4

effulgence
prescience
parlous
licit
circumvent

Synod the plastic shark rested atop a wooden table, observing the goings-on outside his Brooklyn apartment window. He had been filled with prescient misgivings ever since the weather had turned cold at the beginning of November. An enveloping grey had permeated the city and filtered to the souls of its residents. “This is not a dark place,” he told himself. “It is a dark time.” Perhaps he had forgotten the intervolving of space and time, for he viewed the world as events passing from one to the other in a static environment, without the spatial trajectories of normal experience. I guess that’s what you get for being a plastic shark.

Immobile objects are at once passively receptive and actively judgmental. “Don’t look at me like that,” we cry to the lifeless doll crammed onto the bookshelf. Of course, the piercing eyes are just the incarnation of our own self-directed criticism, but we do not acknowledge this. We refuse to be implicated in the plot against us; we are simply misinformed, misdirected protagonists in a perpetual thespian tragedy. Somewhere deep inside, though, in the disquiet sea of our subconsciousness, a perspicacious voice begs for expression, and takes form in the lifeless, peering effigies we craft after our own image.

Synod was not a big shark. He was a proportionate model of a big shark, but he was only six inches long. Models of sharks are not like models of other things. Human dolls, for instance, are well proportioned, healthy without being overweight, and possess large, round eyes with full eyelashes. They are almost never red, soggy, or covered in afterbirth, and they are certainly never frightening (“Chucky” excluded). Human models are ideal because they are crafted by humans who like to see themselves in the best possible light. Models of other species, though, are different. Synod was not “shark-as-shark”, but “shark-as-human view of shark”. He had light blue skin, a white underbelly, and pin-point black eyes. His gills were bright red, because humans like to associate predators with blood. His mouth gaped open, displaying two parlous rows of sharp teeth. This was a shark ready to kill. Synod had fallen victim to public perception of sharkness. That said, if one wasn’t predisposed to thinking of sharks as barbarous beasts, Synod’s expression could be alternatively interpreted. He could have been choking on a piece of seal meat, or sustaining an operatic note. He also had no insides, and the vacuous, inner cavity running from tail to snout suggested that this was, at best, a shell of a shark trying very hard to look mean. Or maybe he was just aghast at what he saw out the window.

Life was not always busy in Brooklyn. Synod’s apartment was on the rear of the building, so his window overlooked a sort of conglomerate courtyard fashioned from the rear balconies and yards of adjacent buildings. He at times waited for days for anything significant to happen, and during these extended stretches he would contemplate his own life in relation to the world around him. Synod had an active mind; while inactivity causes some to fall into a stupor, he quietly exercised his skills in logic, mathematics, astronomy and meteorology. He did not have a clear view of the sky, so his understanding of weather patterns was somewhat skewed. However, he was able to judge atmospheric conditions by what he observed in the courtyard: an overcast afternoon desaturated the red of the exterior brick walls, and a sunny morning filled everything with bright, effulgent warmth. It is important to note that he did not circumvent his shortcomings with elaborate excuses about being a plastic shark with a limited view of the world; he accepted that his experience was “sui generis”, that is, of the plastic shark variety. If he was unable to walk outside and look into the sun, or feel the rain on his rubbery fell, he would do his best to discover how the elements affected the inside world of a Brooklyn apartment, and the inside world of a Brooklyn resident.

This is not a story about the witness of a murder. With all due respect to Mr. Hitchcock, we’ll leave that to the movies. The courtyard activities were often painfully licit, and on several occasions Synod had inwardly begged for something unusual to happen, but it was not meant to be. Instead, this story is as subtle and achingly attenuated as a motionless observer at a courtyard window. It is about the self-validation of existence, the self-generated meaning of an active mind. It is about a plastic shark who, after a protracted period of looking at the world, learned to see everything and nothing at the same time.

3

omnivorous
mandible
interline
gestation
apostatize

He was swimming in a sea. A black sea. His movement was congruent with the dips and doodles, wips and woodles of the invisible undercurrent. He twisted, turned, flipped and wormed through the dark void of the inbetween. Up cropped monster mountains of dynamic modality and fecund fields of phatic flora. Suddenly, streamlined schools of spawning superlatives sent him plummeting to a present perfect patch of the palindrome piedmont. The interminable motion of indiscrete terms caused a vortex of vacuity to envelop his being. He was pulled, pulled, pulled
d
o
w
n
into the space between words. And that is where our story happens. If you look deeply between the lines of this text you will see the bubbling, coming-into-being of the underwater world. Do you see it? Do you hear it? It is the possibility of differentiation; those dark bodies emerging from the depth of meaning, protruding now past the surface of intelligibility, joined together somewhere far below. They are moving now, premature limbs of individuation, thin voices of empty speech-sounds. They spread out and multiply, and there is strength in numbers. What exists now is a cacophonous chorus of assertion.

