Oscar Night — we are encamped just outside the Black Gate to Celebrity Village. The ten-storey doors rumble open just enough to release a floating disembodied mouth.
ENTHUSIASTIC KID: Hey! Let’s eat some of this dirt from Mars!
Tolerance ranges vary from deployment to deployment, based on extant arousal levels on the four major indices (fear, anxiety, desire, other).
The barker— a pallid, ectomorphic Jesus in a candy-striped vaudeville suit— stands atop a raised entry platform, swinging his cane and making tricks with his straw hat. He lets a little kid pull a chunk out of his beard; its patchiness suggests he’s been letting children do that for some time.
My most beloved word-babies.
Why are you here?
I hear you chuckle, and am fractionally gratified by it. You have heard me start off this address by hacking up a tired old philosophical joke, kicking off this inspirational oration with a twist of a Great Question (capitalized).
A serial entertainment.
One man’s quest to find a mystical land, and the injuries he incurs while he searches.
‘So we will have to be careful, like spies,’ said my brother. I nodded vigorously – for what young boy does not entertain dreams of being a skilled intelligencer, pursuing secretive duties for crown and country, reliant on wits and nerve alone while plunged deep within enemy terrain?
Chosen solely by math.
Life is long. How can someone fill up all the time? Sure, a third goes to the sandman, and smaller fractions devote themselves to eating and bathing and arguments and other forms of general maintenance, but still, you’re left with long thick swaths of rolling time, like the wrinkled bedclothes on your grandparents’ bed. The […]