Congratulations on Winning Your Children's Affections for the Day!

In the divorce you lost a lot: your house, your car, two-thirds of your money.  But you kept your kids on the weekends.

At first, this seemed like a boon: your kids, essentially continuations of you as a person, presented you with hope for the future, aspirations for what the world might become after you're gone from it, a topic that occupies your thoughts quite often in these bleak days.  But all of these optimistic notions rested on a single misapprehension: that your children weren't foul little beasts completely devoid of any appreciation for you or your fatherly affections.

It took them less than a month of weekends to wear out most of your patience with their absolute ingratitude and indifference to you as a father and a human being.  After about two months your weekends were terse, spite filled affairs, wherein you would ask your children about their lives away from you, then, as their ambivalence blossomed into ire, they would begin to pepper their uneventful accounts of their lives with asides about the various men their mother was now dating, with an eye towards the physical qualities of each man (race, height, relative handsomeness) as well as their mother's perceived happiness and sexual satisfaction, as measured by the abstract "glow" quality that they'll have stumbled upon early on in their endeavors as being particularly infuriating to you. 

If you were comfortable despising your own children this wouldn't be a problem, but you're one of those strange people who actually loves your children and doesn't want to hate them all the time, so you've been trying to figure out a way to break the cycle for the entire week you had away from them.  The solution came to you in a dream, one where you dwelled at length upon the ancient memory of a breakfast in your house wherein your wife and children, laughing and happy and flush with joy, sat around the table as a family and shared of themselves.  This dream, and the memory it drew upon, is a singular instance in the course of the events of your marriage of things not being tinged by bittersweet regret or repressed rage.  The French Toast Family Breakfast stands, both in your mind and in fact, as a milestone marking the only occasion upon which you and yours have ever acted together as a functional family unit.

So this morning you'll begin cooking as soon as your wife calls to inform you that she's coming over with the kids.  You'll crack some eggs, pre-mix sugar and cinnamon and other accoutrements so that when your children arrive the scent of french toast will waft through the entirety of your apartment.  When they settle in they'll immediately be put off their guard and, as such, their passive aggressive campaign against your self-esteem will be interrupted.  In its absence, your children will default back into their natural pattern of human affection, responding politely to each of your questions about their lives with candor, laughing at your jokes, occasionally punctuating their elation with questions about how long it'll be until the bacon is ready or until a fresh slice of toast is out of the pan.  They'll be your children again, and when French Toast Partial Family Breakfast is finished, they will recall the notion of loving you, at least for a few hours.  The four of you will sit down, bellies full, sink stacked with dirty dishes, to watch Die Hard as a family.  The pattern, the return of love, will last the rest of the day.  After that, things become unclear.

Congratulations on Winning Your Children's Affections for the Day!

Congratulations Depraved Shit Bandit!

You'll come in through the skylight on a rope, dangling above your target like a spider on a strand of its own silk.  What will strike you, more than the elaborate security measures, more than the guards, all of them with their backs turned as you descend, will be the odor, or rather the lack thereof.  The shit, trapped within a glass box, will be absolutely odorless.  It will bring with it a strange sort of dissonance, a notion that something is missing, that something requires pursuit.  You'll find the sensation, or rather the lack of sensation coupled with the expectation of sensation, to be decidedly arousing.

Even after you open the glass box containing the shit and remove it from said glass box in a specialized carrying case the odor will still be muted, barely detectable as shit.  It will require all of your will power, all of your self control not to break down and start touching yourself on the roof of the museum, but you'll keep your act together for the trip home, for the elevator ride up to your penthouse apartment, right up until you enter your home.  The moment the door closes behind you, your penis will flip from six to midnight.  Your pants, once ideal for heisting, will suddenly feel restrictive, so much so that you'll tear your zipper in your rush to get them off.

You'll barely even be aware of what your own body is doing as your penis, shivering, grinds against the ancient turd you'll have stolen from that museum.  Hardened by time, odorless, as ancient as the mad Egyptian king who ordered it preserved upon his death, it will, in a single moment be incredibly old and incredibly disgusting, fulfilling both of your requisite fetishes.

You won't last more than a few minutes before you come, explosively and dramatically, semen spraying across the room, landing on your coffee table, staining your walls.  You'll feel at once drained and satiated, so much so that you'll pass out on the floor.

When you come to your head will be pounding.  The faint odor of the ancient shit will no longer seem enticing; after your conquest, it will strike you as stale.  Dead, at best.  Staring at it, you'll suddenly hate it, hate yourself for wanting it, for breaking into the Smithsonian to steal it, to fuck it, to ruin it, not just for yourself but for all mankind.  Amidst this storm of self-hate, an ultimatum to never steal ancient shit and take it home to fuck it will take hold within your mind.

