Honest Conversation Is Overrated
Actual Human Interactions Witnessed Or Overheard
In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century America
In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century America
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No, phone. Please do not change "your mother's cremains" to "your mother's creamings". Thanks.
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written for Orlando's Loose Lips reading, at the request of Tod Caviness  While I know that headlines mixed with apologies always come off as forced and insincere
I do want to apologize to Tod for agreeing to do this show tonight I don’t watch or read the news anymore so I am entirely unqualified to perform at this reading I can’t fully blame it on the 2016 election But that is the point when the mere mention of certain names Not just one name Certain names led me to thoughts that made me question my mental stability So I stopped following headlines apart from the inescapable ones And even then Rather than rub my hands together until some rageful Hadouken shot out of them I would close whatever tab or feed had let me know about … and try and find some weird animal story that calmed me down In Egypt, for the second time in a decade archeologists dug up the skeleton of a whale with legs We spent hundreds of years thinking birds were kaiju Creative paleontologists frankensteining bones into creatures that didn’t precisely exist so maybe there wasn’t a whale with legs Maybe a whale-like aquatic blimp thing swallowed another animal and like two lovers buried with their bodies intertwined their skeleton fused into a beauty our world hasn’t earned yet Or maybe whales used to have legs Not manatee-like dolphins or calm gray whales or smiling bottlenosed grampuses Nasty Anubis headed predators who terrorized whatever sea dried up leaving Egypt behind Whales that walked on land dove into the water and massacred Everything Whales with legs I was going to spend ten to fifteen minutes regaling you with weird little rumors because there aren’t yet any facts about whales with legs weird little rumors about their diet how fast the moved how they looked like some massive coyote and an enormous porpoise fucked in some unimaginable position How they probably used to have antlers because currently scientists think that whales with legs evolved from ancient deer which is not something I’d ever considered I was going to just try and entertain you with these ridiculous rumors but just after my plane landed in Orlando my phone let me know that Todd Akin died In 2012 Todd was a Republican nobody who decided to run for the US Senate His complicit idiot family would like America to remember him as a patriot who dressed up like a minuteman on the 4th of July every year and told stories about America’s evolution from British territory to Freedom Loving Paradise But if anyone does remember Todd Akin at all it’s because in a 2012 interview he was asked about his stance on abortion and Todd Akin said that womens’ bodies have a way of avoiding pregnancy in the cases of legitimate rape I didn’t know that whales evolved from deer cousins Shed antlers and webbed toes to better fish I don’t know quite how evolution worked in this scenario I am not a scientist And even the scientists don’t yet know how an herbivorous prancer Became one of the fiercest aquatic predators of its era But they do know And have known for at least decades that humans have not yet evolved into the ability to instinctively prevent a pregnancy through force of will Even shameful Republican senator wannabes who walk back their remarks and apologize claiming they were misquoted as though they had evolved a sense of shame and learned that their misogynist rape supporting propaganda was nothing but cruel and hurtful lies fabled to stupid men and complicit women Whales with legs would fuck up beachfront property rates Mitch and Marjorie toasting the sunset Hear a rustle from the garbage cans beneath the porch and begin shouting the least creative slurs in The English language at whatever seagull raccoon or member of their staff has disturbed their idyllic moment but we know raccoons don’t venture this close to the coastline anymore and seagulls have moved inland and become lakegulls because wherever a beach full of plump tourists and unsuspecting aquatic life gather is just an All You Can Devour Buffet to the ever-increasing army of Whales With Legs These four legged splashing leviathans with two webbed feet and two hooves that could swallow a family of four whole but choose to chew them instead because they love the sound of the screaming There is no escaping the platoons of oncoming apex predators Whales. With. Legs. In his 2014 memoir “Firing Back” written because his political career was over because being called a nice man … authentic to his beliefs by the woman who trounced him in the 2012 election doesn’t undo being the decrepit face that first uttered the phrase legitimate rape on camera In the 2014 memoir Todd Akin rescinded his apology and reiterated his chauvinistic fable about female anatomy Whales with legs have heads like Anubis A jackal decaying Heart pumping embalming fluid Whales with legs swallow apologies whole Shred memoirs in their sharp beaks I’m sorry Further research has shown that the gulls and Republican senators can return to the coastline Whales with legs were strictly freshwater hunters Descendants of deer who looked like dogs but swam like hippos Whales with legs ate rabbits and fish in equal measure Maybe? Nobody was there to take notes I’ve been told not to bring any science into this room so I won’t mention that next month NASA is enacting every 90s disaster movie by sending out missiles to blow up a Pluto sized comet that is only supposed to be heading kinda sorta near Earth Todd Akins isn’t even close to the worst Republican who ran for office in the 2010s but he is the only one held accountable His party offered him money to drop his stupid ass out of the senate race knowing he didn’t have a prayer of winning but if he’d just waited until 2016 he could have felt the party violently swerve into his lane and he could have been the president of the entire United Shithole States Whales with legs drink the blood of Anubis under the 4th of July moon Dress as minutemen and shout about the good old days before all the best rivers dried up Shriveled up fish on withered land Whales with legs stalk a world that’s moved beyond them They gnash their dentures at smaller whales with teeth Flail their tails Thin out the herd at both ends of the age spectrum until there is only one generation of whales left with enough legs to stand on I don’t know if at this point in my life I’m qualified to judge every piece of shit politician from any party for speaking their ignorant and/or hate filled propaganda Sure I have no power over any laws or any person and I outgrew downpunching edgy humor in my 20s but I’ve said some regrettable things that I believed in at the time Anubis weighs the hearts of the dead on a scale with legs that nobody can read Scales with legs are jackle headed gargantuans Digging up old shit the earth wishes it could forget Anubis the paleontologist whale finds Anubis the jackal with fins The Egyptian jackal whale Anubis Holds all of our secrets In his razorblade hooves Sniffs the garland of clover from the deserts of our past And flings us in or away from the directions of our beliefs I don’t hope Todd Akins is burning in Hell I don’t believe in an afterlife but I hope consciousness fades just slow enough for him to have realized his Heaven was unreachable My coworkers in the retail hell I’ve been suffering through for the last twenty years enjoy the curses I bestow on the rudest loiterers (never customers) When the mood assassins leave without buying anything instead ranting about prices or Amazon or their general inability to distinguish a specialty bookstore from a hardware store I say I hope he trips while crossing the street in heavy traffic But no car touches him He gets up and crosses completely unharmed but shits himself every time he sees a car and he has to bike to a boat to travel to some Gilligan’s Island where he lives out the rest of his life donating all of the money he earned to charities that help unbeknownst to him every retail worker he was ever rude to and one day when he is older and more in pain than my friends he suddenly understands how awful he used to be and decides to devote his life to undoing all the emotional turmoil he’s caused and as he looks to the sky to thank a completely absent higher power an unmanned drone carrying a tractor trailer truck falls on his head and crushes him Whales with legs carry grudges like busy servers in chain restaurants carry plates and the fear of getting sick without adequate healthcare and this is why it’s so difficult for them to apologize That’s the rumor anyway Science doesn’t have the facts to back it up yet Comrade: I was going to lie down on this seat but it's not very comfortable, and it smells.
Me: Well, an infinite amount of butts have been pressed to it. Comrade: Now that you're here, I'll just lay my head in you lap. Me: But an infinite amount of butts have been pressed to it. |
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