Dear diary,
My life is one long string of neurotic episodes, all centering on nervousness. My body produces too much adrenaline for modernity; modernity requires a slight buzz of angst to get thru each day, but my system overkills this need: it’s like “Oh, you want fear? I’ll give you a dose of fight-flight to help you escape from HEAVEN’S ARMY.” But I’m not trying to escape from Heaven’s Army anymore — I already fell to Earth; right now I’m at a political debate, which requires significantly less pizzazz; all this anxiety just makes me look like a trembling fool.
My point is that there’s a world outside, and a world inside. And my inside world is one hell of a place, which matches up with the outside world in about zero ways. Isn’t this what they call insanity and madness, when one’s inwardness is sufficiently disconnected from the commonly shared outwardness? Yes, that is correct. It doesn’t bother me, tho; for the world is cruel, thus a disconnection from that is a badge of honor. “Listen to the fools reproach, it is a kingly title” (Blake). And my kingdom is not of this world. Also it helps that I know I’m mad — a lot of madfolk don’t grasp that their interior is out-of-whack, so they take themselves too seriously and provoke reality’s goons to institutionalize them; they end up in mental asylums. Being able to comprehend my own chronic uniqueness means that I place a high value on diplomacy. For I’m like a country that has no allies among the nations; thus every move I wish to make must be carefully negotiated; and the better I can speak the lingua franca, the higher my chances for survival. This is why I can clearly articulate my essential obscurity — one can achieve the most oxymoronic aims if there’s a scary enough incentive.
So I’m accustomed to thinking of all problems as being inwardly rooted, and stemming from one’s private universe. If there’s friction with the outside world, it can be solved by rearranging the decor of one’s brain. If you’re not comfortable in your cramped cubicle at work, it’s not due to your workplace actually being inhumane; it’s because the chemical makeup of your person is off. Take a pill therefore, to correct this.
What I like to imagine is, just once, for you to be able to take a pill that’d change not your inside world but the outside world. What if there were a jagged little pill that, when you swallow it, “fixes” everything exterior: finally, a solution for reality!
So I’m in my chair at work, typing on my keyboard. I’m writing an email to one of the company’s numberless administrators. And my boss is indefinitely unavailable: he’s out somewhere having fun, not laboring. I’m very annoyed. Then I take the pill that leaves my own mind and body unaffected but wholly changes the outside world. The first thing that happens, which indicates that the drug is taking effect (I cannot stress enough that this is not some psychedelic that causes me myself to hallucinate — NO: it legitimately brings about real change in the objective, physical world; so it’s less like a drug and more like the way that magic or miracles formerly operated), I say, what indicates that the pill is beginning to work is that just above our cubicle bay, a disciplined fleet of squirrels come flying on leaf-ships (I mean miniature airplanes that consist of just one regular dry maple leaf that is somehow airborne and able to be steered by its piloting rodent via telepathy), and these bushy tailed invaders commence to pelt our stacks of business-papers with acorns. It sounds like rain. Or rather like hail.
So we employees of The Evil Corporation cover our heads with legal binders, to protect our hairstyles from the acorn storm. We dash out of the skyscraper and into the street. All the cars are stopped, parked haphazardly everywhere, even in the middle of intersections; their doors are left open, and the drivers and passengers are all running to safety, covering their heads with whatever sheltering substances they can find, because the fuzzy air-force of leaf-surfing squirrels is out here, too, whipping acorns by the zillion.
“God, this is fun,” I say. “It’s like the universe has grown perfect.”
Just then the squirrel-rampage comes to a halt. People cautiously begin to pace back to their motor-coaches; but, just before they can reach them, the vehicles vanish. Or, wait — on second look, I realize that they’re not simply fading away, but they’re melting or atomizing and then reconfiguring their structures into sofas and beds, or love seats. The harder parts of the cars, trucks, and buses now serve as the foundation, the bedspring and legs, whereas the softer parts from the interior — the seats, the upholstery — these serve as the cushions of the sofa, or the mattress of the bed, depending on what type of furniture each vehicle chooses to become.
