Tag: 32 feet per second per second

Beehives, soupladles, stars, snakes, anvils, boxes of vaseline,

June 14th • Cyclops

We accept reality so readily -- perhaps because we sense that nothing is real. I asked Argos how much of the Odyssey he knew. He found using Greek difficult; I had to repeat the question. Very little, he replied. Less than the meagerest rhapsode. It has been eleven hundred years since last I wrote it. 5:54 pm

[Scene: The Star and Garter Ballroom, Empyrean Building, Holy Mother Public Relations. The party planning committee including Saints Martha, Agatha, Patricia, Augustine, Genevieve, Wenburgh, Cecilia, and the Holy Mother herself, Blessed Virgin, Queen of the Heavens, CEO Holy Mother Public Relations, etc. are preparing for the imminent arrival of what will be possibly most likely perhaps God willing a new saint: Saint (maybe) Ahasuerus.]

Mary [Frazzled] Jesus H Christ, where are Anne and Margaret? They were supposed to be here a half hour ago with the welcome banners!

Jesus [Appearing suddenly as if from nowhere]: Mom?

Mary: Holy Christ you scared the bejesus out of me! What did I tell you about popping in unannounced like that? I completely forgot what I was doing! What do you want?

Jesus: Sorry Mom, I thought I heard you calling me.

Mary: Well, you didn’t. Go back to your father, it’s his week to have you. Oh, but first, I need you to make some wine. God I need a drink. I tried to get some beer out of Amand, but it’s too late in the day to catch him sober. Best I can hope is he doesn’t vomit on the guest of honor.

Jesus: Who is it this time?

Mary: Ahasuerus.

Jesus: That guy? I thought he was supposed to wander the earth until I returned.

Mary: Well, there’s a chance he’s coming today, dead or not, unless it’s some sort of mistake. He’s got some tunnel visioned meat head after him who’s getting ready to crack his head open with a biscuit tin, but that’s if he has the depth perception for it. Personally I don’t want him here, I could do without yet another one of these enormous parties. I’ve got Agatha and Patricia fighting over command of the kitchen and that sour bitch Martha complaining about both of them. Look, here she comes.

Jesus: Speak of the devil.

Martha: Hey Jesus. Mary, I could really use some help in there. Why am I always the one stuck in the kitchen doing everything? Patricia is beyond useless and I’d give my left breast to get Agatha to shut up about the Glencree dinner already.

Mary: What are Margaret and Anne doing? Aren’t they in there with you?

Martha: Mina Purefoy went into labor and called on both of them. They’ll be with her for days.

Mary: Both? Well get Aquinas then, where the hell is he?

Martha: That fat ass? He’s in the kitchen, but he’s eating everything in sight: loaves, hogs, stags’ horns, hawks, eyes on a dish, unicorns. I have Wenburgh in there resurrecting what she can, but I still have to cook it all over again. And how do you resurrect a seed cake?

Jesus: Yeah, that’s not easy.

Mary: Well, Genevieve is working on the look of the room, I’ve got Fiacre on flowers and Cecilia is handling music. You can have Amand, but he’s shitfaced drunk.

Martha: Yeah, great. Thanks. Might as well give me a swarm of locusts or a rain of frogs for all the good he’ll do me.

Jesus: Maybe we can delay Ahasaures’ arrival somehow? You don’t want him here anyway, do you Mom?

Mary: Oh Christ no.

Martha: Really? Oh that would be great. I hear he’s bad news anyway. Uses his wife to help him cheat at cards. Son of a grifter too, who defrauded a bunch of people with unsecured loans before he killed himself.

Fiacre: [Carrying an enormous bunch of aconite] Oooh, who are we talking about, Ahasuerus? I heard that he won buckets of money on a horse race, and then refused to buy a round at the bar. What a cheap ass. Cute as a shit house rat too.

Mary: All right, think. What do we do to buy some time?

Jesus: Who’s the one going to throw the biscuit tin? We can mess with his aim.

Martha: Good idea. Maybe we can blind him?

Mary: Well I can’t spare Genevieve, she’s up to her tits in work getting this place decorated.

