people love to be amused

so laugh then.
isn't it kind of funny
that you can't?

Maybe Fox News is right...

about being fair and balanced? Are they? Fair? Balanced?

I read the news today. Oh boy...was there an argument today in the New York Times? A word attributed to a Republican, countered by another one right, or several utterances of Democrat. Throw in the jaded opinion of an independent and you've got yourself conflict. You have a story that boils down to a lot of he said she said we say absolutely nothing. Precious little nothing.

Now, this saddened me, for what other source of NEWS have I but a few stolen moments of New York Times? And not Times Select, either. Regular anyone can click on "I don't pay for my information" New York Times. Right before I hit hotmail, myspace, backstage cause I'm a relentless actress, I scan the headlines for something of interest. I generally pass over the latest bloodcount. Bloodcounts tend to read the same, unless you recognize a name. I can't even remember the names of everyone I've slept with.

Today was different. Because I ate only an apple for breakfast, because I re-used my teabags from the night before, because instead of going straight on to check my pixeled social life, I really got caught.

This is what New York Times told me (my own poor but sufficient summary):

The Bush administration, who's name has become synonymous with hapless, akin to the little engine everyone wished would combust, has approved the 6.8 billion dollar sale of U.S. shipping operations currently run by the London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., which runs commercial operations at the six U.S. ports, to Dubai Ports World, a company owned by the United Arab Emirates.

Fuck. But, wait, that sounds a little leftist, a little slanted, please let this be sensational...

I visited FoxNews, something I haven't done since my days of half-assed college journalism. I think it may have been the skeptic, the last remnants of the Southern state of mind flashing red in my brain, but it seems like I don't ever know what to fear anymore. It's always bad. And you know what? FoxNews thinks it's bad, too. So does CNN and the AP wire. I am sufficiently convinced.

The United Arab Emirates are our friends. The United Arab Emirates served as a financial base for the September 11th hijackers. We need more Middle Eastern Allies. We must hold all companies to the same standards, and not succumb to bigotry, to hysteria...I'm scared and stupid while wondering why.

President Bush was unaware. He didn't know abot the deal until the screams of dissent broke water. But he has threatened his veto. Six years in office and he's never vetoed anything before.

These are the impressions one is left with. Flat paper, a personalized screen. What if we still had to gather around radios to hear things happen?

A high percent nodding their heads at once. The thing is, even the Republicans are after him on this. Republican majority leader Bill Frist pledges legislation to block the transaction. A light in the attic?

Maybe the baby's had the toy for too long. Maybe he needs to be changed. Even daddy smells the shit.

 
 

Absurd

is something you write when you are given these guidelines: Include an old-timey bicycle, a gumball machine and a nine iron. Gashes of weariness. This is so strange.





Allister saw the lady every day...the lady. The lady...he did not know her name, but her legs were long and her hair was thin and the color of warm wet pasta so he called her Miss Spaghetti.

"Miss Spaghetti, I'm ready. Miss Spaghetti, I'm ready." Allister would whisper at the wall of windows as she pedaled past. He worked at the front desk of the insurance department at Yarfly Bellows Home Improvement Community Affluence Emporium. He sat shuffling papers from alphabetical to numerical to arranged in deepening shades of off-white and thought of Miss Spaghetti on her old-timey bicycle. Miss Spaghetti and her morning ride. Miss Spaghetti, he knew, was being noticed by more than one bachelor much like himself.

Was it daily he found himself narrowing his eyes at the glass-plated office across the street, wishing spontaneous combustion on Harrison Fyler: the off-center ball, club and membership salesman at Wallersmitt's Putt-Putt and Yarfly Bellows Community Affluence Emporium? Harrison was a pervert. Harrison had a glass desk, so Allister could see his crotch, and Allister would know the second that miserable jerk started masturbating. He knew he would catch him doing it...at nine-fifteen as Spage pedaled past. And Spage pedaled past like clockwork, like a clock, actually...her legs moving gears, her hair the frayed wires of Gepetto's mind...Spage would be her nickname. He would call her Spage as they lay in bed, sharing a bag of Sunchips, rubbing the tired from their eyes, swapping salty mouths and waiting...oh the waiting Allister forced upon himself. Just the right moment. Just the right time.

Many times the right time comes rather unexpectedly. But Allister was a man who kept himself vigilant and well groomed. He zipped up his pants that morning. He stood up from his desk. Nine-fourteen. Harrison had gone to the bathroom. Allister had twenty-five cents and the plastic bubble with the trapped purple ring was dropped down into the chamber.

