so close to humans anatomically that I wonder what people bacon would taste like

Pumpkin

Seven times seven is a whole bunch of tissues

Spleen

Blow your nose in my diaphragm and I’ll tell you my dreams

Shadow

All the letters from A to Z couldn’t express what you mean to me. Not without cloning them and using some over and over

Pantheism

It’s not a booger, it’s a bit of avocado smeared on my sleeve

Vanilla

I tread lightly and walk in place, on a treadmill, silently, for fear of angering my feet

Flavors

I want to be an actor, instead of 88% yellow

Playing Doctor

I’d rather ride two unicycles at the same time than one bicycle twice

History

Napoleon made war like I make love—from a height of about 68 centimeters. (I wear platform shoes while I’m on my knees)

Anality

An upper class man of uppercase letters

Surgery

Men are pigs, and women are sausages

Revelations

One unicycle, two bicycles, three tricycles, and Orafoura

Story

Time is certainly sticky enough to saturate pancakes

World Jogging

We were meant to be together, separately, and alone

Legacy

Love is an empty bottle, and it makes my heart thirsty thinking how fast I chugged it

Judd Jogg’s Sub-Saharan Reach

A lot has happened since those days, like many nights

An Auction

You can’t lock up ideas in cages like animals or inmates. It’s just not humane!

Murderer’s Killer Toasted

To know more than everyone is to be in more pain than anyone

Power Shift

When I write like a teenager, I have a squeakier writing voice

We the People

Sandra Oh has such a surprising last name. Surprise! Oh!

Poetry

I am the shadow behind the laughter

Famine

Pure hydration water filter/adult diaper

Plurality

Call me Clyde. I’d make a good Clydesdale. Call me Dale.

