To the Gulags

The Third Chapter.

-3-

To the Gulags

 

                        Duckett drove down the stretch of modulated earth with a wind tunnel in his head.  And he was laughing.  The kind of laughter that comes up in chunks.  He found his entire existence amusing and pointless.  To live is to die.

            Isn’t that pretty?

            You and I will one day become fodder for the grass.

 

            Duckett was the product of a mistake.  Not the kind where the father forgets to wear a trash bag and not the kind where the mother forgets to swallow chemicals inside a rubber pillow case to repel any baby souls that might climb inside her eggs.  This was the kind of mistake all parents make when they forget how terrible the world is.  Probably because at THE moment everything finally feels so much like Christmas on steroids.

            Scientists call THE moment an orgasm.

            An orgasm is when your body shoots jelly in all the right places.

            Teenagers call THE moment plucking the V-card.

            The V-card is when you forever ever lose the privilege to have sex for the first time.

            The average muck calls THE moment love.

            All in all THE moment lasts 3-5 seconds like most climaxes.  I tend to agree with the scientists.  Really, your body is so excited stuff the color of Elmer’s glue before it dries flies out the closest exit and into the nearest entrance.

            In 1948 an abstract filmmaker caught the attention of many a well-known critics in France  They wore smiles and crayon colored bowties and had champagne with strawberry cake and all agreed that his film ‘Harvest’ best illustrated THE moment. 

            In three minutes the audience watches another audience locked in a burning theater and roasted alive.  3-5 seconds before the end a smoke machine coughs under the giant screen and a man appears to exit the movie and enter on stage.  He then announces the first verse in Genesis in Latin which concludes the film.

            The church wanted to ban it because it compared the mind of god to a burning movie theater.

            The perverts redid it so all the actors and actresses were naked and hard.

            The filmmaker did the jig as a part of therapy.  He was the only one in his family to survive the Holocaust.  The Germans didn’t have time to season and bake him and turn his body into air.

            In second grade Duckett learned the fundamentals behind the Holocaust.  He was taught first that ice has no feelings and it’s ok to expose it to lots and lots of heat.  Then he was taught that heat melts ice into water then boils the water and turns it into steam.  Really the extra step just requires taking the human out of human.

            This was in the same chapter as the water cycle.  It still rains humans in some parts of Europe.

            Duckett was in the waiting room while Sullivan Sr. and Katherine were making their mistake.  Like all parents their reasons were selfish and sensual.  They were curious about what would happen if they combined body fluids and genes and finger paint.  They wanted to know what it felt like to be in each other with the intent to create. 

            They also wanted to remedy their loneliness. 

            Once they were done Duckett’s number was called.  He wasn’t told anything just flushed down, down, down, and into a fleshy oven. 

            God has two good reasons for not telling you anything before you get flushed.  If you know you’re going to be American you’ll be arrogant too soon and you might explode before you pop out.  If you’re French, well, there’s nothing He can do.  If you know anything else, maybe about how much the world resembles a bloated and pretty gulag, you might perform a self-abortion, premature suicide, which is against both celestial law and Roe v. Wade.  Abortion is reserved for God and women only.

            The first time Duckett learned about how he was made was in the second grade.  And it wasn’t while watching the Magic School Bus.

            It was early December and his Sunday School teacher was preparing him and the other children for the second coming.  They did this by handing the children black and white drawings of a baby in a manger under a giant start surrounded by all the characters listed in two of the four gospels.  Then they gave them crayons so they could fill in the voids.  Duckett afterward asked his mother where little Jesus came from.

            “God.”

            “Do all babies come from God?”

            “Yes all babies come from God and He plants them in their mothers.”

            A solid Neanderthal theory.  Much like the story of creation in Babylonian myth.  Yes, it involved a man being molded out of dust and clay.

            “Well, I made this for you.”

            Duckett like all children love giving gifts they make to their parents so they can be reassured of talents they gradually lose over time.  Katherine loved everything about the picture except for the star over Bethlehem.

            “Why is it red?”

            “I thought that was the color.”

            “I think it was really yellow.”

            It actually was an entire galaxy being crunched into nothing. 

            Like Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

            God did it so three wise men could pay up.

            I wonder if God will crush the Milky Way so another galaxy will know it is in the process of being saved.  I hope we will be a red star. 

The color of strawberry cake.

Red for sacrifice.

Red, white, and blue.

Proper.

 

Duckett grew up like every other American in the early 90s.  His parents bought him Velcro shoes so he wouldn’t be humiliated all the time when he couldn’t make bunny ears with the laces. 

Every Halloween they dressed him up like his favorite super hero.  The red power ranger, Batman, Michelangelo.  People make millions every October selling costumes and masks worn only once like a wedding dress. 

The first Halloween Duckett remembers started at 7 and ended at 9 PM.  Two hours is all the time you have to collect as much candy as you can. 

The proper introduction and polite way of getting candy is-

 

‘Trick or treat smell my feet

Give me something good to eat

If you don’t I don’t care

I’ll pull down your underwear.’

 

In some places in the world two hours is enough time to kill the same number of people as the number of candy a child collects.  That’s if you count a package of many servings as a whole family.

I’ve always wondered who sets the times for trick or treating.  I think a professional panel meets every day for the rest of the year to decide. 

Panels are always a proper vehicle for decision-making.  Sometimes they are composed of 12 people who decide whether or not you’re guilty and deserve to die.  Other times they are part of an electoral process so a candidate can win an election without having to worry about the popular vote.  After Hitler shot himself and evaporated many panels decided who else was responsible for polluting the air in Dachau and Auschwitz.  A panel even decided what to show Duckett every Saturday morning. 

The cartoon of choice was the Looney Toons which composed of a talking drag queen rabit, a duck with a lisp, an obnoxious conservative ginger snap, a stuttering cancer patient hunter, and two cases of misguided food chain representation in which the underdog always wins. 

Each episode always involves a weapon and a company called ACME.  This helps encourage capitalism and the second amendment. 

But I have to say the loss of Bugs Bunny in today’s young TV appetite explains why so many are so dumb.

Duckett often mistook Bugs Bunny for the Easter Bunny, and vice versa.

The Easter Bunny is probably the most absurd myth in the world.  A rabbit hops around the world laying eggs with candy inside. 

Good riddance.

When you’re 9 or 10, 10 in Duckett’s case, you learn that most of the excitement from your childhood was fuelled by lies.

Like a German post-world war.

But for some reason the idea that Noah fit two of every animal into an arc 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high remains an indisputable fact.

Properly.

 

Democracy is a passive dictatorship where you shoot ballots

instead of bullets.