He'd been chewing green gum and melting army men for three weeks. He walked to the gumball machine by the front door. "Oh, is the gum reserved for customers, Mr. Bellows? Is it? Yeah well....sorry. I like gum., okay? Sorry." That's what he would say if interrupted. He would say that...mapped out, planned. Yeah. Yeah.

He cleared his throat and dropped the flat piece of metal into the crank. It was all up to mechanics now. He had done his work. He cranked the silver rectangle and bent to hold his hand under the cool flapping door that would deliver her ring, his prize...green gum. No, not green, yellow. Yellow this time, yellow. Damn gum! Damn yellow! Where was the ring? Had he miscalculated?

Spage was stopped at the light, pedaling backwards to avoid tipping. Allister stared at the gumball in his hand. He had no more quarters. Harrison wiped his ass and looked at the paper. The air stopped humming and suddenly weighed a thousand pounds, and Allister felt nothing...and Allister felt the desperate ticking of clockwork...and Allister ripped the gumball machine out of the floor with his two pound arms and later he would discover he had come undone at the elbows, and later he would discover his tolerance for grief but he ran into the street as the light was about to change, as Harrison took a last heavy breath of bathroom and sized up the situation through plate glass...and grabbed a nine iron.

Then an unspoken rivalry unwound in screams, Allister with the gumball machine hoisted above his head and screaming like a tyrant, Harrison howling his nine-iron in a jousting thrust. Spage did not scream. Oh, she saw them coming at her in the mirror of her mail-away Captain Crunch reverse spy glasses, but Spage was insane. She lived with her invisible waitress roommate Rose in the Underwood-Yarfly Home For The Enabled Through Positive Thinking and was able, through constant conditioning, to do two things:


1. Pedal an old-timey bicycle

2. Use a slightly modified toilet. (It flushed itself and had a velcro strap to hold her in place for at least three and a half minutes...she had a habit of leaping up too early and clapping like a cheerleader.)

The two men did not circle and size up the space for fighting. Allister had not actually expected a battle and had simply intended to present the gumball machine to Miss Spaghetti as a gift, but had been right about Harrison's shared affection for Spage. His Spage, who he intended to stop with a practiced stare, who he intended to present with a ring...and treat like a queen, who he had never dared to strike up a conversation with...

Spage directed her wide eyes to the man beneath her massive wheel, bowed before a gumball machine like Frankincense. She laughed at the colors of the balls and began to pedal as the spokes of her wheel were stopped by an extension of Harrison's heart. The nine-iron was meant to destroy his rival, but Harrison had slipped.

So both men watched as the bike began to topple. It did not happen in slow motion, but rather like the inside-out twist of a ruined umbrella, Miss Spaghetti crashed to the ground, the nine iron bent geometry in her spokes. Her delicate raked-through head freed the ring that would have been hers from the glass globe, her delicate head peppered with bits of gum and slivers of glass. The ring had been next, in the chamber, adjustable in size.

Perhaps Spage would have become mesmerized by the colors of the gumballs a moment later, triggering a bit of repressed epilepsy and falling anyways. Perhaps had they not been miserable worthless people, Allister and Harrison might have run for help and shared the blame (and possibly an eight by nine cell) and grieved together forever the loss of Miss Spaghetti with the thin hair the color of warm wet pasta. But Allister peed himself, and Harison got an erection and they gathered any incriminating bits and melted into spectators. And the entire town of Yarfly Bellows learned a valuable lesson that day. Thought they may ride old-timey bicycles and be amusing to watch, retards bleed too.

Did you know Medicaid pays for Viagra?

He's on the phone, on the couch-the brown couch...no, fabric blue...denim maybe...powder blue leather? He is on the telephone, the cord a tired jump-rope, the cord collecting cat hair on the floor, sitting on his powder blue leather couch that was not already there but that he tied to the back of a borrowed '99 F-150 and sat on while his brother-in-law drove too fast on the freeway, taking turns like a drunken goose in an oil spill, hoping something might slip. But acquired relatives are strong standers and often have heavy feet as a result of hiding napkin rings and various silver in their socks. Nonsense.

The couch got there. Three days ago. His name is Jerry. He is relatively attractive for being a bit thin. He eats sticks of gas station pepperoni and drinks sodium free club soda and sometimes thinks of little girls but has never gotten weak. Powder blue leather couch, red novelty race car phone, cord dragging the ground, one sock, the television full of weather while he punches each number with the guilt of a border jumper.