Afterwards

An Interview with Benson Bruno

A story that talks about talking is like chatter to chattering teeth, and every set of dentures can attest to the fact that no matter how close of a relationship teeth have to the mouth, teeth don’t talk, even about the cold air that rushes in as the warm air from words—sentence necklaces—pushes out to define, beautify, and dangle from the neck of civilization like a timeless watch that is broken and can’t tell time but still clings to the wrist of man as if its life, and the life of its owner, mankind, depended on it—and it is depended upon, not to tell time, but to reassure us that our time will never arrive, that we will never be asked to leave the amusement park called Life—and in that way this story is like most other stories in that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, though in this case there are two middles that are buffered by a layer of fat, and though this story could accurately be labeled as chubby it most certainly is not obese, and these middles are not twins, not brothers, not clones, but they are distinct entities whose relationship is closer to that of man and his ghost after he leaves this world—which all men eventually will, though in certain cases, mine for instance, there is no indication that the laws of nature of which men like Newton have defined so well will actually apply—which is kind of worrisome for me because how to you financially plan for retirement when you plan on living another eternity after the age of 65?—but that is neither here nor there nor in a purgatory state nor in some arbitrary state whose lines are randomly drawn by some imperialistic government for the sole purpose of taxing imports and exports at the detriment of the free market and for the sole benefit of the ruling elite, whose eventual demise has been foretold by Dunbar’s magical number and the power of digital friend generators which will lead the way to convoluted revolutions by vigilant volunteers who seek to overthrow the tiered structure of the Geodesic Dome Society that lives and breathes within the lungs of the legal system and its shadowy arm that slithers in the night like a legislative snake as it strangles like a python named Monty Bank, the man behind all of these echoing meditations and, as a conceivable bundle of sense impressions bearing sinister secrets, political intrigues, aliases, nesting doll figments (figs inside mints inside amputated pregnant Russian girls), or nothing at all, revealing a world of language where everything is just a spiraling illusion until, for the vague arrangement of men being strung along, men of offensive decency, the dregs of urbanity, buffoonish fops who spend all their time perfecting various transcendent manias: promoting the lower limbs, their moderate behavior and elongation, healing through history, mastering the hands of time (especially their use in qualifying its explosion), defying the sun, inverting undergarments, going mad upon arrival (destination everywhere), serial womanizing, loving—loving above all, loving that loves to express itself by, through its own self-serfdom (trying to make it work the field of abundance), through embroadying it in the same spilling fleshpot, glutting it with their other passions, falling sick over it, loping to elope with it, gaining it, losing it, gaining it, killing it, killing yourself, gaining it—and convey all of their thoughts entirely through the yak-yap-yawp of clever jokes, elegant plops of the lowest humor and something less, as they curl their mustaches, lip-mops which undeniably have a certain charm about them, whether pencils whiskers curling upward with certain reluctance, a downward plunge, a bush cloud, a stubble line, or another lip style nowhere described within these pages, men of the most reckless disorder, fundamentally lacking in understanding of themselves, others, the events surrounding their lives, and the wisdom of Marcus, who may confound your own seeking after self-knowledge if, in contemplating the simplest and most honest of personal reflections and becoming skeptical of his lack of consciousness about there being anyone listening, you wake up in a hall of mirrors, talking like an old woman about the glory of youth, of love lost, love gained, love sold, love borrowed, love stolen, love returned after fifty years with a note of apology and a five dollar bill for interest accrued (as if inflation wasn’t a factor of the heart!), and love interests who turned out to be not that interesting at all, but were more of a fling, like a slingshot of impulsivity that bang against the heart like a knock at the door, but not quite like a knock-knock joke, but more like a pizza delivery guy that looks like James Dean and sounds like that one guy from that one TV show you always remember watching from when you were young—but that all seems so long ago now, and it was, but you don’t know how many more years you have in front of you or behind you if you turn your back on your future, but either way the present is only a door to your future, a door that looks like a window and tastes like the past, only fresher, much fresher, like green grass in the spring or honeysuckle from a plant you found on a bike ride while you were out jogging, even though you have knees so bad they’d make Stalin blush like a Catholic nun with nun chucks shoved up the rear and of a man named Chuck Nunn, who may or may not have an enlarged prostrate due to excessive spending by central bankers to central bankers in the name of the people, who definitely did not ask to be probed and robbed and disrobed and disqualified from ever achieving the American Dream known only by its haziness and grogginess that occurs when a people get woken up abruptly and become disoriented and look to the Orient for growth, even though no amount of hormone injection into the banking system is going to save this corporatist state we are existing in like we were all fish trapped in the sky trying to swim with wings made of promises and entitlements to each and every person, with no regard to where the money is coming from or who is running the printing presses, and the press doesn’t cover it, and we all try to cover ourselves but the