Congratulations on Liberating Your Car!

After weeks ploughed into a snowdrift in New York, weeks of staring at your car from your apartment window, dreaming of sitting in bumper to bumper traffic, honking ceaselessly, violently turning and dooring bikers willy nilly, today is the day.  Following a three day 50 degree heat wave, courtesy of global warming, the ice surrounding your car will finally dissolve into a series of puddles which, in turn, will bake off the sidewalk against glittering sunlight and heat.

You'll leap out your front door on to the sidewalk, over the crackhead sleeping on your stoop, and dance your way up to the driver's side door of your vehicle.

"Hello car!" you'll shout at the top of your lungs, staring at the moldy interior of your 1983 Toyota Tercel.  You'll make kissy faces at the beaded seat covers contained within until you hear a coughing sound to your right.

There, lined up down the street, will be most of your friends from Brooklyn.  Some will be clutching heavy bags, others will have printouts from the Ikea website.  A handful will have serious injuries, bound by paper towels and masking tape.  One of them will have a puppy.  They'll all want the same thing.

"Can we have a ride?" they'll ask in unison, a wave of sound cascading on you, a mantra that besieges you during the summer months.  Your mouth will hang open as you consider your response.

"Nooooooooooooooooo!" you'll scream, pointing your finger at each and every one of your friends down the line, watching their faces collapse, watching some of them actually collapse from their injuries.  You'll contain to moan at them until you hit your friend with the puppy.  Once you get to her, you'll crack a smile and shout:

"Come on in, you!"

Then the two of you will hop in and drive down to Dead Horse Bay, where you'll play with a puppy and take black and white photos of industrial waste for the rest of the day.

Congratulations on Liberating Your Car!

Congratulations on Stopping Those Nosebleeds!

Lately your nose has been shooting gouts of blood out of it every morning, as you get up, and every night, just before you go to bed.  You've been to four doctors about it, and each one has told you that the nosebleeds appear to be stress related.  But there's a problem: you're an award winning playwrite who has never worked a day in her life, and you really don't have a lot of stressors in your life, so there's nothing for you to adjust in your daily habits that could potentially stop your nosebleeds.  You could see a therapist, but your "artistic mindset" has left you convinced that if you seek help for the various problems you have in life, you'll stop being creative.  What's an artist to do?!

Today, three days in to a Burmese hike-fest, your nosebleeds are going to stop.  You'll consult the travelling shaman who'll be leading you along the mountain passes and he'll inform you that your chakras are now open, or some horseshit like that, which will basically be his way of saying "you got over your own bullshit for a while."  Your assistant, whose name is either Hazel or Heather (you never bothered to learn) will pipe up that you have, for the first time in a long time, been out of wifi range for an extended period of time and have, therefore, not had any access to the bevy of negative comments about your work that pour through the internet unbidden.

You'll promptly fire your assistant, but tomorrow, when you reflect on her notion, you'll realize that she's sort of right.  Later, after you return home, you'll resolve to stop reading comments about yourself for a month and see what happens.  Your nose will stop gushing blood, and you'll rest easily, though your sex life will become less interesting as you'll no longer head out to random bars each evening to have random men fuck the living shit out of you as an act of contrition against the negativity that the comments build up inside of you.

We look forward to reading your next substandard play!

Congratulations on Stopping Those Nosebleeds!

Congratulations Decorative Bird!

The stitches will, one by one, wake up whatever it is you have that resembles consciousness.  We'd call it a bird brain if we didn't want to risk sounding cavalier about your existence, which we think is just great.  Instead, we'll call it something else, something wittier, like a "fabric of thought."  Still kinda weak, but it more accurately represents you, what you are: a decorative bird stitched on to a pillow.

As you ease into semi-awareness, you'll know, suddenly and irrevocably, that you are not important.  You will be an object, not even an object really, an icon on an object, infinitely reproducible by nature of your substance.  You will know that you are less than nothing: you are the most ephemeral consideration of thing-dom that can exist.

With this awareness of your own unimportance will come a sudden and vibrant sense of self worth, as your presence on that pillow, which will quickly leave the hands of your stitcher and find its place on the table below, will really tie the whole couch/room/rug ensemble together.

