Misc. junk story entry

Dear diary,

It was 5:19 a.m. on the morning of November 3, 2021. An ocean liner carrying hamburgers and hotdogs to suburban America was floating beautifully on the still surface of the ice-cold pond in my backyard, while speedboats zipped alongside it like little dogs that had befriended a wooly mammoth. There were intelligent women in bathing suits driving the speedboats, and no children in sight. Two artists, Midge and Betty, stood apart from the rest, on the water. They posed real good. Everyone in the world was young. Everyone was exactly twenty-seven, according to their star chart. Nobody was afraid, because fear cannot exist. And Midge and Betty look straight ahead — they gaze at the future thru their spectacles.

“Hello, gorgeous.”

The velvet voice of Lord Bryan, who is the only other character that matters in this novel, addressed Midge and Betty, making both of them feel excited. The two women appeared as one ideal goddess to Lord Bryan, and he nicknamed his love “UNE FEMME”. UNE FEMME turned her head and noticed that the speaker who had labeled her as gorgeous was a first-rate mind. There was a cloud of mystery surrounding him. Or rather more of a plume of flame than a cloud. He appealed to her, to them. He bedazzled their imagination. He spoke to no one but Betty and Midge. If anyone else tried to speak to Lord Bryan, he would slap them on both cheeks with his white magician’s glove. This would cause people to regret trying to get to know Lord Bryan. Normal people would always run away while casting nervous glances over their shoulder. 

Betty and Midge saw Lord Bryan as two distinct spirits: an author and her reader. You, the reader who is reading this sentence, constitute the first person of Lord Bryan’s twofold essence. (You are also UNE FEMME.) Again, I repeat, there is no fear: only mastery of fate. And everything in this world glitters: it’s almost as if the entire dimension is made out of tiny raindrops on a windshield, while the moon shines upon them. UNE FEMME and Lord Bryan trifle with death as a plaything. 

“Greetings, welcome,” the women’s eyes meet ours, because we are the future.

We stand staring at each other confidently. We are resolutely in love.

“Nice night,” we thought to ourself, “yes, it’s as if we’re all bathing in a textbook example of pointillism.” Then we quickly said aloud to UNE FEMME: “American woman?”

“Yes and no.”

“Well, which flag do you wave?”

The women answered nothing, but a Jolly Roger became superimposed over their image, and it was flapping proudly.

Lord Bryan smiled.

“Of course you are the American woman. We are one poem.”

And then much spying occurred, and it ended up sinking the ship. The life rafts were handed out to all the unimportant characters, and the important ones drowned. So spies from Russia met spies from the U.S., and they fell in love, just like Bryan and you did with Betty and Midge a few seconds ago. And everyone was tapping everyone else’s phones, so we all knew where we were planning on dining tomorrow.

You reached forth your hand and took one of the french fried potatoes from the plate. You dipped it in ketchup and tasted it. — It tasted good. 

Now robots come. They come down out of the night. Big robots, with huge square chests and wires on their arms. Bazookas for hands. Their eyes are a red glowing rectangle that blinks when they talk. They say “Stand back while we blast a hole thru this mountain.” And then they do what they promised. We all glide thru the hole, after the robots install a track for our choo-choo train to hover upon. You pull the whistle. Betty and Midge are awestruck — their hair is blowing in the wind.

“Who’s that?” say the robots from the outer darkness.

“That’s my soul-mate, UNE FEMME.”

Pots and pans now begin to fall from the sky. They came from the same planet that the robots escaped from. “Are they chasing the robots?” you ask me, from within our shared brain. “I do not believe that they are the police from Planet Chromium, no.”

Then the pots and pans arrest the robots and take them down to the station. They question the robots vigorously. The robots are scared. (This is when fear began to exist in our world. It came from afar and was never meant for us to taste; but we positively relish it.) The robots admit to being the ones that caused all the trouble in Afghanistan. Then a whole chorus of dames in evening dresses do a dance and sing sassily about how their spies are better than our spies. 

“Aren’t we on the same team, tho?” I ask you from within our shared brain. 

“I’m not even sure, at this point,” you answer; “however, notice that the stuff that the chorus girls sang in order supposedly to incriminate our double agents was not only a projection but basically a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Then you point and I gasp because everything you just said already came true and was happening yet again. 

“Oh my goodness,” I say. 

