War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044) (14 page)

Dear Familial Run-in with
Religious Hypocrisy,

What’s he look like?

86 — Should Have Gotten
Knocked-Up at Fourteen

Dear Fake Advice
Columnist,

I went on one date from a dating
website and now I’ve been getting harassing phone messages from the
guy for almost a year. I’m not being singled out. He seems to use
telemarketer technology. But I get these horribly intimidating
sound-effect voice mails. They are the worst. It's totally
psychologically traumatizing. I stopped checking my voice mail in
the fall because of them. I couldn't deal with it. They are weird,
mainly. Like movie sound effects. The scariest one is of gunshots.
It sounds like it's coming from inside a firing range. I’ve got the
cops on it, but I was wondering what to do about
procreation.

Dear Should Have Gotten
Knocked-Up at Fourteen,

You think too much. Cops will get you
nowhere. You need to take matters into your own hands. Look at
everything that’s already on your plate. It’s getting ridiculous. I
mean your daily to-do list is like this: 1) leave the house; 2)
start dating again; 3) find a soul mate in order to fulfill all
life dreams; 4) be sure all the guys who turned out not to be the
soul mate aren't skulking around in your vicinity honing malicious
intentions just for something to do on their days off; 5) become
completely and totally paranoid about ever leaving the house
again.

But moving from the general to the
specific, let’s get down and dirty about how to cope with this
phone harassment. I suggest an M60 mounted on the hood of your
Prius. Just drive past that guy’s house and mow his ass down.
You’ll probably get the old lady watering her geraniums next door
and the guy who’s out front there waxing his car, but at the outset
factor in that kind of minimal collateral damage. There is nothing
that should be coming between you and your life plan. You are on
birth control for the first fifteen years after puberty, then you
come off it, and go straight to the fertility clinic. This is
society and those are the rules. You can’t be getting sidetracked
by some idiot who wants to intimidate you, just because this
culture has him completely emasculated.

87 — Book Worm

Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

I almost checked a book out at the
library, but there was no one at the circulation desk. I didn’t
know what else to do so I just took the book and walked out of the
library. But somehow the book set off those alarms at the doors.
It’s so ridiculous. All that does it is this magnetized metal
strip. So unfair. If I’d just taken the strip out, there never
would have been a problem. Well. The librarian came over and made a
big thing out of it like the book was hers or something. She
completely embarrassed me. Shamed me and shit, you know? But I want
to go back and get more books to keep for myself. I need them to
put over my fireplace because they look really good in the marble
bookends I got from IKEA. How I can deactivate the sensors in the
collectively-owned books so that those stupid alarms don’t go off
next time?

Dear Book-worm,

Who does she think she is?
Incompetence has reached its tipping point. Rip the covers off and
run.

39 — July Visit

Mother is in town. Chicago is as good as life gets
in the middle of July. We met, as soon as I could stand it, at the
new Modern Wing. The Art Institute’s new twin. We stood on the
walking bridge talking about literature for an hour. I did not hate
her so much anymore but still hated her garish jacket. My mother
looked out at the water. I looked down at the prairie flowers and
gravel paths in their planned boxes in the Lurie Garden. My mother
stood at the edge and leaned over. I couldn't. Couldn't stand
it.

88 — Want

A isolationist alienated insular island-man joined the one-set
to not be so me-too-mummy-cling marginalized. Why? Because one of
the one-set went to the no kind of answer, about which so many ask.
And he stood there, looking, you know? Really looking.

Hobble. Cobble. Gobble. Go.

For a moment, even to him, it seemed
like maybe being one of the one-set may not even crash-test matter.
No. Untrue! He was really looking. And not just to look but to
find, to know, to believe, to become.

46 — Love/Pity

There are corn and cattails elsewhere. Whether or
not piano eyes aspire to penetrate that stained glass Joseph at the
chapel I am no witness, no more. Darkness consumes objective truths
but as my hand reaches out to them, they ripple. Summer thunder,
snow, and gleaming memory, but I am no witness no more, whether
layered bakery rolls flake apart in church basements, even if
milkweed seeds silk-drift through unmoving air—despite their anchor
weight—and rise past beech groves, up into sycamore-leaved nets, or
if creeks still hush dry as they season pass.

If mossy summer crawdads vacation in
galvanized tubs on cement slabs still shaded by remembered peonies,
then likely there a praying mantis still looks down from a leaf
with reserved disapproval. My father said, “Never confuse pity and
love.” His advice became a litmus test for coiling tendencies that
seeped in through the chinks of my life where diagnosis and
judgment made worm trails through my have-to-know-it-and-why
mind.

Even to this day I’d rather know if
the summer auditorium curtain at the high school bike rack still
gets filled up with tan kids near a place where slow continual
invisible men chew limestone out of the earth, lift it by dump
truck, shake it up conveyor belts, pile it high to make dust and
our mini-mountains. Not knowing, I’d guess a swan has stopped for a
bit, again, and is preening on the quarry lake that stands at
silent capacity rain after rain.

92 — Me

Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

I want to write in to ask you
something, but I don’t really feel invested in my life. I feel like
I’d rather watch reruns of reality TV. Maybe wait for the repo guy
to come get the car I leased last year. Can you think of some
questions that I might be able to write in and ask you so I can
point to the entry in the paper and show it to all my friends and
say, “That’s from me!”

Dear Me,

If you really want to latch onto
existence, then it’s about savage recalcitrance against the status
quo. So I guess you could ask me why the fuck I care.

93 — Fuck up

Dear Fake Advice
Columnist,

I’ve recently gotten sober after
fucking myself up on a regular basis for a solid fifteen years. I’m
wondering what to do about lack of sensual stimulation. I get sort
of bored, then it’s almost like I’m grounded. I hate it. I want it
to stop. I’ll do anything. Seriously.