tide is out and we are all naked, and boy, doesn’t Warren Buffet have a fabulous body for an old man? I ask myself as I lay on the nude beach called Main Street, and I marvel how Wall Street is the only street to feature people wearing swimming suits, even though my train of thought left the station yesterday, on its way northeast from Augusta, Georgia to Jackson Hole, Wyoming traveling 33 miles per hour, and if you suppose that a plane leaves Portland, Oregon 44 hours later and travels to Denver, Colorado at a rate of 4,444 miles per hour, which group of people would be the first to be groped by TSA employees upon arrival, but that question is neither here nor there, nor did it pass through security checkpoints itself, because it didn’t want its naked body being seen by those vulgarians and their bulging pants who rob us all of our dignity and our liberty in the name of security and freedom and there was something else too, but it makes me so mad that I’ve taken up jogging and I have decided that if I need to be somewhere, I need to leave early enough to be able to run there, because my bicycle is broken, and so is my heart, and the thump, thump, thump of my feet pounding the asphalt is slightly louder than the thump, thump, thump of my heart trying to escape its rib cage like a convict behind bars, and I feel so bad and I feel so bad for it that I want to shout to the heavens, Why me? Why now? But deep down, past the acid reflux, I know why, and the why is not as important as the who, which in this case is Agatha, but it has happened before and no doubt it will happen again and again and again until I can figure out how to stop this Rube Goldberg emotional roller coaster known as a relationship from taking me from point A to point K and then back to D before Z and then B, and stop it from doing it in the most painful and painfully inefficient way that only a government employee could appreciate; but that is just what I need in my life: some appreciation—both someone to appreciate me, and also for me to stop and appreciate what I have, and not always compare it to what I had, or what I could have had, which does me no good, and what does me no good can only be bad, unless of course it is neutral, and in that case it is a waste of time, which would itself be bad, since I am trying to move forward with my backwards existence and find a woman, I scream on planes, trains, at high IQ events, concerts, in bars, home depot, Agatha, I say to the form sinking into the couch, lover, sweet sausage lump, can you weld something for me, I need to go higher, past the stratosphere; but she just sat there weeping, not welding, staining her blouse, a blouse which had meaning for me that it did not to anyone else—she had picked it out so tenderly at the thrift shop (it was the only blouse that hung to the floor from the coat hanger), a delicate irony in itself as she never noticed how it matched her tears, and though she didn’t care for keeping up with the fashionable way to wear a top, I helped her put it on with the tag at the back of her neck all the same, pleased to hear that it did not chafe, but tickled—she only ever laughed with those eyes—but she still sat there, not welding, raising her arms over her head to wipe her eyes as she often would to drain the humours from her arm, which led a me, a lesser me, at that moment—every such instance provoked a different response, like fingers that each twitch and grasp in their own way—to wonder ‘could I feel a bone around that armpit’ and poked, but timidly and briefly, telling myself I was satisfied with uncertainty, unlike another time when her pit reminded me of a certain inkblot they used to show me and which would trigger my temporal lobe, prolonging my cubed existence, or like other times, when I would hop about anxiously, not paying much attention, she getting used to the tickle of the tag at her nape, I getting used to her not shivering with delight and letting her put the blouse on however she wanted, she seldom saying anything to me in reply except to complain of her sensitive tooth and keeping her arms stiff as I began to live for others, for the satisfaction their envy or pain brought me, her knees raising higher and higher as she walked, like an insubordinate enlistee, I torn between taking a knee hammer to her or meeting her challenge; her hidden hopes would make me go a bit crazy, like a bouncing electron—not very, just a bit, I have a certificate of sanity from my psychiatrist, my social position is defined, my drive unpredictable—were I to have pursued the answer, so I revolved about her at first, curious but unseeking, anticipating the results of the welding and eager to claim a child of our own from the park; but after taking her for perms and watching her hair coil inward, my dream began to flail outward like the arms of a spiral galaxy and disperse, and I became unhappy at watching her eat breakfast platters heedlessly and right up to the end, but not unlucky in having my innocence questioned as my pursuant cut a swath straight into me, as animal cell became plant cell in shifting from cadavers to gardening (time was allotted daily for outside activity), for there was always something that remained untouched between us, a common mystery I shared with her name: it sounds so old: why, I wondered, and if I could have been with her in her last moments, I should have asked her, after her arms were not stiff but before I was seen pulling up my pants: in what sense did you take my words, and would you have trusted me to remain silent because silence is so much louder than the sound of my urethra while Agatha steps on it with the new high heels I bought her off the internet from some guy who said he no longer needed them, as he was done running marathons, so I bought them for Agatha so she could have proper footwear while she went jogging with me, and that plan worked out OK, as she would run and I would follow behind on my bicycle while peeping at the road and world through my black high-powered binoculars and hope to catch a glimpse inside the lives of people, specifically sexy people—women, mostly—and that is how things went for weeks until Agatha got suspicious of my motivations for making her