This will be a normal part of the shame cycle that drives you.  Ride it out.  Drink some chamomille tea and go to bed.  Try to wake up early and go for a jog the next day to clear your head.  You'll soon learn of an ancient Aztec shit on display in a museum in Seattle, and you're going to have to start planning right away if you want to pull that job off.

Congratulations Depraved Shit Bandit!

Congratulations Thematic Device!

When you appear on the page we immediately understand what we're meant to be feeling.  Sometimes that feeling will be altered by the surrounding material, but usually it'll just be there, easily accessible for even the most dull witted of readers, a point of humanity that can be accessed, returned to, turned over and assessed, again and again, as an example of some fundamental human trait.

But not today.  Today you're on vacation!  Enjoy the wonderful beaches of Cabo San Luca!  Let the sun tan your insubstantial firmament.  You'll look all good and toasty brown when today is done, unless you realize you're just a literary device and, as such, can't actually tan, or really do much of anything, aside from exist in an abstracted context.  Tomorrow, you'll be back on the page, doing your thing, informing us of stuff about what it means to be human, cuing us in on when we're supposed to be happy or sad based on what's ocurring.  But today you've got the day off.  Have fun, and try to ignore all the art that's happening without you around - no one's really going to get into that anyhow.

Congratulations Thematic Device!

Congratulations Red Herring!

Today is Wednesday, and today nothing of interest is going to happen to you.

Plenty of interesting things will happen in the world.  People will live full, vibrant lives, rich with activity and potential and opportunity.  All throughout the world, things will change today.

But nothing will change for you.  You're a red herring, and today you're just a thing that we briefly focus on which, upon reflection, will have no significance.  The details of your day, including your breakfast (fair trade coffee and a bagel from the bagel shop near your work), lunch (Subway chicken teriyaki six inch), and dinner (Weight Watchers chicken satay with rice) will all be completely insignificant.  Even though we've mentioned them here, the narrative significance imposed through their position herein will be wholly undercut by their thorough disconnection to anything of value, even the surrounding context of other peoples' lives, which might have some measure of significance in the world.

You'll just keep on living, alone and unknown, and one day you'll die, unloved and unmourned.

                                         

Congratulations Red Herring!

Congratulations on Ruining Sex for Those Kids!

The children will fall silent as you step into the room, not for fear of your countenance, but for the muted tales that their older siblings will have told them of you.  Even your introduction, flush with candor, will make their blood run cold in their veins.

"Hello class.  I'm Mister Jacobson," you'll announce, depositing your briefcase on the table in front of them.  "Your sex ed teacher."

You'll punctuate your sentence by opening the briefcase and removing your smart phone from it.  The briefcase will be empty aside from this device and a single sheet of paper, on which you'll mark attendance later.  You'll take your phone and, using a cord provided by the school department, plug your phone into the projector sitting in the middle of the room.  With that done you'll fiddle with your phone a bit, then look out over the room, reading through the names on your attendance list.

When you reach James Frankletorp's name you'll pause.

"Are your grandparents Gloria and Shem Frankletorp?" you'll ask him.

"I guess," he'll mutter in response, eyes still fixed on his desk.  He'll know what's coming.  The whole class will know what's coming, but James will have the misfortune of being the one to bear the full brunt of your attention.

After he responds you'll pick up your phone again, fiddle with it until you find the relevant file, then turn off the lights and turn on the projector.  Light will scintillate on to the screen, requiring delicate effort and tuning until it sharpens into a still image of two elderly white people facing one another in the nude, bodies loose and baggy, faces harrowed.  Once the image comes into focus you'll press play on the video.  The elderly white folk will immediately begin touching one another, painfully unaware of the fact that they're being filmed.  They'll clumsily smash their bodies together, grinding, moaning, sweating, grunting, cursing, praising Jesus, and, at one particularly fraught moment, begging one another to stop.  When they finish they'll do so with terrified looks on their faces, as if this might be the way they die, as if they might be found locked in this terrifying, macabre embrace.  The video will end soon thereafter, you'll switch the projector off and the lights back on.  The students will all be staring ahead, all except James, who will be staring at his desk.  It will look like he's been weeping quietly to himself.  You'll smile and begin speaking.

"This is what sex is.  Sex is horrible.  Sex is hideous.  Sex is the source of all shame.  To have sex is to give in to base desire, to become as those elderly folk are, truly reprehensible.  Never have sex."

After you finish you'll pack up your smart phone, exit the classroom and leave the school, pausing only to deposit the attendance roll sheet with the principal's office.  Then you'll get in your Honda Accord and begin driving towards your next destination, another school, filled with another group of children, one of whom, you're sure, will soon to be subject to a most unpleasant surprise.

Congratulations on Ruining Sex for Those Kids!