“Hold onto your wig,” you say, as we speed thru the restaurant on our motorcycle.

Now a ball bounces into the shot. Then we see multitudes of children escaping from a school building. The children chase into the street after the ball. And a truck comes charging down the road at breakneck speed from the zero hour. The children are scrambling toward the bouncing ball as the truck zooms directly toward them. The truck’s driver is shocked that he has encountered this obstacle: he tugs the steering wheel left and then right and then left and then right. The truck swerves all over the road — we keep expecting to see unimaginable carnage, but, amazingly (and this is noted in a long shot, very clearly, in case they need to prove in court what happened), the truck swerves around each and every child: it misses them all. Now it dashes off into the distance and disappears over the hill. 

The child at the front of the mob now holds the ball in his hands. All the children stand in the street and stare at the truck that almost hit them, as it vanishes, honking its horn with the doppler effect. 

These children all grow up to be bankers or stockbrokers. “I love you,” say their wives to them, when they’re older. “I love you, too, honey,” say the bankers and stockbrokers to their wives. They also buy escort girls and harlots, and they copulate with their secretaries. Both the bankers and the stockbrokers and all of their wives do this. Fornication is rampant, and everyone is OK with it. Even the Creator is OK with it. The Creator who fashioned trees so that their roots draw water from the ground, this same Creator is OK with everyone sleeping with everyone. — Is that OK with you?

“I’m fine with whatever,” you answer. So we become counselors, and then we become gamblers. We rent a hotel — the whole thing: all the rooms, and we pack them with junk. You and I get in our jalopy and visit numerous garage sales and yard sales. Some estate sales appeal to us, and we stop at an auction or two. We buy tons of plastic objects, and it’s all worthless to us; so we store it in our hotel. And this is funny because we only rented the hotel; we didn’t buy it outright. So we must continue to write checks to cover the lease, every month for the rest of our life. This is a bad decision, but we don’t care.

Now there’s a sword fight. Sparks are flying. I’m Betty and you’re Midge. We’re so good that neither of us gets so much as a scratch. Then we sheathe our swords and go grab a bite to eat.

“What sounds appealing to you?” I hold out a map of the area that has all the eateries circled in red. Their names have been clearly affixed next to their locations, using a label-maker.

“I like THAT one,” you say; and you point to the place on the map. You thrust your finger so hard at the map that it bursts thru and tears the paper to shreds, so that we cannot read the establishment’s name. And you burn the map with your butane lighter. We sit and watch it crinkle up. Then the rest of the hotel begins to burn. We watch that, too.

“I could sit here and watch the flames forever and ever,” you say.

I sigh and tell you that I agree completely.

Now Lord Bryan approaches from the East, and he hands us a machine gun, which we must share.

We sit in the hay and watch the stars. A teddy bear creeps out from behind the barn door. We wave, and it waves back. Then the Creator takes the tree that he has invented and plants it next to the “Adult” section of a Videocassette Rental Shop. We wave to the Creator, but he cannot see us; either that or he ignores us. He enters the red drapes of the “Adult” section and never returns. We continue to lie on the hay bale and breathe. Then we go into the Rental Shop and find a pro-war film from the U.S.A. and watch that on our television.

Now Betty and Midge and I go to a classy restaurant. Then I leave and take a nap in a department store. Your mom enters the picture and buys a pillow from the Hard Cube Store and we laugh as she cannot get comfortable. This goes on for several chapters of the film before we take pity upon her by entering the shot and teaching her how to pound with her fists upon the pillow in order to soften it up. “It is hard rock,” we explain, while our cape keeps flapping; “you must pound on it, to soften it, like THIS,” and we go to town. So… I guess that’s all. I’m not sure if I want to say that your mother learned her lesson and got a good night’s sleep after bloodying her hands, or whether I should mention that she quit the production in a fit of rage before we could finish filming the sequence, because, as a joke, I told the Special-Effects Department to make the fake blood extra sticky, and she got miffed about this and stomped off the set. 

“Let’s just put up an expository intertitle stating that she found a far superior bed at the Coffin Shop,” you say.

“Good call,” I agree. 