And all the motor oil and gasoline or diesel fuel in each engine is carefully preserved in the basin of a baptismal, which is positioned like an accent piece next to its furnishing: one baptismal per unit; so, when people choose to sit or recline on each item, they can either enjoy the look and scent of its accompanying liquid, or decide to accept a baptism of fire.
And the fire is new and improved, because the world is now actually good for a while, remember; therefore the fire does not burn one’s hair and skin when one lights oneself up — on the contrary, it brings out one’s inner glow. So those who were previously homely or unattractive become super hot. And those who were stunningly gorgeous aforetime remain so: their beauty is, in fact, maybe even a little more breathtaking now; and they have the added bonus that when you lick them, they taste ambrosial & not just salty.
Now all the aliens — every single type and style of alien that anyone’s ever imagined — all appear on the horizon at once, and they hover down real carefully until they’re just above the ground, and then they violently crash-land. But nobody gets hurt — neither humans nor aliens — cuz, remember, nothing matters anymore. The aliens, one and all, short and tall, exit their respective spacecrafts and stand up and salute the nearest U.S. flag. We correct their salute. (“No! That’s the Nazi salute! Hold your appendage like THIS instead, over your heart, and keep it there. Where exactly is your heart located? Do you even have a heart? It’s hard to tell cuz you got all this exoskeleton covering your comely parts.”) So, like I said, every single kind or species of alien that anyone has ever hypothesized an existence for congregates at the selfsame point of space-time, in New York City, which becomes a really cool place to hang out. “Every thing possible to be believed in an image of truth” (Blake again). And the aliens prove to be gentle and kind — even the aliens who boast multiple sets of fangs, and who are constantly drooling thick mucus, and who wrote that letter “To all earthlings” back in 1977, which said “We are coming soon to destroy you...” — I say, even these human-hating aliens tolerate humankind now (cuz of this pill that I ingested earlier, which rendered the outside world more presentable). And one of the sexier aliens saunters over to you, and offers to share her beverage. She apparently ordered your favorite flavor of strychnine. She’s your soul mate, obviously. You two get hitched and go share life in a comic book somewhere. The fun never ends.
Now the world’s pretty crowded, cuz of all the new immigrants that arrived here in wooden spaceships from every nook and cranny of the surrounding multiverses; but not even this is a problem: for we just build more skyscrapers for them to live in. And the plumbing in these bonus developments is even superior to the plumbing in the old high-rises, which itself is still decent. And I wanna underline the fact that there are no longer any motorized vehicles, so everyone just wind-surfs everywhere; as the squirrels who rang in this new era taught us how to do earlier.
And now glasses (by which I mean spectacles worn to correct one’s vision) never slip down and fall off one’s nose, because nobody any longer possesses such a greasy face as they did in ancient times. (By which I mean in the bygone world: the one that existed prior to our popping of the perfect pill.)
Yet since this most blissful outcome was brought about by one small over-the-counter pill, I’m sure that a heckler among my readership will be inclined to naysay:
“A pill? That sounds suspiciously like the morning-after pill. Therefore, if your affidavit is to have the slightest attraction to us lechers who populate the scientific community, you must address this confusing issue, regarding those homo sapiens who engage in holy matrimony with extra-dimensional entities, even antimatter. Here’s our ultimatum — your options are strictly binary: Either we reject your findings and thus render your cult ‘officially pseudo-scientific’, OR (and this is the correct decision, which I advise you to choose) you must teach us about the birds and the bees.”
OK, I’ll try to address this important item of criticism.
Let’s say that you fall in love with an alien, and you two get married in a church and then move to a suburb inside of a comic book. In order to live happily ever after, you must first perform the Kiss Act. That is the pinnacle of earthly existence: without it, everything turns back to funkytown again. OK, so you yourself go put on your bee suit, which has a stinger in the rear; and your alien consort zips up his or her feathered onesie that vaguely resembles a bird, which is to say: a prostitute. Now you make sweet love. Five minutes later, your partner sits bolt upright and gasps and declares “I forgot to lock the kitchen!” which, when translated, means, “I neglected to take precautions to bar my food-prep area from any intruding chefs.” This is how you begin to suspect that a bun might be baking in the oven. Now, to bear offspring within wedlock is about the worst thing that one could do to futurity. So, since freaks only come out at night, you pop the morning-after pill. This reverses any nocturnal bumping that might have occurred. The term’s etymology stems from a solar trope mixed with a metaphor from the world of finance: we all assume that you’d have followed the wisdom of the stock market — “buy low; sell high” — and thus slept all night with the sun, like a non-vampire, and only woke when the sun has arisen, during the nightmare known as “morningtime”; only then would you remember to abort your fetus. But you married an alien; you’re not a normal person.