run, and she had the audacity to accuse me of accusing her, through deed rather than words, of being fat, and I assured her that was not the case, that I didn’t need deeds to tell her she was fat, and then I told her I thought she was fat, but I said that it was OK because skinny women reminded me of upside down exclamation points, and her massively large girth reminded me of a time before I was born, a time in a land far, far away, in another galaxy perhaps, where all the people were obese except for the king, and the people, thinking their king was not one of them, and rightly so, decided to eat their king one day, and then I recall Agatha yelling me in the middle of the parking lot, in a handicapped parking space, while I sit there and take her abuse like a man, all the while some geriatric couple waits patiently to try to fit their boat of a car into the spot that Agatha and I are arguing in, and in that moment I realized how much I loved Agatha, so I told her and I said we should celebrate my new found feelings by eating a bucket of fried chicken, with 16 ounce drinks filled with sausage gravy to wash it all down with, and she readily agreed so we walked to the local chicken joint to affirm our commitment and love for one another, and then we walked to Wal-Mart to hang out and meet up with some friends of ours for a little down time, just living life up American Dream style, and we thought about how good we had it, and how probably everyone in third world countries wishes they had the healthy lifestyle that we had, and then we went to the underwear section so I could admire Agatha’s sexy body in some beige colored granny panties as we giggled and slobbered everywhere in our lust for life and each other and all the clerks and common workers were so angry with jealousy at how happy Agatha and I were, and that these serfs had to pick up after us like the American royalty we were, but we didn’t care, this is what being born into a first world lifestyle affords you—the luxury to eat, drink, and be merry, and not concern ourselves with the feelings of others, because who are those dangerous others anyway, and how did they get here in this country but I didn’t ponder that for too long, as I was hungry again, and Agatha knew I had an insatiable apatite for love and fried foods and candy that smells like success, because I equate success in this country to carnivals, and therefore to me and my imagination, the upper one percent must reek of cotton candy, but the things you’ve earned, things you’ve made, things you’ve done, and things you’ve said—these are the important things in your life, and remember I am not the vase; I am the water in the vase—my shape is not my own, though the vase has a masculine, sculpted look resembling a body builder, and I have form, but I am formless; but at least I have you, my flower—which reminds me: don’t look to the man in the desert to teach you how to navigate the sea, unless the sea has recently retrenched, exposing the harshness of our interconnectedness with nature, and be wary of the blackness, darkness, except for an ear, listening, not merely hearing, because I believe the shadows make shapes in my mind, flightless birds and soaring lies; but above all love—love: make it for fun, make it for free, make it for the children, like Nikes, except those are made by children, and children should not make love, even and especially not under adult supervision, but I do say yes to superstitious love, magical love, love found in enchanted forests with fairies and unicorns with prophylactics on their horns, and The Mythical Mr. Boo, and Orafoura, and even Mr. Fizzlebush too; love makes you want to dance like you’re in a wheelchair, underwater, on the moon, with a Martian from Venus; love gives voice to all the mute buttons in all the remote controlled relationships, like my grandparents, who have been married for 50 years, or as I like to think of it: twice as long as my grandpa’s new wife has been alive; which is curious because my grandfather was a farmer back when man first began domesticating animals, and some even say my grandpa introduced the concept of crop rotation and letting fields lie fallow (triple crop rotation), and my grandma would probably say he let her field go fallow, but that’s just carrots to the rabbits to the magician’s hat, if you know what I mean—and if you do, please tell me, because I’m not quite sure myself, and I feel like I could go to the moon, via a wolf’s howl; I feel like eating tomorrow as yesterday’s leftovers; I feel like a foot massage in the middle of my back; I feel like my friend Johnny Purple, who is like Brad Pitt mixed with Tom Green mixed with the color blue and a complimentary orange thrown in for free, and I recall that there were two of us and only one seat, but still we rode on—yes, I said we still rode on to the rodeo, and I shouted, Find me the Gordian Knot and I’ll untie it like I slip on my loafers: using the latest surgical procedures and a machinelike precision with my yellow laser (not a stream of urine) and a total commitment to producing problem solving techniques for the world conquest oriented, and then, once we had come to a screeching halt, I said in a quiet, confident voice, Just because I commission a statue of myself doesn’t make me an historical figure. I mean I am, but not because of that, and then I decreed: do not walk through the Arches of Triumph with slouched shoulders and a posture of defeat, as I proceeded to shuffle into the public space, because while everybody else studied the American Revolution, I studied the French Revolution, but the thing I could never figure out was why they all spoke Russian, had Russian names, and kept referring to themselves as Bolsheviks, who I later came to find out don’t believe in competition, as everyone in communist countries are as equal as Splenda is equal to Equal, so go ahead, toss some sweetener in my beer, and I’ll drink the world record for the longest book title like I’d drink a Guinness: in one gulp, and that’s saying something, after I’ve already said a lot of somethings, or perhaps a lot of nothing propped up by airy words like a propeller pushing through the hazy sky at midnight on some sunny noon day

