This represents the pinnacle of western civilization thus far:

It’s from a movie called “Free Enterprise“.

Walking through the house, towards the front door. You are with me. We have done this same sequence before. But this time the people following us are closing in, and I don’t want to wait till the correct moment: A deer is pissing on the front walk. It has to finish what it’s doing. (Was it piss, turn around, and die? I can’t remember for sure.) So I open the front door too soon. So we can get away. And I open the front door, and I stop, stunned, terrified, simply by the deer pissing, the unfinished sequence, and the late hour of the dark night. I turn to you and say, “The thing about these simulations is, if they’re not perfect, they don’t work.”

Pied had the Brooklyn Bridge in a small glass box. The box, four feet long by eight inches high by eight inches wide, stood on an ancient metal pedestal in the center of the southeast quadrant of the room. It wasn’t a “model” of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was the entire structure, and a portion of the edges of Manhattan on one end and Brooklyn Heights on the other, and some of the water and air and ice that hovered in and around it. It contained the entire history of the bridge, from the time John Roebling began surveying the East River in 1870 until the destruction of the bridge during the Great!!!AesthetixWarzNow in 2360, when, in the battle of Eh, What For If Not For Nothing?, New York version 3.4 was largely decimated by something resembling the color purple. During this battle, a giant metallic replica of a certain twentieth century cartoon cat effortlessly and un-ironically squashed it with its giant, metallic unpainted robot paw.

Pied had acquired the bridge many centuries later through a certain antiquities collector. Pied was also an “antiquities collector”, although unlike the aforementioned collector, Pied didn’t particularly subscribe to such ego-labels, especially those specific enough to represent such ancient concepts as “businesses” or “careers” or “vocations”. But the aforementioned collector had a penchant, not only for the antiquities themselves, but the antiquated lifestyle and moods and brain patterns that he assumed were typical of a person from this era. Therefore the collector would sit inside his shop, perform monetary transactions for the customers he had animated to walk in, browse, and occasionally buy something, then would close the shop when the hypothetical sun went down, tidy up the store, and then simulate locking up and walking home to a one-room fifth floor walkup downtown.

There was little else in Pied’s room, a dimly lit room with Japanese-style paper walls and an oak-colored parquet floor with a pattern that shifted back and forth slowly to slightly faster, depending on its mood.

Pied stared wistfully at the bridge, a tear forming in the corner of his bottom right eye. Time stopped, and slowly started up again. Pied looked to his left. A small teakwood table materialized out of the floor and lifted up to his waist level. Pied opened the front drawer of the table and pulled out an oddly shaped twin barreled blue pistol, the muzzles of which were precisely fit to both of his mouths. He whimpered, sniffled, and unceremoniously pulled the weapon’s triggers. A thunderous bang, quite showy even for a weapon of this size, rang out, and what was previously Pied’s head, (or heads depending on who you asked) splattered all over the far wall and floor in a delightful and intricate pattern which contained many variations of blue and red.

Moments later the maid walked in, grumbling something about the “big, fat, fucking baby” and began to scrub the floor, having to repeat this process now for the eighth time this week. The Brooklyn Bridge continued it’s endless cycle of creation, existence, and destruction inside the glass box at the other end of the room.

* * *

Suicides never seem to help anymore, thought Pied, as he re-materialized eight hours later in the next room, a room which didn’t have any furniture, or any dimensions per se. The room did have something resembling giant flowers, one of which he laid on as his arms and legs formed. He had decided, already, to have a rubbery skin and a yellow-orange complexion. Death had lost its childhood romance for him. He grew a pair of phalli which then twisted around each other symmetrically like the serpents on Hermes’ caduceus.

copyright (c) 2007 by Atom Piken

From the desk of: Giles Fuquard, Language Usuage Investigator

I have noticed as of late a disturbing trend: the use of the phrase, “Quick Question for you.”

At the office, when a person approaches another person with a query, this oft-heard phrase seems likely to preface it:

“Quick question for you.” [Pause for a response, hopefully.] “Do you know where last week’s data accounting system merger backup files are located?”

