Coincidence

"Trip on this shit," Travis began to say, before actually tripping on an extraordinary pile of dog shit.

A skywriter saw this incident, mused, turned up his nose and instantly began composing a sestina in flight, yet when he reached line 38, writer's block commenced, and he was forced to land his aircraft in the center of a local dog park, skidding on precisely 38 piles of dog shit.

Meanwhile, somewhere deep in the San Fernando Valley, Scott Baio threw down a script in disgust, shouting "This is total dog shit!" Then he tripped.

Precisely at that moment, Roy, another skywriter, in the midst of spelling "Scott Baio Eats Dog Shit" over the indisputably clear skies of the San Fernando Valley, thought of his friend Travis, and how he used to say "Trip on this shit" before actually tripping on shit.

Coincidentally, Travis became a skywriter. Scott Baio later hired Roy the skywriter to read a script. Baio, in turn, became a poet and wrote sestinas, the first of which began with "Trip on this shit." Then everyone went to the zoo.

Revisionism

Naming your novel's lead character "Dildette McGlyph," internationally known heiress to a urinal cake manufacturer in Bisbee, Arizona, made most Thomas Pynchon fans feel that he was lapsing into self-parody. That is, until a series of investigative articles in the New Yorker revealed that employees at Pynchon's publishing house were secretly outsourcing all writing under the Pynchon rubric to a series of highly developed wasps.

"I think Tom would just LOVE the idea," crowed a balding man aloud on an empty J train as it hurried under the East River.

"These wasps have no clear concept of my literature," Pynchon later said in a fax to the New York Post. "I have no proof that they understand metaphor, much less even the most generic of cultural references."

Unfortunately, Pynchon's fax merely spawned an entirely new school of Pynchon handwriting theorists, most of whom, it was later revealed in a series of investigative articles in The Atlantic, believed that Pynchon himself was a parasitic queen wasp controlling all media related to the incident. Pynchon's coy about-the-author photo of a yellowjacket on his next novel neither calmed the furor, nor did it cause anyone to chuckle under the age of 62, or anyone living south of 59th Street. In an attempt to put to rest this persistent rumor, Pynchon allowed himself to be filmed that summer eating 17 Peanut Buster Parfaits at a Dairy Queen in Connecticut and then joining the moshpit at a Social Distortion concert, all for an upcoming documentary called "American Badass" which was to be aired on ESPN2. Unfortunately, Pynchon and the entire crew of the film were killed when an errant swarm of approximately four million bald faced hornets attacked them in rural farmland, during the shooting of what would have been the film's final Motocross sequence.

Crepuscular Romance

It was Lothar's opening for his new artisanal hors d'oeuvres shop. I don't know how many linen shirts and seersucker suits I counted. It must be the season. It was unreasonably humid, granted. It felt like I was back in New England on the Friday night yacht club cocktail circuit, pounding Cape Codders and staining my Docksiders with enough spattered oyster liquor so they resembled a Pollack. But I'd left that transient life behind decades ago. If I caught myself drifting into that adolescent reverie, I felt nagged, like the sense of a flea jumping around on your body that you can't catch. No fleas here, though. It was tick season.

The band showed up, but they just mimed, never even playing music or plugging in their instruments - just total silence. Called themselves The Dense. What horseshit. I was annoyed. The only reason I showed up at this opening was to promote my new version of the Montecito Yellow Pages, which was going to be the first phone book that could be injected into a human being's blood stream, and read with a microchip that could be comfortably stapled to your perineum. Dad would call this another one of my "harebrained ideas" but screw him, I'm a goddamn stallion.

"These are actual poached kitten lips," Lothar cooed into the ear of one of his wealthy, Silicon Valley benefactors. "It took hours to remove them." Veined tusks suddenly grew out of his lower molars, piercing both cheeks, as everyone in his immediate range took a few steps back, agog, avoiding the sudden spray. He quickly tried to alleviate their shock. "It'ss jusht...it'shsh..durnt worreh abourt it." This was my cue to gather these startled buffoons with their open wallets and show them the real genius behind a good telephone directory. The strained beauty of its indexing, the velvet nuance of the philately section.

