The Rake Magazine

Tag: nonsense

  • You Know How It Is. Or Maybe You Don't. Maybe I Don't. Maybe, in Fact, None of Us Does

    What does it mean that I have to sit and think for several minutes, and eventually have to count on my fingers, to figure out exactly how old I am?

    I don’t know what it means, but I know it’s appalling, the fact that I have to do it, and the number I eventually end up with.

    I’ve been gone. You may have noticed. Perhaps you did not notice. No big deal. No skin off my teeth. I’ve been out of it. It being, I suppose, things in general. I’ve been mulling and muddling in somewhat equal measure, although if I’m at all in the business of truth-telling I guess I’d have to say muddling has mostly been winning out over mulling.

    I don’t know what to tell you: there’s an honest statement if ever I’ve uttered one. And here’s another, as long as I seem to be in the mood to speak the plain, hard truth: Good Lord, I sure as hell do eat a lot of soup.

    The winter was interminable. There were stretches that I suppose I could say were like a dream. Perhaps they were a dream. I’m not sure I can tell anymore.

    You know what the "PF" in PF-Flyers stands for? I’ll tell you what it stands for: Positive Foundation.

    How do you like them fucking apples?

    I taught my dog to talk, but he’s still a pretty tight-lipped character. I can’t get a whole lot out of him. In the last 24 hours he’s spoken to me twice, and on each occasion his utterance took the form of a question.

    The first question was this: "Those Chinese kung fu sneakers in the closet –you ever wear them?"

    The other question was this: "You ever hear of a broad named M.F.K. Fisher?"

    To both questions I responded with "Why?" and received nothing in the way of a reply. I’ll say this for my dog: he keeps his counsel. One morning I asked him, as I do each morning, "How did you sleep?"

    "So-so," he said. "A phrase was running through my head all night in my dreams."

    "What phrase was that?" I asked.

    "Mist oppeternity," he said, and then turned his attention to his morning meal.

    I chalk that last business up to the Krazy Kat book I gave him for Christmas.

    I’m full of questions these days, but my dog is unfortunately of little help, keeper of his counsel that he is. Still I ask. I go on asking.

    "How did we ever agree that ‘time piece’ means a teller of time?" I ask. "Or, for that matter, how did we ever agree that ‘a teller of time’ or even ‘telling time’ means anything at all?"

    Sometimes I just go through the dictionary and recite words to the dog, trying to build up his vocabulary. "Bulldozer," I’ll say. "There’s a beautiful word. As is hourglass. As is pitch pipe, which is actually two words, referring to the invention of Jacob Kratt, Sr., who as a young man worked for a time at the Hohner harmonica factory in Trossingen Germany, and who later, in America, worked for Thomas Edison in Orange, New Jersey before opening his own harmonica factory."

    To which my dog will either say nothing or will say something like, "Big whoop."

    I’ve had a lot of dogs, and I’ve managed to teach almost all of them to talk. My current dog’s name is Leon "Blood" Runnells. I met him at a junior college in Kansas, where he had come from Fort Wayne, Indiana to play football, this because he didn’t have the academic chops to get into a division one school.

    Leon was a complete monster on the football field. Other guys on the team were terrified of him. They weren’t much more comfortable with him off the field. His old man was some sort of badass Special Forces character, or so Leon claimed.

    "You think I’m crazy," he would say. "You should get a load of Leon, Sr. This shit’s football. My old man, he’s a warrior. He’d cut your nuts off and leave you to bleed to death in the sand, and you’d never even get a good enough look at him to make a positive I.D."

    Our Leon –my Leon now– was also notorious for having once told Lou Holtz to suck his dick, this after some booster had paid Holtz a boatload of cash to fly out to Kansas to make some sort of motivational speech, after which he’d been persuaded to swing by and lay some rah-rah bullshit on the football team.

    Anyway, Leon couldn’t cut it in the classroom, even at the junior college level, and he also suffered some kind of degenerative hip injury near the end of his first season. They were prepared to cut him loose and send him back to a dead end job in Fort Wayne. Around this same time he learned that his old man had been killed in Kosovo or someplace like that, and poor Leon took all this bad news pretty hard and started running the streets. He eventually ended up at the local animal shelter, where they cut off his nuts, implanted a chip in his neck, and put him up for adoption.

    When I visited him the first time he had turned into such a docile, good natured fellow that I took pity on him, paid the three hundred bucks, and took him home with me.

    Truly, his reticence aside, a guy couldn’t ask for a better dog. It’s crazy, I know, and people who knew him back when probably wouldn’t believe me if I told them that I now share my bed with that legendary badass Leon "Blood" Runnells and that he greets me every time I come in the door like I’m the greatest thing that ever happened to him.

    At any rate, I guess I’ve had my say, even if it wasn’t what I wanted to say, and was more than I had any intention of saying.

    I’ll just leave you with this: I’m here now, and there ain’t a damn thing Zen about it.

  • Any Old Business?

