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.