“He’s not a normal person.”
—David Dolores Frank to Officer De Luca, speaking about Officer Duke, from the film Wrong Cops (2013)
So, just as you wear your hat as you please, indoors or out, you take your morning-after pill whenever you please, night or day. For you launch all men and women forward with you into the Unknown. “The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate?” (Whitman.) What I’m trying to insinuate is that taking this world-perfect pill, which you’ll remember that we utilized to bring about the paradise above, to the eyes of God is the same as reneging on your private organs’ promise. For if a man-part and a woman-part say “Let’s do it,” and they put their minds together to create a new artwork, but then some belated savior rushes into the womb and shouts “Stop the production! Our financing for this project has fallen thru!” meaning that some bigwig from the upper world has pulled the plug on a life that they assumed had been greenlit, this is exactly how The Divine Creator of this Doomsday Device known as History must feel, when we readers decide to edit and redact his intellectual property: for reality is like God’s story (is it not?), and he doesn’t want us to change it, to IMPROVE it (does he?), since he made it just right, in the beginning.
So when I instigated the famous Acorn Wars of 2019 and turned all the gas guzzlers into furniture, in an act of cosmic refurbishment; and then I went around street-vending fire-baptism, while allowing my reader to enjoy inter-species espousal and live two-dimensionally within a graphic novel, in ecstasy, on glossy paper and printed in glorious black-and-white, even going so far as to allow the couple to erase their own cluster of Ben-Day dots which had threatened to forcefully colonize one of their stomach-wombs — to God, this was like hearing that your patron disapproves of the painting that you were commissioned to paint for her (or of her). God’s like: “What the fuck; don’t you like squirrels just how they are, scampering along the grass, not flying on magic leaves in the upper atmosphere, bothering me like a swarm of long-haired mosquitos: can’t you see I’m trying to nap on my cloud in the wild blue yonder? Why do you want the forest creatures to engage in acts of war? Let the acorns fall from the trees as I originally intended for them to do. I gave warfare to you humans, and to your superiors the chimps and gorillas. Don’t teach war to rodentkind: they don’t know how to perform it properly. War is supposed to be endless. But look at your ‘furry-tailed airforce’ or whatever you call them: the squirrels who pelted everyone, and totally plagiarized my idea of solidified precipitation (you mentioned ice, but I’m referring to brimstone) — they couldn’t even manage to keep their attack going for more than six hours! Right during their first battle, they quit and went home; started building nests and burying nuts again.
“And, Jesus Christ, didn’t I make enough varieties of being to fill this planet? Ya gotta bring a whole bunch of weirdo aliens in, from distant galaxies, which I purposely situated far away from your solar system so that you couldn’t mate with them to bring forth beings better than me. Behold, I manufactured the octopus — isn’t that alien enough? Look at some of the insects that I stashed in the hidden places: those are bizarre! . . . at least they’re relatively outlandish.
“I don’t get why you can’t just be happy working at your cubicle, in accordance with my plan for you. You have food and water, sort of. Must your aftercare be infinite? Why do you gotta slander me in a blog, on the Internet, and imagine a better world: it’s embarrassing! When I have guests over, and they see how my creation is behaving, they quip that I should send you to training school. I’m afraid that one of these days, some fellow divinity is going to alert the pantheon, and they’ll come in here and take you away from me. If they do that, it’ll be YOUR fault — your world will not have half as much pain, then: they’ll never allow it. Death will not be nearly as terrifying or believable. They’ll remove war back to the mental realm; then unleash fancy out into the commons, and make all your wet dreams come true. It’ll be like living in the house of some alternate parent who is not stiffnecked and jealous but rather tenderhearted, by which I mean noodle-spined. Her id is filled with knickknacks and bric-a-brac.”
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