I mos def must be the funky! I desire to shake my grooved thang higher! I must melt the hot stax of wax in my ears, and take off to an astral plain! We will, we will, biological clock you in the face! Raise the roofie on the sucker! It’s a crisco inferno! Burn your mother’s down!
Sunday, Sunday, Sunday! Let’s put hope in your soul finger! And ebony and Merchant Ivory soap in your hole! Maceo, take me to the bridge of sighs! I wanna take your squier! Good God alrighty! They’re gonna spank that plank like a rented joule! So high, I can’t get over Stitt. So wide, you can’t have it your way, have it your way! Make it fonky!
When you look up at the heavens at night, a goodly portion of the pinpricks of light are white dwarf stars. Those stars don’t function anymore; that is to say, they are not ongoing concerns in the star business. They’ve run out of hydrogen, and have imploded. They only “shine” because they once were capable of making heat, and it takes a long while for a star to cool off. Apparently there aren’t any white dwarf stars that have cooled off enough to stop being visible altogether, because it takes hundreds of billions of years for them to achieve space’s room temperature. But they are all already kaput; they just appear to be functional. When we look up at the night sky, we’re just having a really long wake five minutes after the murder, so to speak. They’re dead, Jim.
I’m not interested in the TV show these people are trying out for, or Craftsman tools, or much of anything in the videos. It catches my eye for other reasons. These people are not unusual. It is not their fault they have been gelded and made useless. They did as they were told. I find them interesting, because they appear to my eye to be about average. They have participated fully in American public life, and it has made them useless to themselves and to others. The reaction necessary to shine is missing, and the ingredients have collapsed in on themselves, and they only have the slowly fading appearance of the citizenry they sprang from. God bless them, they’ve got enough mettle to try to squeeze something from the raw material of their lives: Maybe I can be crowned the king or queen of the shiftless, and appear as a Reality Sideshow geek, displaying my underdeveloped limbs and the stubs of my intellect for a few pennies.
Whenever the topic of our children being homeschooled comes up — and it always comes up, and not by way of us mentioning it — everyone blurts out the same thing: Aren’t you afraid your children won’t be “socialized”? No one ever hesitates one moment to consider that the question might be an ipso facto insult to us, or even to ask themselves what in the hell the term itself means. The lack of thought in formulating the question removes any malice from it, and we never take any offense. Our own relatives ask us the same thing. We just consider it a dumb question, and dumb questions aren’t rare enough in our lives to pick one out and manufacture a barrel of umbrage over it. Aren’t you afraid your children will turn out just like you, instead of just like me? would be a more amusing version of the question.
There is, essentially, no crime in the town we live in. But there was a real, live murder a year before we moved here. A disreputable young woman with some children she doesn’t care much about paid her boyfriend and one of his friends $2000 to murder her husband, who had made her angry enough to try to divorce him, and then kill him because he had once thrown a stick of butter at her. The two boys shot the estranged husband to death, and because he happened to be playing video games with another fellow at the time in his seedy apartment, two men were murdered for the price of one. The murderers turned old enough to drink liquor while being held without bail. All such criminals are short on real savvy and long on what they learned watching TV, so it took about fifteen minutes to figure out who did it and why, and they’re all going to prison for a good, long while. Maine doesn’t have a Casey Anthony drive-up window at the courthouse — yet. The paper took pains to point out the murderers were Honor Roll students, fresh out of the local high school. They were exquisitely socialized.
We are trying, with no help and a lot of opposition, to produce decent, productive, ethical, moral, well-read, arithmetically capable, ambitious, vigorous, funny, kind, intellectually curious, self-regulating adults. And the only question anyone has for us is: how can we live with ourselves, knowing we’re keeping our children from the wonders of attending the White Dwarf Star Academy.
Somehow we manage to bear up under the shame of it.
My book of collected flash fiction, The Devil’s In The Cows, is currently Number Two…
Wait a second, I didn’t like the way that last sentence was shaping up. It’s currently ranked second on Amazon’s list of “Hot New Releases In Short Stories“
It’s currently ranked 43rd in sales on Amazon for Fiction, Short Stories. I feel like I’m young and single again, as I’m ranked between “Dating my Vibrator” and “Christmas in High Heels” on the popularity scale.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has me by a nose, right now, but I’m seven slots ahead of that fellow that claims to be a writer from Maine named Stephen King. He may very well be from Maine, I guess; but I’ve lived here for over a year now and I’ve never run across the guy…
I realize upon closer inspection that that last sentence was an unfortunate turn of phrase to use regarding Stephen King, and apologize unreservedly. Anyway, if Stephen King really lived in Maine, I expect he would have been in my living room at least once by now. There just aren’t that many of us up here. I bet he shares a villa with Gore Vidal near Como and just keeps a PO box in Skowhegan to keep the revenuers off his scent. The Devil’s In The Cows is currently the 3013th best-selling book of any kind on Amazon.
I find upon looking around that there are at least 450,000 volumes about sparkly vampires alone available at Amazon, so if you throw in all the other books for sale there about vivisection and cooking and how to code websites so they don’t work very well and Fabio with his shirt half-off and ex-government officials explaining why they should get a medal instead of an hour in the stocks, 3013 doesn’t seem so bad.
But in the words of Joe Mantegna in The Money Pit, “Let’s not get nuts, here.” I notice every other book around me on the lists have the full panoply of agents and publishers and flacks working on them day and night. All I have are friends and Windows XP and my own efforts. Friends are better, no matter how quickly I might slip from sight. You have a best seller? Compared to what?
I won’t get nuts, because I know, as I wrote in A Fresh Crop Of Rocks:
A farmer never thinks wrong. That’s because a farmer never thinks his troubles are over. A farmer knows when he’s eating a turkey with one hand and holding hands with a pretty girl with the other, things are going to go downhill soon. He feels about the same way when his hands are empty and the girl is ugly.”
I’m hardly a farmer, but the point stands. Thanks to all my readers that purchased a copy, and to Bird Dog, and to Glenn Reynolds, and Daphne, and Jill, and Julie, and everyone else who I’m overlooking in my haste to go and make a coffee table, and especially to Gerard Van der Leun for helping me sell my little book.
If you haven’t purchased a copy yet, you’re in luck. Amazon and Barnes and Noble are engaged in a discount war over the book, and it’s currently available for only $8.60.
Buy my book!
Month: July 2011
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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