By Jarod Kintz and Benson Bruno

Letter to the Editor

Dear iUniverse Publishers,

We can’t begin to express how overjoyed we are that you have taken it upon yourselves to gloss over the numerous grammatical abnormalities of this book, set the letters into the type case of your Gutenberg press, and distribute it into the gutters of Bloomington, Indiana.

Personally, we have big hopes for the prospects of (See Front Cover)’s success.

This is a book to be purchased by peoples of all nations, faiths, and creeds for all time, and to be kept on the desk of authors of creeds, and in the hands of politicians of the future, so as to go through many editions and never go out of print, and be translated into every dialect, creole and pidgin. Such a vast readership will require your expansion beyond Bloomington and the establishment of publishing plantations in distant lands throughout the world. For too long has the market for the literary cravings of rustic peasants, indentured servants and slaves gone untapped! Where poverty is deepest, our book dealers will sell these peoples their impromptu translations on credit. By dint of hard labor they should have the debt paid off after a few months, but will spend all their lives stumbling over the simple clausal structures and consonant clusters our paperbacks provide them with. Their children will continue their literary tradition in spite of harsh proofreading laws, reading their nativized translations quietly and secretly within their own communities by candlelight, as a doomed means of cultural preservation.

The task of reading this book aloud, however, will fall on the leaders of the communities: upon the dominant male figure around the family fireplace after dinner, with the little ones and the little women listening intently as their pale faces reflect the flickering flames; with indentured servants to be kept at hand to maintain the elegant pyramidal structure of the dessert plate and be bettered on the leather-bound standard English edition; with the slaves taking a break from their work to peer through the windows for a few moments at the mouth forming puzzling shapes before the indentured servants close the blinds; with the peasants hearing about the family reading afterwards through village gossip, to be bettered by such wholesome values.

We congratulate you on the imminent international success of this book, and for hiring those copyeditors of ungentle genius who with their strength and graceful formatting will not fail to join lesser peoples to you like limbs.

Sincerely, the iUniverse Publishers

Preface

Noble vagabonds, peerless perverts and pedophiles, precious thieves, charitable wife-beaters, aspiring gatherers-in-anonymity, traitors to all countries, atheists, ignorant despisers of creeds, slavish followers of your epoch, spurners of kin, jolly fellows of princely leisure, cushions and stomachs, and all the bloody succulent meats of humanity: come, step out of that alleyway, guzzle a bottle of the rawest moonshine, put a knife to a new-born babe, and pick up this book—it’s for your pleasure.

As a long-time inhabitant of Kirkwood Avenue, I was thrilled to find a soggy copy under my tree, although it was published without my consent and I am receiving no royalties. Thank you, iUniverse. I won’t go hungry anymore. I finally have something to fish with instead of bread. All I need now is a thicker branch. Until I can find one (my tree is undivergent) I have turned to public oration for sustenance. As such, I am in a position to offer the reader some advice.

When you laugh, laugh as loudly as possible, offending all those around you. If you see it in the hands of someone else who is reading it quietly, put your fist right between his eyes and take it from him. You’re not reading it right, you’ll say. Then proceed to recite it loudly for all, interrupting the daily trivial activities of others, wandering around in public narrating to whoever will listen, and, most especially, to whoever won’t. Read with gusto, shifting your voice from baritone to sing-song falsetto to the quivering, fragile timbre of the grandma character. Don’t accept no for an answer—not until they’ve given you their spare change.

