Crippled Flattery

Eat the fact and fiction

I go from solitary confinement to hosting a cake talk show in minutes. I leave the set and munch on homemade fruit that an amphibious fan handed me. It’s ok to be naïve. This gig isn’t as exciting as I thought it would be - the same psychobabble every day to my audience of one. Life gave me a restraining order, viable outside the womb. There’s other humans outside the door, outside this existential vacuum we call Gaia. A camera man wearing a pooka-shell necklace speaks to me in analog and I throw him a few benevolent lies. Where else would I be right now? In a cubicle talking to erasers and filling my backpack with pencil shavings? We’ve always done it this way. I get in my car and start to drive home. I pass Half Dome, then One-Fourth Dome. I stop to get gas in Paradise. $4.89 doesn’t sound heavenly to me. I retrieve some money from an ATM; most of them are still using Windows XP. I pass the paper route kids reading dime novels, knowing good and well that they’ve all loved, lost, and been afraid of something. I turn on my laptop and rinse a Sham-Wow towel. I get on my weekly forum and see what my salient personalities have cast in stone.

I go by Grimmfreaky. Three other thought-motors have group membership and we all eat up new phenomena, dissect minutia, metaphorically snipe each other with words, eviscerate ones selves with thoughts... in a safe and friendly environment. I pack it away in the hard drive of my mind. We call the group: One Tom Hanks. This is where we come to chat and litigate. Long-time member Amanda Knox, owns a pizza parlor called Habius Pizza. She’s a pathological liar who laughed during child birth. Kobe Bryant, raised in Italy, has a salesman attitude and works as a seeing-eye human for blind dogs. You are an OBGYN for food babies and can count to 5150. Why do you steal my punchlines? Life is too homeostatic right now. Let’s dent the universe. Everyone, let me be blunt. We’re going to meet at Weinerschnitzel and put all our eggs in one basket.

Then, we’re going to heist the place where creativity goes do die…

Thank you all for joining me. Please, no mustard on the hotdogs. Let’s coincidence. I write down a few notes on sand paper. The idea that society gets better and better is a myth. The Romans owned a freight train headed straight for a nerve center. The phone rings. Let’s get this out of the way/Hi! What can JC Penney do for you today? This isn’t going to be a cheap booze cruise. It’ll take a lot of discreet discussions and dissolving donuts. We’ll need to do a massive data dump at the end of this yadda yadda yadda; our minds will be constantly rewriting and editing our memories. Kobe, I said no mustard on the hotdogs. Thank you. We all walk into the fridge, it’s chilly yet mundane to the touch. Remember the past, anticipate the future. We emerge on page 47 of the book Civil. Amanda Knox, I need you to drink the plane dry. You, I need you to go up to that gentleman and tell him that you met the son of the guy who made the first Marie Calendar’s pie truck. Kobe, where are you? He tells me that his foot is stuck in the table of contents. I’ll still sue you under RICO. A native pulls up next to me and there is no Twinkie defense here. She shows me the back of her knees. I choke on grass.

You watch me like poetry in aluminum foil. You watch me like 70% of apologies are meaningless. You watch me like you got into this old wive’s tale to fix your own issues. The native liquefies to dust. Throughout life, humans will get to experience the luxury of being a solid, a liquid, and a gas. The contradiction of living in luxury in Fresno. Ambiguous in nature - how we parrot phrases and skip genres like cogs in a wheel. Ambiguous in nature - how the Ten Commandments were found in Hammurabi’s code years before the ad hoc, churning and burning of Moses. Sue my chronology of fact. You grab me and you say that my words are falling out of my mouth like a deranged cannibal who pokes at suffering robots who look like Tom Hanks. I am not a robot. Say, think, or do what you might, but there is no state corporate tax in Delaware. I see the box that holds the confused and misunderstood gem that is creativity. Shanghai the innocent, prove them guilty. But what is guilty anymore? A phrase, a breach of coincidence? Don’t let the flashing light[s] get to you. I reveal myself the more I talk/ talk I more the myself reveal I. Don’t buy a solid state hard drive if there’s no harm or foul. Amanda Knox cuts the box open vertically and we see a dysfunctional panic. Our meeting is both random and fortuitous. Birth, miscarriage, abortion; if there’s a fourth option let me know. Kobe looks out the window to a world where cities aren’t born yet -- Where North Korea still hangs you for violating laws 1, 2, and 3. Where you can’t win them all unless you win the first one. -- A schizophrenic hand pats my back and gives me justice for society rather than justice for the individual. He hands me a phone that’s now embedded into the fabric of the universe, possibly plaid. He grabs my plugs and begins to press buttons: the data dump. I answer the phone with an uncertain wonder, hello?

Hi! What can JC Penney do for you today?