You'll get it, then.  You are a decorative bird, sewn into a pillow surface for the simple purpose of improving the decor of a room.  And by merit of being, by merit of being a bird made of thread set on fabric on a pillow on a sofa above a rug in a room lit by southern light with a smattering of trees blocking the noon sun, you'll understand that you are important.  You'll make what would otherwise be atrocious home decor choices absurdly fashionable.  Hipster chicks will adjust their hairbands to take in how cool you are.  Women will ill-advised bangs will swoosh them out of the way for the sake of witnessing, at long last, the majesty of your silhouetted plumage.

So stand proud, decorative bird.  Or perch proud on an invisible branch, or whatever.  You will, by merit of merely existing, make this world a better place, albeit a very small chunk of this world, which is more than we can say for most people.

Congratulations Decorative Bird!

Congratulations Racially Diverse Gang!

Tonight's the night!  The night every single gang in North America (Mexico aside) has been waiting for!  The night of the Gangies!

The Gangies, as if you didn't know, are a series of awards commemorating exceptional behavior in the field of organized crime and collectivized violence.  Former Gangie winners include The Purple Gang, Butch Cassidy, Nancy Kerrigan, and Kingping, from the Spiderman comic books.  While the Gangies historically emerged to award particularly brutal mobsters with conspicuous trophies, the awards have more recently become a means of promoting socially responsible behavior among gang members.  Not like, safer streets stuff.  More like stuff that makes gangs more socially progressive in their insane violence.  Awards are given out for creating LGBTQ safe spaces using intimidation tactics, racketeering, and systematic violence, for promoting female gang members to prominent non-prostitute positions, and, most notably, for constructing socially and racially diverse gangs in an attempt to distance notions of "gang life" from allegations of bigotry or racism.

Tonight you and your gang, the Detroit Skullfuckers, are going to win an award for exceptional achievement in diversity.  See, every member of the Skullfuckers comes from a different cultural and religious background.  Anyone who is already represented in the gang can try to fight their way in, but it's a fight to the death, so factions never develop.  You've managed to amass an impressive number of gang members (twelve!) and so you qualify for a Gangie, at long last.

Tonight, you're going to go up on stage and accept your award.  Immediately afterwards, a cadre of Mexican cartels will show up at the venue and burn everyone inside alive, sending a powerful message to the surviving Gangie leadership committee members about discrimination, tolerance, and respect.  Only one of your gang members will survive: Tsai, the Chinese Muslim.

He will later write a book about the experience.  It will fail to break the New York Times Best Seller list by a narrow margin, proving once and for all that America hates original stories about interesting Muslims more than it likes violence and crime.

Congratulations Racially Diverse Gang!

Congratuations Terrified Prostitute!

When your boyfriend gets on one knee, your stomach will start turning in knots.

"Please don't do this," you'll whisper.  The sound will rake out of your throat, so soft he won't even hear it.  He'll just keep going, his lips moving, making those dumb fucking sounds that your brain won't recognize until you look at his face and realize that this is really happening and you hear the last two words...

"...marry me?"

You'll start shaking your head at him, so he'll stand up and wrap his arms around you in a big hug.  "Honey," he'll whisper.  "That's okay."

You'll start trembling in his arms, rattling, really, trying to shake yourself free.  When he finally lets you go he'll look you in the eye and ask:

"Are you okay?"

You'll freeze for a moment, tears welling in your eyes.  You'll want to slap him, to say, fuck you, my uncle molested me, of course I'm not okay.  But instead you'll just shout:

"I PUT PENISES IN MY MOUTH FOR MONEY!"

He'll smile his little sad smile at you and nod.

"I know," he'll draw you close and murmur into your ear.  "I still love you."

The world will begin to dissolve around you as the panic attack takes hold.  When you finally come to it will be hours later, but it will feel like days.  Night will have fallen, but somewhere in the interim, you'll have gone to bed with your boyfriend.  You'll stumble out of bet and rush to the bathroom, where you'll close the door and turn on the light.  Inside, under the hum of the CFLs, you'll touch yourself, checking to see if you had sex while you were blacked out.  You won't have, which will make you feel a brief flutter as the fear returns.  You'll imagine the ring, your boyfriend's eyes, flush with puppy love and innocence.  You'll see him on one knee, staring up at your face, the same horrified, exhausted face that will stare back at you in the mirror, and the truth of the world will rush into you in a single moment.  You'll fall to your knees, retching into the toilet, until you hear your boyfriend tapping on the door, asking if everything is okay.

You won't know how to answer that question.  The fear will still have you.

Congratulations Terrified Prostitute!