Still, though, lies the deep. A monster lurks there. If you peer into that tenebrous pool you will just see the outline of a giant mandible, overlaid with protruding incisors, ready to assuage an omnivorous appetite. This renegade body negates the possibility of meaning, and threatens to swallow all. Our hero plunges to face that sinister darkness, and the last vestiges of light flicker, playing tricks on his senses. His own existence dims to the point of prevarication. He is no longer able to distinguish between himself and Mephistopheles, and he is startled by the notion that he has already been eaten. As quickly as it arose, though, that thought recedes into the inky blackness from whence it was once created, rejoining the sea of infinite possibility.

game 2.

hosiery
deference
scourge
stodgy
sublimate

This brief story is about a refrigerator hate crime involving a stodgy pickle and a little girl named Abigail. By “little” I mean smaller than a memory but larger than a baby carrot. Some argue that memory is immaterial but that is because they have never felt the crushing weight of guilt or the immense pain of love lost. Ironically, the sheer size of memory stems from its immateriality. Memory cannot be boxed or shelved or burned or given away, and it certainly cannot be erased. It can, however, be inherited, shared, altered and cherished just like any number of physical objects we pass amongst ourselves. The more negative the memory, the more elusively immaterial it becomes. The positive memories, though, they are different. We clutch them to our chest like tiny lockets of dense, purified metal.

Abigail wasn’t like other little girls. She was a name engraved on a granite stone, embedded in the earth. She lived with the undercreatures: the worms and hedgehogs and creepies and grandparents, but sometimes she visited the fridge world and presided over domestic, chilly matters. The other fridge Contents regarded her with respectful deference, heeding her strange words with cautious obeisance. Sometimes her rulings seemed disconnected from the conditioned world of the Contents, like the time she ordered some frothy milk to receive ten lashings for going bad and unleashing a stinky odour. The scene caused quite a mess as the leather thong splashed about in the bubbles, coating the walls and making the air thick with sour stench. The frothy milk was no worse for wear except for the social humiliation and subsequent castigation of a public flagellation.

Abigail always appeared in the fridge wearing the same outfit: a red dress with white polka dots, brown stockings and black, shiny shoes with a silver buckle. It’s hard to describe her other features because they were a bit obscured. It was like a pencil drawing that had been smudged with a wet thumb. Some adults might find this account disconcerting or disturbing, but that is because they have never lived with the undercreatures or visited the fridge during a public trial. If they had, they would recognize that while Abigail was earnest in her work, she was also very pleasant. Things are never strange from the inside out. It’s only on the other side of the window that light is refracted and images are distorted. Someone once told me that this story is distorted, but I told them that when they join the undercreatures they will understand.

Time is short, so I must tell you about the hate crime. Strangely enough, it involves Abigail, not as the judge, but as the perpetrator. As it turns out, in another time and place, people actually eat pickles for fun. Being unaccustomed to outside worlds, the Contents were very open with each other, and did not hide in glass jars or plastic baggies. The stodgy pickle thought nothing of sharing its sweet, acidic goodness with its neighbours, and enthusiastically welcomed Abigail whenever she dropped by for a visit. Familiarity breeds trust, and trust breeds indiscretion; these words were foreign to the Contents, though, who bred nothing but hairy mould. That is why this event is known as the Crunch Heard ‘Round the Fridge. It is also why Abigail no longer presides over domestic disputes because, as the thin trail of yellow vinegar trickled from her fuzzy mouth, the Contents realized that they should never trust a girl who lives with the undercreatures and has a smudgy pencil face.

mind games.

Use each of these words, or a synonym of each word, at least once in a coherent story of 500 words or less.

etiquette
lupine
snipe
feckless
collocate

It was in the festering heat of centre court that Jelly Rogers remembered why he left Compton Hall for the desert of Arizona: the pulsating smell of rubber being ripped across blue acrylic, and the inane applause of a crowd being lulled into a stupor. If finding a reason for being is the paramount human struggle, Jelly had managed to make it this far oblivious to his own yearning. He did not strive. He did not make snide remarks about the happiness of others. He did not collocate successes into a shrine of competence. He lilted through life on the invisible wings of ignorance; not crudeness or willful disregard, but benign oblivion. He had been a feckless wanderer through more than three and a half decades of living, and the meaning of it all had suddenly wafted over his body in a single moment of pungent clarity.