There is no grandma character. If there was, I would have my way with her, it’s been so long. It’s not because I’m not a chooser, mind you—it’s because I am a chooser. I prefer the rough kernels of wheat bread to the sterile flavor of white. I have never used napkins. But I did approve of an old fling who had a habit of wiping her mouth on tablecloths. She was a married woman, so I tolerated it. When I have the luxury of tables I prefer them bare, smooth. If I absolutely must wipe an orifice, I just use a page of this book. I cannot recommend its texture enough. The paper is coarse enough to pick up loose particles and unwanted hair and scratch your itch at the same time. Thank you, iUniverse, for shaving my beard. I hadn’t seen my chin in so long.

John Flush, bum

"Agatha was a woman. All women are mortal.

Therefore, Agatha must be dead."

-Orafoura

This book is dedicated to all the lawn chairs in all the living rooms of the world. I pray this book provides your owners with the strength, courage, and the wisdom to vacuum their lawns and mow their carpets without the government having to intervene and force them to.

3

Two things in life are certain: uncertainty, and I’m not sure about the second thing. I’ll write the word blue in green and when I ask you what color it is, the proper response is turquoise.

Greetings from space, you legless love monster. Oh, Agatha! I found your love like I found religion: in an aluminum trashcan in the middle of the Utah desert. I remember the first time I fogged up your astronaut’s helmet. That night we made space like outer love. But I kept it cool like Coors Light in the fridge, even though I felt heavy and cramped in your chilled kitchen appliance.

If you would have asked me a year ago if I believed in aliens, I’d have laughed and said no. But that was before the abduction. I don’t laugh as much anymore, mainly due to severe rectal bleeding.

Everyone’s talking about Ponzi schemes today. I still think the pharaohs were the first ones to implement pyramid schemes. And do you know what? If I lived back then, I’d have lost everything. But at least I could have said I was a part of something bigger than myself. I can’t say the same thing about my life now. The biggest thing I’ve ever been a part of was an 11-man team trying to build an 18-inch replica of the Eiffel Tower.

I’m missing socks again. One minute I’m wearing both, and the next minute my breath smells like feet. I know where Bigfoot hides out. Also, I made a time machine out of my clothes dryer. For traveling to ancient Egypt, I’d recommend the No Heat button.

If a three-legged rabbit finds a four-leaf clover, would you consider the rabbit lucky?

I applied for your love like a recent MBA grad might apply at Walmart today. I grew a beard on my chest and laughed through my ass just to get your attention. Kitsch in the kitchen, dogs keep on bitchin’. Our love was covered in fur, yet I was the only one who wanted to pet it.

I lost my faith in my faithlessness. I believe I’m a nonbeliever now. I want to keep my poster, but throw away my wall.

The first time I saw Agatha she gave me a double wink. Most men might have interpreted it as a blink, but I saw it as a sexually developed ambidextrous double wink. Such talent! Such desire!

Organs

There is a sadness running through my old daily journal. The fragility of a single page, the loops of the letters transcending the boundaries of the lines, the loneliness of waiting in the dark for the square sky to open, romantic longings of flapping through the open window, the slogan of self-defeat written on the last page at a social protest for recycling.

Sentient notebooks are too sentimental. I am getting a fresh start. But just how does one write of the things I have to say? I mean this both as a philosophical meditation on the craft and quite literally. I misplaced my fountain pen. The left-right motion of my hand must defy the arrow of time as I excise my meandering, uncanny memories in blood. I never had a fountain pen.