Athens and Sparta now catch our eye. “What?” you ask them. They try to interest us. “You have our undivided attention,” I say; “now make the sell.” They hold out a display case that contains various soaps and body-sprays. I buy them all. “Thank you so much! You are a lifesaver,” we kiss them on their chemises, where their triangles reside — this was not our original intention: we first try to kiss their hands, but they move their hands downwards before our lips can make contact, and we follow them, but then they remove their hands quickly so that we end up kissing the silken fabric, in the afore-specified locale. Athens and Sparta are a pair of middle-aged women. We get along really well with them. They are wonderful people.

Then we do an Internet search for “Best place to live,” and we move there. So now we live in Agra, India. Boy this is nice. We buy a couch; then we build an entertainment system out of wood and position it perfectly within an alcove. We now watch our U.S.A. war movie. 

At this point of our life, I begin to feel very, very good. I wake up in the morning without a headache, and I eat breakfast and feel energized. I go for a run. I wave to the neighbors. We make love in the street. Dogs bark and I answer. Murdered corpses vanish entirely: they become flowers and mounds of fertile soil. I save my money and eventually become a decent politician. The sun makes California a great place to film motion pictures. I buy three houses in Iowa, but I remain in Agra — I hire a couple bundles of people to live in my houses, and I pay a production squad to film everything that occurs there and stream it online. Then I buy a catchy domain name so that I can log in to my website and view what’s going on inside of all my homes. At first it’s boring: all anyone is ever doing is playing chess. So I prick my finger and paint a decree on a piece of dead lamb: “Henceforward, the game of chess is prohibited.” This improves the show drastically; for, now, the residents of my houses must find other ways to pass the time. The women end up wearing dresses that reveal their shoulders and the upper part of their back; and the men shrivel up and biodegrade. Every day I log in and give my show a four-star rating out of six. (I reserve the last two stars, so that my feedback feels believable — I don’t want anyone to suspect that the website’s owner is logging on from the administrator account and manipulating the reviews of his own show so that they all are slightly positive, even tho that’s exactly what I do: I delete any comments that veer too far from neutrality, because I’m a realist.) Then all the spies from the U.S. and China and Russia and the Persian Empire all begin to grow hooked on my webinar. They tune in frequently. I even chat them up, sometimes, when I’m drunk. Pretty soon I max out my credit cards and get a job as a newscaster.

Now what type of monsters do we want climbing up out of the mud? (We just now received our shipment of mud.) A red dragon? OK. A green lizard? OK. How about a pelican? That’s fine with me. A giant white ape? Great: do it. God? Check. 

So we’re at the restaurant in our evening wear, and the waiter is handing us menus. Now the REAL fun starts. I order a cheeseburger and a cherry soda. You order a club soda and meatballs. Betty orders fruit, and Midge orders a cocktail and a salad. 

We eat. I take my cufflinks off and throw them at the diners to our right. One of the cufflinks hits the stern-looking man right in his pince-nez. The glass cracks and there’s blood everywhere, like the Odessa steps montage in Battleship Potemkin (1925).

At this point, I order fish. The waiter brings me a lovely cut of salmon. “Thank you,” I say. There are nude women standing behind my chair, to my right and my left, as I eat my meal. All my dates at the table, as well as my co-stars and stunt-doubles, look on in envy as I nibble each morsel like a gentleman. I then stand up and pull a pistol from my coat pocket and begin to clean it. I disassemble it and oil it and then put it back together again. Using my pocket square, I polish the gun’s exterior. Then I pass it around to everyone at the table, for them all to inspect it. Each person says “Ooh!” or “Ah!” as they receive the firearm; then they immediately aim it at their neighbor who cowers in fright, but the gun never does discharge (I smartly engaged the safety function, because I never want anyone to get hurt during the filming of my books, except your mother or my mother) as they admire the weapon’s cleanliness. Even the nudes to my right and left get to fondle the piece; although I am unconcerned when they aim the thing at me. I keep eating my fish and thinking in my thought-bubble “Do it: I dare you.”

Then, I yank the napkin from of my dress shirt and unfold it so that it billows, and cast it down upon the now-empty plate; for I have finished eating my fish. I jingle a bell, which causes the owner of the restaurant to come sprinting over. The owner hands me the bill, and I sign it and stuff a wad of paper caesars into his breastpocket, which causes his eyes to cross when he tries to ogle his prize. Then I slap his face hard, just for fun; and I leave the establishment. 

Midge and Betty lock arms with me, as we skip around town. When we pass the Creation Science Museum, we stop skipping and begin to walk like sane, rational people — but our attitude is still skippy. 

