Saw an article on human smuggling and wondered: “Wouldn’t it be easier if you smuggled them in more than one piece?” How would that work? Chainsaws at the border? A Texan Dr. Frankenstein?
Trying to remember the first explicit joke my dad ever told in my presence. I think it was the one about the woman with heart disease; she had “acute angina.” What have I said in front of my son? Hope I didn’t traumatize him. I guess if I survived my trauma, he’ll survive his.
I always buy a few month’s worth of books ahead. For example, I did that while I was in a religious phase. But then I had my conversion experience when the angel of atheism shone a flashlight of reason into my eyes. Lost my religion but still have all those unread books. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothee Soelle, Mircea Eliade, et al. What to do with them? The Scottish half of me wants to read them so I’ll get my money’s worth. The rest of me wants to get rid of them. That’s the kind of conflict you get yourself into when you’re half Scottish/half atheist.
Story idea: guy with a wad of cash shows up at the U.S./Mexican border expecting to be smuggled into Texas. Smuggler accepts the cash, then pulls out his chainsaw. Guy yells: WTF? Smuggler smiles and says: “Trust me. We have a good doctor on the other side.” Cuts him into little bits and packs him on ice. I think I’ll call it “A Million Little Pieces.”
Do mimes ever give poetry readings?
I think I’m in love with the woman in the picture frame I bought. Do picture frame models ever have stalkers? Let’s ask that question again, only this time, let’s imagine that the stalker wants to immigrate illegally from Mexico into the U.S.: do picture frame models ever halve stalkers?
One day (when I’m older than I am now) I expect I’ll write my memoir. But given the genre’s name (memoir), I think my writing should flow the way memories flow – associative instead of linear. Is that the same thing as random?
Maybe it would start like this:
I was born in 1963, not long after Sylvia Plath committed suicide by sticking her head in a gas oven (and turning it on). From the day I first heard of Slyvia Plath (sometime during high school), I was haunted by the idea that when she died, her exiting spirit got stuck in a revolving door and came spinning back into the world where it lodged itself in my mother’s uterus while I was making my entrance. Her spirit clung to my feet and got squeezed back into the world with me. That notion became more plausible to me when I started having bouts of depression. I blame Sylvia for all my problems.
My earliest memory involves the arrival of our piano which was the cherry on top of our middle class ice cream cone. It was a traumatic moment. Maybe I had some intimation of forced music lessons to come. But before I ever had piano lessons, I would roll dinky cars across the floor while my mom played Hello Dolly and songs by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.
No one in Herb Alpert’s band was an illegal immigrant.
It was not long after the Tijuana Brass broke up that I first heard the name John Calvin. I felt such guilt whenever I forgot to practise the piano. That’s how I knew, from an early age, that there’s a place at the table for me in hell. No amount of extra practising would ever atone for my depraved piano habits.