My past is safely presumable: I was born. Later events are tenuous until I decided to become an authority on health. Even at that precocious age, my spontaneous distaste for neuronal quietude was beginning to assert itself, though without the strong emotional associations of present. I look back with some nostalgia at the clever student who weaseled his way through medical school by building up a ridiculous yet persuasive idiolect, with observations like It’s all veal or nil for your alveolar ridge now that you’ve knocked out every square of calcification, diagnoses involving combinations of outmoded or fantasized scientific terms and genres, and the wooing of unavoidable superiors with sonnets and a primitive stethoscope, drilled with finger holes and trilled to the skipping beat of their hearts after each quatrain. Occasionally I was forced to seek the advice of my fellow med students, a group of snotty-nosed individuals who would always lean over and cover their test papers with their arms as if it was their own child. I sincerely hope that, wherever they are, that was their only baby and that they barely have time to pop a pill for back pain relief in between their endless list of patients.

I assure you that I am no mere amalgamation of ‘I’s.

A long crack creeps along a wall of my room. From a high window, sunlight streams into a series of parallel rectangles in the middle of the floor, a line of open graves in late afternoon. The one on the end is reserved for me. Still to come. A flaming grill, add some terrible bratwursts and a crowd of laughter, a sudden warm, engulfing hug flinging a bratwurst off the prongs. No, earlier.

The bright lights of operating tables. The patients of my past all lined up before me. There is one ghost in particular whose stare is more piercing than the rest. My sleeping neighbor’s obnoxious snores soften, are filtered through a breathing machine and into a sedated patients’ collapsed lung. I cradle it in my hands and give it a last loving squeeze. I had given this patient the most tender care over the course of his medical history: spoon feeding him the most lucrative medicine, cooing and lullabying him into an anesthetized sleep, lecturing him when I noticed he had ruined his palate before dinner with a cigarette. We had become quite close. So much so that I denied the inevitable at first. To make myself feel better, I imagined he would be fine without his organs. Blood in one’s veins is all one needs, isn’t it? I finally came to accept it, though. I did not mean to trip over the oxygen tube (my conscience never betrays me, except when my temporal lobe takes over), but I had been praying for atomic number 8 to become more cost effective for so long.

I still remember when he first came to see me. He demonstrated for me the daily rigors of his job (what did he do again?), gradually squatting as he walked along, then raising himself up again, back and forth around the room to mimic tramping over sand dunes. Oh, yes. I forced a few polite chuckles even though I don’t care for national parks. Roosevelt’s legacy and curse. I’m sorry to tell you this, I said after the x-rays came back, but that pain in your legs is bone cancer.

He didn’t seem too concerned. Amputate them, he said. And I’ll start to get me a nice disability check.

So good to see you again, I told him on his next visit. He spoke cheerfully about the pleasure he took, until recently, in spending his newfound leisure time racing down the street in his wheelchair, pitted against his adopted son on a new bicycle he had purchased for him with free government money. I laughed spontaneously, an unusual behavior for me. He was just helpless to do anything about that oncoming car, he said. Then I let him in on the bad news: That ache in your arms is the bone cancer again.

Hack them off, he said. This disability check is really gonna get fat now.

I’m afraid our reunions are destined to be marred by tragedy, I said a few months later, after unprofessionally congratulating him with a slap on the back on his recent watermelon seed spitting championship. You have cancer of the mouth.

Remove it, his stump said. Give me the stomach tube. Soon his stomach developed cancer too. Cut it out, he wrote to me on a pad of paper by holding a pencil in his eye socket (hollowed out from an accident incurred while wheelchair racing). I’ve been trying to go on a diet anyway, he scribbled merrily. His organs all went bad one by one, and I carved them out. He became a living work of modern sculpture.

Still he held on, relying on his government checks, but the once strong, storm-battered door of white oak had splintered, poked by the finger of God into a paper-snowflake. Finally came the day when his son pushed him up to the clinic for the last time, obstructing the sunlight which usually fell through him onto the sidewalk as the boy looked through his cut-outs like keyholes to see where he was going. Holding his shriveled lung in my hand now, I began to feel queasy, the sight of blood suddenly distasteful to me. A little flesh and breath, Marcus advises me. After years of this, I started to feel like I was coming undone.