I buy a ring for each of my dames, and they gawk at them. Then we go to the chapel and get married. We have a traditional white wedding, signifying that we all are virgins. Then we kill the priest who wed us and roast him and feed him to the swine. Then we axe down the church, but first we evacuate the swine and lead them to the rolling green hillocks outside the studio. (I love swine.) Then we create a human infant, out of clay that I pulled from the earth.

We name our human Jeff, and he becomes a banker, as expected. He takes a swig of his beer, while visiting us one Sunday afternoon, in our backyard, next to my monarch butterfly sanctuary, and there happens to be a hornet inside of the can; therefore his mouth gets stung on the inside. He spits out the beer: “Pah! Pah! Ye gods! I’ve been strook!” — That’s what he exclaims. The boy is thirty-three when he sez this. 

It causes me to turn to you, my gentle reader, and quip: “What’s wrong, is he convulsing because…” and then I conclude my remark with something very clever and funny, but I don’t feel like remembering exactly what I said on this occasion, so I’ll just leave it up to our viewership to imagine what they will.

A man wearing a Darth Vader costume (from the 1977 movie Star Wars) now enters our backyard and I shoot him with my newly cleaned revolver. Although I like to think of my gun as futuristic, the weapon cannot be set to “stun mode”, thus it annihilates the actor. A portly insurance agent now steps forth and uses a broom to sweep the human remains offstage.

I then stroll to the drive thru and order an orange soda. The clerk tells me it’ll cost seven dollars and seventy-seven cents. I tell him to do something obscene with his person, and I pace away holding the soda without having paid for it. My pose, at this moment, resembles the famous Statue of Liberty from America, with the soda can standing in for the Flame of Freedom; and, instead of being clothed in ugly green robes, I look dashing and debonair.

But you and I are one, remember, so you look really attractive too. 

Then a man dressed as R2-D2 appears from the same Star Wars film that I mentioned earlier; and I blast him with my gun, and it fries his brain. He wobbles back and forth like a fool. “Stop wandering onto my private property and I will stop obliterating you,” I say, after blowing out the sparks that fizz from the barrel of my well-oiled revolver. I have no idea how the Star Wars crew keeps ending up in the pages of this masterwork. My guess is that they’re unfocused.

Then I order a burrito. “One bean burrito, please,” and the cashier takes my caesar coin and faints. (This happens often.) She’s apparently never seen real money before. I climb over the countertop and revive her by holding my hands over her head and emitting circular blue voodoo rays; and she eventually awakens. She tries to kiss me, but I pull back. I stand up and position myself on the other side of a glass barrier; then I press my lips to the glass. She rises and steps forward and presses her lips to the other side of the glass barrier. Thus we fake-kiss. I curtsy and leave when she starts adding tongue.

“Who wants to ride the mechanical bull?” yells a voice from the smoky depths.

“I do,” I say while taking the cigarette out of my mouth and crushing its cherry onto the face of a statue of cupid.

So I ride the mechanical bull until the thing blows a gasket. It’s only a machine, but I cause it to work so hard that it gives itself a hernia, and all its ball bearings jam up. 

“Whoa! No one’s ever done that before,” sez the voice from the smoky depths.

“The secret is that you hold onto its horns while it’s bucking; otherwise it throws you off,” I explain.

The voice scratches his head and then fixes the bull’s hernia and gasket and replaces its ball bearings in order to try this trick himself. — Sure enough, it sorta works.

Now I drink a popular brand of soda. I dislike it intensely. Now I drink another popular brand of soda. I dislike it equally. Then I do a taste-test challenge: a River Nymph serves me two soft drinks whose cans are covered so that I cannot see their labels. I sip the first, then I sip the second. I point to the one that tastes bad and say “That’s Pepsi-Cola,” and then I point to the one that tastes just as bad and say “That’s Coca-Cola”. 

Now Betty and Midge enter a telephone booth and become UNE FEMME while the seagulls are divebombing them. When they exit, they have dazzling shivers of glass magnetized to their clothing like intentional sequins. 

UNE FEMME and I create a comic book together, and it sells big-time and earns us a rocket-full of money. For safekeeping, we place this rocket into a camper; then load the camper onto a catapult and launch it at Neptune. It hits a wall and rains cash on North Minneapolis. Then we sleep together with our clothes on.