The gamesmanship of the tennis world is what had first attracted him. Void of the fustian rhetoric of other over-paid athletes, tennis celebrated the best of cultivated urbanity. Players of lupine deportment, rapaciously sniping felted rubber over taut netting would pause in a match to observe the minutia of court etiquette, even if it meant breaking concentration. The equidistant rows of numbered plastic seats established a sense of religious order and honour; a high priest held court as combatants battled on the down.

How had he gone so long without seeing himself in this bounded theatre? How had he survived in the absence of delineating chalk squares, fault lines and umpires? This was his subsistence, his essence, his existence.

“ADVANTAGE!” cries the voice from above, as Jelly lowers his shoulder to the opposing target. Two bounces, a toss, arm cocked, pure synergy, explosion. Love to forty in seconds flat.

Things are just beginning.

Smatterings

I watched Vicky Christina Barcelona tonight and it was other-worldly. I mean, the film as a whole was good good, not great great; but I biked home after (it was raining) and I was provoked in a way I haven’t been for some time. Which character do I identify with? I won’t ruin the film by talking more about it, but after watching it you may find yourself asking the same question.

I’ve watched a lot of good film recently. I finally saw Bergman’s trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence), and last week I watched two Dylan films: Don’t Look Back and I’m Not There. I’m not a film buff (yet), but I’m on the road. I’m close to orienting myself in the local indie/foreign rental place which is the first step. Next step is developing an air of condescension and smoking cigarettes. Hipster progress is slow.

With every film I watch and every book I read I feel closer to writing my own stuff. Not that blogging doesn’t count, but in the grand scheme of things I don’t want to blog professionally. Maybe just compulsively. Quick hits of indulgent smatterings, so I can leave the serious work for serious projects.

I hope you’re not offended (it’s the whole condescension thing… it’s not personal).

What will Willy Wonka write while walking a wanton way? “I’m into incredulous, insane insinuations. Hereupon, here’s history’s hokum: harbouring highschool hallucinations hobbles highbrow, ‘heavenly’ hermits. So, sacrosanct Swami, stop soliciting society’s susceptible schlemiels."

Why are weddings so damned high maintenance? I have a theory, you can tell me what you think: God doesn’t honour our ceremonies. We pay big money to rent out beautiful cathedrals and perform production-worthy religious rituals all in an attempt to convince ourselves that marriage is sacred. I’m increasingly convinced that this elusive “sacred” is found not in pomp but in the everyday. When Uncle Stu dies you don’t mourn the memory of that one summer roadtrip to Williamsburg, VA; you miss stopping by his house every couple of weeks for caramel squares and small talk. Marriage is caramel squares and small talk, and it’s wonderful. We create the sacred by combining inner attitudes with outer symbols which elicit a response. Weddings have become a gaudy, expensive outer symbol but I fear we often miss the inner attitude. About 50% of marriages convince me that we have missed the inner attitude.

At what point am I truly married? When I say my vows? Sign a piece of paper? No, it’s when I make the inner decision that I am choosing this person for the rest of my life. That I will do my best to make our lives happy until I die. That we will make love to each other, and only each other. This happens long before I sign a document.

So save your money and invest in what matters.

(no, I’m not getting married. But I am standing in a wedding this weekend…)

"The sky in the summer is majestic. Sometimes his dad and mom come outside and pop popcorn in an old iron skillet. Josh finds this funny because his dad likes to cook using butter and frying pans, and things always turn out burned. But there is something about his father’s cooking that is more primitive and makes everything taste better. It makes Josh feel at home, as if with each kernel he is closer to being tucked into bed.

After having popcorn, they lay out under the stars and Josh’s father makes some obligatory comment about God’s creation. This gets annoying but soon they get to just looking at things and Josh can relax. It really is amazing. When you look out at the sky like that you realize why people called the galaxy the Milky Way. It really looks like milk. Since Josh really likes cereal he feels he is sort of an expert on the subject and yes, it looks like milk pouring from the pitcher. This makes him feel good and enhances the whole experience. He usually spends some time trying to find the various star formations he learned about in school. The Big Dipper is usually pretty easy, but other than that they’re hard to find. He wonders who it is that decides what stars will make what shapes. It all seems fairly arbitrary. At any time he can locate a bear or a tiger or a unicorn. Anyone with any imagination at all could do this, he thinks. "

- excerpt from the book I hope to finish one day.