First, I take issue with anyone who not only wants information from me, but attempts to limit my answer before I have even assessed the nature of their question. If you indeed wish to consult me for my expertise, you will have the courtesy to listen to my full reply. Otherwise, you must seek elsewhere for your “quick answer”.

Second: By using “Quick Question,” are you hereby implying that you are such a rush that you must abbreviate your question, or is it that you really just do not want to spend much time talking to me? And you are kindly informing me of this aversion to my presence with the polite “fuck you” synonym known as “Quick Question”?

This is a disturbing trend. The linguistic meme that spreads like a plague— until it inundates every corner of the culture, uses up our valuable intellectual resources and then disappears into the netherworld prefabricated nostalgia. It goes back to viral phrases such as “no doubt” … or the dreaded, “not for nothing” (a phrase that is truly “for nothing”.)

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I hereby, formally request that upon hearing the phrase “quick question” uttered, all parties should respond appropriately with e.g., “long answer”, “too late, not quick enough!”, or “dumb person” or, simply with a swift but firm smack to the side of the mouth of said inquisitor with a standard office stapler or similar implement.

II.

I was inside, it was dusk. The sky’s light was just beginning to turn that early-evening gray. I heard a rumbling, and then a thunder like a vast sheet of tin being shaken up and down. I ran outdoors to the front of my house, which was a little house with a roof like an upside-down ‘V’ with a little patch of very green grass in front of it, surrounded on either side and behind by other houses shaped exactly the same, those surrounded by an indefinite amount of same-shaped houses, in no particular arrangement as far as I knew. In front of my house there was a shed-like building and in front of that a set of train rails.

Things were starting to fall from the sky. Shiny, even luminous, yet clear blobs no more than a few inches long began to rain down at first slowly. I looked up and saw a gray blanket of turbulent, rolling stratocumulus clouds. I looked down at the ground and saw the transparent blobs starting to collect on the green grass of the ground. I tried to step around them as I walked out into my yard. I had brought my camera with the intention of photographing these things.

My neighbors didn’t seem particularly alarmed but I had a growing sense of fear. This is an invasion, I thought. That thought crept through the back, hidden part of my mind, made it’s way into the front. I tried immediately to suppress the next thought that snuck in to my consciousness, which was: these things are going to kill everything on this planet so that they can use it for themselves.

The things continued to rain down with increasing intensity and I continued to try to step around those that had landed on the ground with increasing difficulty. I may have stepped on a few as I opted to return to the inside of my little house. I stared out of the kitchen window, looking at the sky, looking at the houses around my little house, looking at the ground, wondering what to do next.

A report of some sort came through the wire, finally. This wire was either a T.V. or radio news program I overheard, or a thought that came directly into my head. The report was this: scientific analysis of the “creatures” (I am still not sure whether they were in fact “alive” in the sense that humans, or jellyfish, or even protozoa, are alive) showed that these things were unable to continue their existence (or “live”) after having come into contact with water. I felt my worry diminish as I knew that 71% of the Earth was covered with water. I felt a little more relief as I realized that approximately the same amount of the human body – my body – was made up of water. Whatever might have touched, stung, infected, or infiltrated my body would not survive. And most likely I, and most of the rest of the population of the world, would survive.

This may be the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.

I’m on the phone. Overlapping voices through tinny microphones and electric blips. Coworkers in cubicles in monotone phone conversations. Newsfeeds and fluorescent light, passing blurs of pastel rectangles and superficial techno-atmospheres.

Birds. A flutter of wings. Crescendoing to the impact and the shock of…

Silence.

Just the air, softly rushing by.

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In truth you leveled too much pressure on me:
With this mourning by proxy; These words are not mine.
With all of the pain I have kept inside
While I am the messenger for others.

Each man must mourn in his own way:
Just as grief must be shared,
It must also in the end be a solitary thing.

Add to this list:

• Whenever you see that commercial with the stuff that you dip tarnished silver into and it instantly cleans it, you just have to have it, even though you have—at most— like two things made of silver to clean.

• Wearing pajama bottoms with leather jacket