    How it is that I…how is it…or, rather, why it is that I…that I seem to
    keep…or, really, that I do keep, that I keep ending up…that every
    single night I look at the clock, I look at the clock and it’s two o’clock in
    the morning, it’s three o’clock in the morning and I…I keep ending up at
    three o’clock in the morning, I keep ending up sitting here with…I don’t
    know, I keep ending up sitting here with all this shit, surrounded by
    all this shit? Night after night I’m sitting here, I’m sitting here night after
    night on the floor with my back against these racks of records, surrounded
    by these shelves full of shit, shelves full of plastic,
    anthropomorphized potatoes and carrots and hamburgers, all of them with
    hats on their heads and pipes in their mouths and their arms paralyzed in an
    embracing gesture that I often find disturbing.

    I’m sitting here with my legs crossed and my back up against all this
    shit…I’m sitting here in this ridiculous and uncomfortable position, night
    after night, delivering incoherent monologues to the beleaguered animal that shares my
    home…and what the fuck is this I’m listening to? Honest to God, explain to me
    if you can why I am sitting here like this, trying to read about the Donner
    party and poor Lewis Keseberg, who was driven by madness and the most desperate
    of circumstances to eat a woman named Mrs. Murphy. "The flesh of starved
    beings contains little nutriment," the cannibal Keseberg assures me.
    "It is like feeding straw to horses. I cannot describe the unutterable
    repugnance with which I tasted the first mouthful of flesh. There is an
    instinct in our nature that revolts at the thought of touching, much less
    eating, a corpse….It has been told that I boasted of my shame –said that I
    enjoyed this horrid food, and that I remarked that human flesh was more
    palatable than California beef. This is a falsehood. It is a horrible,
    revolting falsehood. This food was never otherwise than loathsome, insipid, and
    disgusting." Explain to me why I would continue to read as this poor man
    was asked by his interrogator, Did you boil the flesh? And as he
    responded, "Yes! But to go into the details –to relate the minutiae– is
    too agonizing! I cannot do it! Imagination can supply these. The necessary
    mutilation of the bodies of those who had been my friends rendered the
    ghastliness of my situation more frightful."

    I mean, seriously, holy shit, every fucking night….What is this? Why am I
    sitting here listening to…George Crumb? Is that what the hell this is? Or Morton Feldman? And at some point –this for certain– listening to Lou
    Reed, the idiot prince of rock and roll, listening to that jackass Lou Reed,
    listening to this lunatic Lou Reed reduce Edgar Allan Poe to the most wrenching
    and painful sort of comedy. Are there even one thousand other misguided people
    on the planet who have paid to be thusly abused? Please assure me there are
    not, even as it gives me considerable anguish to know that there almost
    certainly are. But what in God’s name is wrong with me that I would pay
    good money for a CD on which Lou Reed makes a muddled mockery of "The
    Raven"?

    Look, honest to God, this is the fucking truth: No man
    should ever find himself sitting hunched on the
    floor with a pen paralyzed in his fingers listening to Lou Reed’s
    “The Raven” at two o’clock in the morning. No man should ever eat red licorice
    and corn chips for dinner –not at three a.m. Not ever. No man should ever sit
    at four a.m. raking the soiled carpet with his fingers and building
    bewildering piles of lint and scruff and dog dander and pubic hair and chips of
    indeterminate origin. No man should ever put these piles in an ashtray and burn them. No man should ever write such words as those that
    preceded the words ‘No man should ever write such words….’ No man should ever
    spend so many hours sitting in one dank apartment that the liquor of his own
    stench has become intoxicating and the crawling of the hours has reduced him to
    a savage who cannot remember his last truly conscious thought. No man should
    ever sit studying a diagram of the arteries of the brain as if it were a
    satellite photo of a country that no longer exists. No man should ever look up
    from his hunched stupor at five a.m. and find himself gazing into the clearly
    terrified face of an elderly paperboy framed in the window of his front door.

  • He's Abbott, I'm Costello: Cross-Wired Conversation With My Dog At Two A.M.

    Would you say?

    I would say, yes.

    Say what?

    That is the question.

    Yes, that’s the question.

    No, that is the question. No question mark.

    What is the question?

    Say what?

    I said, "What is the question?"

    And I said, "Say what?"

    I heard you the first time, but I still haven’t heard your answer: What is the question?

    That was the question.

    That?

    Yes, that.

    That?

    Yes, goddamit, that is the question.

    What?

    Yes.

    Yes what?

    I just said: that is the question, which is exactly what I said at the beginnning.

    That isn’t what you said at the beginning. You said you would say.

    I said I would say, yes.

    And I said, "Say what?"

    I understood you perfectly well, and if I’m not mistaken I answered you quite clearly.

    In that I’m afraid you are badly mistaken.

    Did I not respond, "That is the question"?

    You did.

    Then where is the misunderstanding?

    You said you would say, and when pressed on the matter asked, "That is the question?" At which point I said, as would any reasonable person in my position, "Yes, that is the question."

    I did not ask. I said.

    Said what?

    That is the question.

    What?

    Yes, precisely.

    But what is your answer?

    That is my answer.

    May I have a biscuit now?