Jesus: What about Nicholas and Anthony? Nick can steal his glasses and Anthony can hide them.

Mary: That might do it. Jesus, you find them and get them on it asap. Martha, get your ass back into the kitchen. I’ll see if your sister can help.

Martha: Fat chance.

Jesus: No. She doesn’t need to be here.

Martha: See.

Mary: And Jesus, get back to your father after you find Tony and Nick. I can’t have him bitching to the lawyers again about me violating his visitation rights. Costs me a fortune every time.

Every Friday eats a Thursday

March 17th • Lestrygonians

1:06 pm

Fed gulls today, like that time out with Milly. Food tastes like what it eats. Feed pigs lots of stout and they come out tasting of it. Robinson Crusoe ate swan meat, what do swans eat? What would I taste like? Well, no accounting for it. And no need to know what’s in it, just eat it. Every morsel. I tried to fool the gulls with the throwaway given me. Look out below, Elijah is coming! What goes up must come down, at 32 feet per second per second bombs away! That’s the law. Did he get lifted up in a tornado? He left his clothes behind so he’ll be coming back down naked. If I threw myself down? Likely to swallow lots of water like Reuben J.’s son. Elijah will be hungry after his splashdown but plenty are well prepared to feed him. Birds wouldn’t touch the paper I threw away for them. Not a bit of it. They know what’s good for them. Spread foot and mouth disease though. Mouth and foot, foot and mouth. Mouth south. That’s how writers write. The flow of language. The stream of it. Write it and send it into the stream of life, doomed like Hamlet’s father to walk the earth.

Quicker, darlint! On now. Dare it. Let there be life.

March 15th • Aeolus

12:56 pm

He didn’t see it. He suggested I name it It is a God who Gave us this Peace. People always quote the first page. Doesn’t anybody read on? Tityrus worships Rome with his speech to his exiled friend; that’s the god he means. Early Virgil, still a masterpiece, but it doesn’t work for the story as I told it. I named it A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or The Parable of the Plums. You get it. The elements compound and compound and that’s where to find the story. Accretion. What do you want to read? Over and again it is: once upon a time and every day until one day and because of this and because of this until finally and ever since that day. Excretion! If that’s the story you want to consume then open wide, we’ll spoon it right in. Here’s the airplane coming in for a landing. I talked about two vestals aged 50 and 53 out for the day. You could see them. Midwives. I filled it and filled it. You could even smell them. Childless and condemned to be so forevermore. Carrying with them a misbirth with a trailing navelcord. Planting their plum stones per second per second onto concrete. Too tired to see the view. Too tired to look up or down or speak and spent their savings to get there. See them? They’ll be sore tomorrow. And for their aches they use Lourdes water. What more than what I? What else could I? And I think it’s funny. Even if it did remind me of that time with the alley girl. Crawford didn’t realize I was done either. And Professor MacHugh didn’t see it. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll include it in a short story collection.

Careless air

January 22nd • The Lotus-Eaters

(the gravitational pull perceived by certain fixed residents and the capture of uncertain comets chancedrifting through our system suggesting an authenticitatem of his aliquitudinis) 10:03 am

I close my eyes. Picture it. I am floating on water. Dead sea water, no effort. I can float with a book if I want to and rest for hours. Yes. Easy. Languid. Peace. A solid body immersed in a liquid. There’s a law. Who? Archimedes maybe. Archimedes floating in a bath tub. Oh buoy, he said, and ran home naked to write it down. Remember half listening to Vance in high school. Science class late in the day, drowsy. 32 feet per second per second, falling bodies. Just dropping in. Accelerating per seconds through space. Spacetime, a curved thing with geographical features. Bumps, hollows, canyons, mountains. Shaped by things in the way, some of them falling per second per second. Energy too, shaping spacetime. Not falling per second per second. Gravity giving us that heavy feeling. The Earth drags spacetime behind it and around. Like the wake of a boat, losing satelites in the ripples. Seattlites too. Where are they? More like when are they. Earth’s wake moving slowly, languidly through the dead sea. Ripples under my floating per second per second. Floating.