The May Sweeps

"I Never Promised You A Rose Garden" was her favorite song. Predictably she sang it only in her rose garden which she tended like a woman possessed, with burning, scalding hot orange eyes, her body reeking and bestial, while he lay inside on a recliner belching in precise 11/4 meter to that Van Der Graaf Generator tune. Critics called their arrangement "heavenly" and as conceptual artists, with each of their movements generously funded by the Kress Foundation, it couldn't have been more ideal.

That is, until TV's newest detective Ronnie "Poops" McCluggage burst into the room.

"We can either play it my way, or I'll have to get tough," he says, chomping on his unlit cigar, adjusting his visible diaper. He spits: "Which one of you created that installation at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2007? Don't make me ask twice. You know, the one that Rosalind Krauss of the October journal called "...striated...breathing with formative primacy...""

Silence from the couple. "Poops" takes out a grenade.

Poops: I WILL USE THIS.

(LAUGHS)

"Poops" addresses the camera.

Poops: You don't know me. And I don't know you. BUT I DON'T LIKE YOU. And I will BRING YOU TO A FUCKING HALT.

Freeze frame.

Insert graphic: POOPS! He's VERY DANGEROUS!

Announcer: Wednesdays at 9, 8 Central and Mountain.

(LAUGHS)

Pause.

(LAUGHS)

Total Eclipse of the Nuts

Most everything she said was torn from the day’s headlines – but I had no idea what headlines were, having grown up on a media-free planet torn from the pages of a science fiction dime novel called “The Psychodroids.” But the upshot was the same: I had no idea what she was talking about.

This created a rift, but only conversationally. Physically we were often mistaken for a large, greasy soft pretzel, as we practiced our filthy lovemaking in public: apartment steps, empty basketball courts in frozen winter, with candy wrappers locked against chain link, stuck there until spring, or until a wispy gust allowed them to sail into the water supply.

Further proof that quality conversation need not determine the future of a relationship is requested. Anecdotal evidence will not be considered unless submitted by committee. 

Not Nearly

I’m not precisely sure when The Eighties began for me, but it was almost certainly around 1980.

It was when rectal exams were required for even the most mundane daily activities.

It was when Genevieve danced on tabletops for boozy Off-Broadway understudies.

It was near the corner of Houston and Avenue B, wherever that big building with the clock on it still sits (Red Square?).

It was when the Farnsworth Museum was caught dry-humping the Bowdoin College archives in a local scandal that old-timers never quite understood.

It took off like a scallop boat at dawn, covered in paste.

It bordered on lunacy. It bordered on abuse. It bordered on the superhuman.

It ripped open our last box of cereal, hands dug deep into Honeycomb looking for some sort of plastic prize.

It was the last time I went down those steps to the beach and looked out over the bight.

The New Yorker's Fiction Issue

Learning how to tie the full Windsor knot is an important milestone in every young man’s life. But what if you were born without a tie?

Needy children scream wildly as you take each footstep, as you chew every sprouted wheat bun.

Cascading down a sun-dappled banister comes Blaine Crank, also known in the neighborhood as “that kid who levitates every time he re-reads his Mom’s copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.”

“Donald Barthelme is stupid, and you’re a cheap Donald Barthelme.”

He hits me with a tub of bleach and I can’t help but agree before I black out and wake up twenty minutes later, as Blaine feebly attempts to press his limp weenus against my thigh.

“This Donald Barthelme prefers pussy,” I say, and sail out of there like an academic’s dream experiment – determined, lithe, devoid of theory.

Chores

“Mom, it’s Horst’s turns to do the dishes!”

“No fighting, you two.”