Dear Fuck-up,

It’s too bad you’re sober. I quite
enjoyed having a little nip of rye whiskey this afternoon while
reviewing pages at this stainless steel table, with its brushed
swirls, where my bouquet of lilacs and white tulips lies so
carefully on a diagonal over a corner. I’ve yet to get a vase. The
flowers drip every once in a while from the sopping wet purple
tissue paper base. The water is pooling on the antique seat of a
wooden chair next to me. But even if you didn’t mention it and
won’t, the idea of your eating tea cake and ham after sex somehow
disturbs me. I'm not quite sure why. Because, if I’m honest with
myself, salt-cured meat, masticated, swallowed slow, is a perfect
sort of indulgence for those most sober of individuals, such as
yourself.

95 — Self Help
Nightmare

Dear Fake Advice
Columnist,

I’m a co-dependent enabler and I love
it. For ten years Dr. Phil and Oprah have made me feel really
guilty about having any self-worth at all since I derive all mine
from others. I don’t care what the Feminists say, Womanhood has a
lot of momentum and it doesn’t just stop on a dime. The patterns
are really old. For me, self-abdication started very young. But as
I’ve gotten older I’ve harbored more and more silent resentment and
frustration. I don’t know. When it's another person’s turn to
support me somehow it never quite happens. There’s always a logical
explanation. That's the part that pisses me off. Not the not having
support. But. The constant explanations about why I can’t have it.
What can I do to evade the pressure from the narcissists who
dominate my entire existence?

Dear Self-Help
Nightmare,

I can’t be distracted from
broadcasting my overbearing influence by considerations like that.
Of course you resent the world for not recognizing your needs but
what can be done? Living in an emotional hell doesn't compromise
"who you really are," as no one else really has access to your
internal shit anyway. We're all alone. Get over it.

96 — Heretic

Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

I don’t believe any of it. The only
reason I go to church sometimes is to feel some continuity in my
life, some sense of familiarity, some connection to my childhood,
and to the space beyond death.

Dear Heretic,

It doesn’t sound like you’re going to
be able to get your quota of a derivative God. This has to stop.
Don’t mess with any of that shit in the beyond. It’s best to stay
home. How will Santa find your stocking? You can’t be at Grandma’s
on Christmas morning. Get your mom, or some other member of your
inner circle, to sync-in with a church community so that you can
show up surly twice a year. God will know you’ve done all you can
for your spirit.

98 — Sit-Down
Dinner

Dear Fake Advice
Columnist,

I would love to have a party where
there's an auctioneer selling off abstractions all night as you
make your entrance through the foyer. He’d be on stilts and have
those thirty-foot stilt pants, metallic-striped, and yellow, with
flutter, flow, and wooden clicks on marble floors where
spring-loaded spills get cleaned up thud-quick-quiet so he won’t
fall. He’d stand there, shifting his weight back and forth, lifting
his feet, alternately, hunched over, making a rhythm, making a
spectacle, making a left, right, left, right, left, right mockery
march the way stilt walkers do, entertaining onlookers with a
precarious gravity play that might maybe, yes, almost betrays its
physics after all, once, no, yes, after all these galactic eras,
and he’d look for the highest bidder for what can’t win:
philosophical theories, macroeconomies, political spheres, and many
too many emotional responses well-rationed. There would be no
question about value. No low-bid contracts undermining
insta-structures. He'd be streaming. And, as the hostess, I’d pay
him in advance to have a cracked-out, verbal-solid, six-and-a-half
hours of old-time auctioneering, calling our times into high
frequency question, as treble over the deafening electronic
downtempo beat, coming from somewhere out on the lanai. But I’m
wondering what kind of table service I should have.

Dear Sit-Down
Dinner,

Set a table with twenty-four place
settings of your finest china and silver. Use the good crystal. At
each place setting leave a square mirror and a small pile of
cocaine. Give each little powder pile a calligraphied place card.
Prop it up there. Have each guest introduce himself or herself to
his or her neighbor on the right by snorting a line. And, if anyone
wants to meet the persons on the left? Pass the Limoges oyster
plate, where 70mm, 75mm, 80mm diaphragms are arranged as special
order select delicacies.

99 — Altruist

Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

Most of the acts of my life have been
altruistic. I'm basically trying to give myself permission to make
decisions that may benefit me first and foremost and other people
secondarily. This is REALLY tough if you've been taught the good
opposite.

I wouldn’t really mind catering to the
group and putting everyone else’s needs first. But it doesn’t
really seem like I have a pack for my pack mentality. Do you know
what I mean? From personal history, I've found that trying to
benefit the greater good, or the familial good, or the husband good
is impossible. So what’s a good little altruistic self-sacrificer
to do?

Dear Altruist,

Not sure why you care. But we can go
there. How are you even going to offer yourself for the greater
good? Consensus has been deconstructed. I’m not an altruist at all.
Why would I ever want to bother to help anyone else?

55 — Pothead

Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

I’ve been trying to reckon my identity
but can’t seem to remember anything that I’ve figured
out.

Dear Pothead,

My approach to the reclamation of
identity is more involved than the IKEA standard "some assembly
required."

Forget everything you’ve already
forgotten but don’t forget this:

When you build your own contraption
out of spare parts from the junkyard, which I do all the time, you
don't really think, “Yeah, this is definitely going to
work."

Not at all. There's no warranty. No
receipt. No little baggie of plastic pieces carefully counted in
China. There's just you and a bunch of ideas about how it all could
be.

Fine. What do you do with
it?