She is fourteen and can talk dirty thanks to reading. He did too much Meth in '97. He wants her to know it's possible. She wants him to feel disappointment. She's laughing quietly to her sister. Her sister is eight and has tasted beer. Have you? Yeah me too. To? Yah right, I know! I never know how to say it too. To? Did you know...

...my mom is sick.? She's on Medicaid.

...I'm on that?

...I'm not really that pretty?

...I think you're beautiful?

...I'm only seventeen?

...I'm thirty four?

...my dad's a cop?

...my dad's been gone since I was twelve...fifteen. Fifteen. Two years.

...I'd punch your dad for being a...a jerk? I would.

...I'm not wearing panties? I have to go to dinner. You're too old to fuck me.

...Medicaid pays for...

Did you know the line was dead?

Salmonella has nothing to do with chickens

On the bus, gray windows, blue seats, an entire mirror filled with the bus drivers face, studying me with fatherly or lecherous concern, or something in between, an uncle. He laughed when the doors slowly blinked off the morning, quieting the cold steam of outside-this San Diego air I find so particularly familiar. This girl, this woman I should call myself, for some man in some play will read this line and think how twenty-three-year-old women still call themselves girls how thirty-seven-year-old-women still think of themselves as girls, how sixty-eight-year-old women are girls in their sleep…this woman sits on the concrete molded bus bench with bare knees, with thick pink socks and cowboy boots no one else is wearing: in her velvet Christmas stewardess dress swinging her knees in girlish tribute and her big bug sunglasses, he thinks how this woman looks like a postcard in her mind and a misfit on the rocks.

But he lets her on with her questions about where this bus is headed, questions asked without wondering, out of obligation. She knows this bus will go straight. She knows the general nature of buses. And he says yes in broken English, yes it will head straight down fifty-four. It will pass a Sears and an auto shop and several overgrown hamburger stands, more plastic than vines. It will dead end suddenly into Montezuma and if you turn right you’ll hit highway 8 and 805 but the bus will lumber left and the girl in the green dress, the girl that is myself with several improvements will watch a Mexican man on the corner unapologetically. The windows are tinted for the benefit of the passengers and he cannot see her.

He stands on the sidewalk corner, waiting to cross University, smoking a cigarette with his lips and his right hand. It’s windy outside but warm and the left sleeve of his gray rustling sports jacket (with a variety of snaps, zippers and closures) is twisted in the wind for moments, but mainly caught in the empty rhythm of swaying.

This girl wonders for a moment why he does not pin it up when his left arm obviously ends at the elbow. She wonders what knife fight he lost it in. She wonders what torture is like in jail and what being fifty or so with one arm means in terms of drug experimentation? What small dark rooms has he loved in, thrusting mainly to the left, collapsing onto his right elbow when the wrist was weakening? In what small dark room can you visit his blood stain?

Then there is a bell, and the jacket sleeve like extra skin follows his crossing as the bus pulls away. She did not see him throw the cigarette down so she cannot jump off the bus and pick it out of the pile of twenty-five or so sleeping like soft bones in the sidewalk crack. She cannot keep it in her pocket until the hem of her dress smells like Pal Mal tobacco or sell it as an oddity. Why can’t old men and women with strollers be famous? Why can’t red carpet roll under the feet of the one-armed man as he anonymously crosses the street?

Later she ends up at San Diego State University. The driver asks her where she’s trying to go. She smiles and slyly quotes convention. She doesn’t care. Not really. As long as she’s back in time for worry to still be sleeping, as long as she has this story to tell. So she goes on a walk to make herself miss the next bus, and the bus drivers parked and smoking when she’s back in sight don’t know of the 955 so she waits twenty minutes next to two very fat black women and their small adorable children who are the same age and who, if they were prince and princess would face being betrothed to each other.

The queens abandon the dreams of their men with every word, calling them liars, loving the sound of Terrance and George in their own voices, loving the owning of offspring. The girl in the green dress is caught eavesdropping through her sunglasses and realizes later, after she has gotten off the bus, transfer intact, after she has driven lost for seven minutes and passed a very fat man in an electronic wheelchair making lazy half circles on the sidewalk outside of a video store, that some people lose their arms when babies are born, and some people have heart attacks after a life time of never eating butter and that the rules for everything were burned in cigarette papers and into bedposts hiding bed stains, bloodstains, the love of drugs and dresses, all burning so close to the ocean.