But the children had other ideas, and they soon laid waste to the town, burning first their neighborhood, then the entire county, engulfing every living thing in a conflagration that could been seen by satellites.

“This is what we now call the Era of Devastation,” said Dr. Krill, speaking to a room of undergraduates in the year 2098. They’d heard their grandparents speak of those years in hushed tones, with what seemed like pained embarrassment, as if they’d rather reminisce about anything else.

“Dr. Krill? Is that when everyone moved underground?”

“Yes, son. Everyone who had accumulated the proper amount of hot cereal.”

Even the cryptic Dr. Krill, who had taught this class for three decades, would occasionally lapse into twisted reverie, his eyes wide as he stared into the void of their concrete bunker. He would snap back with an uncomfortable burst of shy laughter, run his hands through his matted, ash-colored hair, then shuffle across the room, mouthing a torrent of obscenities that would make even the most hardened criminal blanch.

He had no intention of telling them the actual truth. “I just can’t,” he’d say. “I must describe it in mime.” And then he’d wheel out that palette of stale bagels and begin his inevitable naked writhing.

“Will this be on the exam?”

“Go fuck yourself, Troy!”

Data Speaks for Itself

Recent studies have shown that the more lurid the magazine cover, the more apt college-aged jocks and those with whom they cavort would careen into registers, begging for forgiveness. 9 out of 10 dentists recommended that said jocks and those with whom they cavort be sentenced to the Sorbonne to study with philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, undergoing relentless questioning on the relationship between historic themes of mystical theology and present-day examples of religious out-of-body experiences in suburban Kansas. “They’ll never make it past one semester,” whispered one adjunct to another as a cold wind blew up his boxers, rendering his testicles the size of cashews.

Hold All Applause

With choir practice over, I can finally grab a bite to eat…

This…this will do…this piece of bread…I want this piece of bread….and lemon…good for the voice, lemon….

I won’t fail you…I won’t fail you…please understand me…I won’t fail you.

It is very important for me to let you know that I will not let you down.

I will not let you down.

I will make you feel like you are wanted.

I will make you feel better than you’ve ever felt.

It makes me feel whole to make you feel wanted and loved. I would like to do that again and again.

Is it morning already?

A Night in Corsica

Whenever Rick paused in the middle of a sentence, his friends grew steadily concerned. Not because they were under the impression that he could be experiencing the early onset of dementia, or that he may be suffering a series of minuscule strokes, or that he may have a learning disability that perhaps had remained dormant or unexamined throughout his relatively young life. No, his friends were concerned that whenever Rick paused, they had to, for once - for one excruciating, blisteringly intense moment - they had to acknowledge that someone, somewhere, had managed to tear their attention away from the omnipresent parade of WWF announcers that continually burst their way into this airport men’s room.  Their suits, those microphones – those ticker tape parades! Our youth has vanished! Hoyt! Pamela!!

Concerts

I never went to that Cocteau Twins concert, but I deeply regret it to this day.

In fact, I regret all concerts I did not attend.

This is because I have lived too much within the confines of prescribed behavior.

I have neglected to pay attention to the sheer amount of concerts.

I have never sought out publications that could have guided me toward more concerts.

I have not trusted those who have recommended concerts.

I have not shown emotion during live performance acts.

I have been reticent to display behavior remotely related to abandon.

I have allowed preconceived notions to mollify my judgment.

Log Line

BEGIN MUSIC HUMOR

I started out playing tambourine for a J. Geils cover band, then graduated to playing maracas for a Southside Johnny cover band, took a short detour playing congas for a George Thorogood cover band, and wrapped up my career playing marimba in a Boz Scaggs cover band – until everyone told me to become a road manager for Gnarls Barkley, which made me enough money to buy an apartment in London and work for EMI. Right after that, though, I foolishly invested my life savings in a glossy magazine startup aimed at fans of lactating pornography, and ended up filling water glasses at the restaurant in the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City while spending late nights wishing I could audition for NRBQ.

END MUSIC HUMOR