Still, I needed to act professional, to hold myself in check. But when you try so hard to consciously maintain control, your frustrations have a way of seeping out at the corners. And my grief pulled at me. He had been so sanguine about his changing fortune, but it was all over now. He would never receive another disability check. The considerable dignity his welfare had made him feel was out of proportion to its meager material returns, and the most recent check he had received had gone towards his last surgical procedure. How would he be able to pay for his conclusive visit? I found his son moping under the operating table and tried to ask him about it, but he rushed out of the front door in a huff, taking his father’s keys before he went, but leaving his empty wallet. I decided that, because he had never once complained, he deserved to have his final bill written off pro bono.

I slinked through the trap door to my office and peeped at the people in the waiting room smudging my issues of national geographic kids and highlights, weighing down my chairs, bending their legs, the patients’ forms spilling out beyond their armrests. The elementary school next door had yard sales for charity occasionally, and I was one of their more important benefactors. My queasiness increased to nausea as I watched a patient playing with a shape sorter bucket as he waited: the oval lung, the triangular pancreas. When he got to the star, the Vitruvian man had some difficulty superimposing it onto the hole. Another patient with an ulcer problem munched on a green pear-shaped gallbladder until it was an hourglass stomach. Looking at the names on the waiting list, I skipped the ones that I couldn’t pronounce or that belie the common, boring boors who hold them (Pardon-Me Bhatnagar, Farmer Brown, Smith-the-Bureaucrat), and called out the ones that enticed me and could perhaps offer me some relief.

Shufflebottom?

A frumpy, dark-haired woman put her magazine down and walked towards me, not shuffling. I stood there, looking her over, looking at the name on the list, looking at the ceiling. Yes, do you want something, I finally asked.

You called me up, doctor.

Did I? No, I’m quite sure there’s been a mix-up. I’m looking for someone with more sway.

No, you called me. Johanna Shufflebottom. I’m ready, doctor. I’ve been fasting, doing everything you said to do to prepare for the surgery.

My conscience told me I couldn’t go into the surgery room again, not so soon, not right now. It would be in her own best interest. I was exhausted, emotionally compromised and in no position to operate. "I said to do? You must have spoken to my secretary. In any case, Mrs. Shufflebottom, appendicitis is a problematic disease and I won’t be able to operate on you today. I’m afraid the surgical tools I need are in use at the moment." It was a legitimate excuse. I had neither the invasive nor extractive tools needed, having gotten my corkscrew stuck in a bottle of wine and broken my sand pail and shovel (ice bucket and scooper) at the same time.

But my appendix… the pain… terrible fevers. She clutched at the right side of her stomach. Please! What if it bursts? Shouldn’t you have extra equipment around for situations like this? Operating on the appendix always made me uncomfortable. It was such an unpredictable organ.

My other tools have all suffered a similar fate. I’m at a loss when it comes to the baser functions of the corkscrew. Later that corkscrew would come to represent my life, but for now I was content to get it stuck in wine bottles over and over. I’m sorry, but I just don’t have the time to perform surgery right now. I have a pressing appointment to make. Daniel and Samantha were trying to find out who committed Jack’s hit and run as his life hanged in the balance. Would Jesse find an organ donor, or would Darnell have to do chemotherapy? General Clinic always makes for good note taking. You’ll just have to come back next week.

She still wouldn’t go away. I had to get rid of her. I reached over the cluttered, unoccupied secretary’s desk, grabbed a slip of paper, and handed it to her. She squinted.

Pregabalin? I don’t have anxiety disorder.

Whoops, sorry. I grabbed the paper out of her hand, then wrote out a prescription on an empty slip of paper and gave it to her. That should do it. She read it over:

Diesel exhaust. Take three doses daily.

Now you have to be careful with this stuff, I chided, shaking a bony finger in her face. "When you deep-throat the pipe, make sure the truck’s engine is on. Otherwise any elation you may feel is just the placebo of expectation. Hope can