There is a guy out in the parking lot right now who I believe is unemployed, who drives a car with a missing trunk lock away from and back to the apartment several times a day, always smoking, and now he is changing tires on the car, and I thought my life superior to his until now. Out there now with a nice chrome wheel and a cigarette he looks to have more on the ball by far than I do in here in the cookie-flyer vs. new-clothes quandary. He’s a cross between Kris Kristofferson and Randall “Tex” Cobb.
I should just go out there and beat him up. That would break some logjam in here, or some ice, or something. You might not think there is a connection, or that my quandary would be served a laxative were I to without seeming provocation whip the ass of a contented layabout working on wheels and smoking, but it most assuredly would, I sense it, logically I can’t help you any. We are not in the zone of logic, we are in the zone of cookie flyers and deadbeats and indecision racking our entire mortal coil and time, what little we have of it, on earth. If you do not already divine what I am talking about, there’s nothing for it, no explaining this. It would take poetry, or religion, to get through. I don’t have those. I don’t want those. I want to know only whether to get the new Government Cookie Flyer or the clothes, period.
And now that you have your Government Cookie Flyer — you will want two or three more, to be sure, but one is a start — you shall take it from the box. Pull those brass staples out with these pliers. These are Klein, very nice, now (finally) available at Sears. I worry about Sears. Cut the tape, set your utility knife at a sixteenth, or if you are using your pocket knife you know how to pinch the blade exposing only the tip. Cut the length across and now the two sides all the way, describing an H, very gratifying somehow, like a goalpost — open the box, score a touchdown! Now the whole business will slide out. Pull the Styrofoam braces off. Now everything is bagged in a nice gray plastic, some of it actually shrink-wrapped onto the large parts. Snip those and listen for the vacuum as air enters the Cookie Flyer. Unpeel everything, lay out the parts, get the exploded view, assemble. The Germans (reveal this to no one) supply a tube of Loctite but we prefer not to use it. We keep a dedicated 5/16” nut driver tied to the Flyer and like to manually check torques continuously. It helps us stay in touch with this fine machine, we feel, and we feel better in touch with a fine machine.
Sweep up the chips, put them in one or two of the plastic bags, put the Styrofoam braces back in the box in the correct orientation, tape the box lightly back up, put it in the attic or basement. Sometimes these days one is asked to ship in original container but also sometimes in a new container the warranty server provides, you do not ever know in advance, so we’ll have you save the box.
Behold the brand-new Government Cookie Flyer on your floor. Congratulations. Your life has changed, it is safe to say. Very safe to say. One’s life changes all the time, one might say, or it does not change all the time, another might say, and both might be right. When we caught the magnificent catfish in the muddy Brazos and ate it, and can still see that shiny gray fish fighting on that shiny red mud, so handsome, so strong, undone by his appetite for a chicken gizzard, we might say our life changed, or we might not. But with the Government Cookie Flyer on your floor, your life has changed.
The moment I touched the Flyer my life did change. I saw to the core of adult capitalist life, what constitutes the Highest Good: IT IS THE MOMENT YOU INDUCE OTHERS TO GIVE YOU A LOT OF MONEY FOR SOMETHING THAT DID NOT COST YOU MUCH TO SUPPLY. This I now know is the only lasting thrill — not meeting a woman or having good drugs or securing a good job or car or seeing God or whatever. The thrill that the Big Boys are about is in duping for cash. I took the Flyer out and let one fly right by the idiot mechanic in the parking lot as he performed his endless machinations on his beloved car. He stood up from the wheel he sat on while studying a brake drum, stamped out his cigarette, advanced on me with the built-in menace in his gait, and said he would give me the pink slip to the car at that moment, and do me a barbecue that night, and invite his wife’s sister over for me to meet, that she was newly divorced and lonely and hot, if I would give him the Flyer. I said no way with such certainty that he stopped lighting the new cigarette he was about to light and kicked me squarely in the groin. He looked at me a moment on the ground, lit the cigarette, and returned to the car.
Now things are so clear. When I see any government functionary, say the Secretary of State, or Defense, speaking ostensibly about this diplomatic matter or that military matter, respectively, I can now divine the truth underlying the positions. The man speaking, were he not in Government service, would be a major CEO pulling a multimillion-dollar salary, an income he has chosen to forego for the nonce in order to protect thousands of other multimillion-dollar salaries, and on this his integrity depends, if not his life. His colleagues the Big Boys watch him serve and protect, and they hold open a position for him when he is done with the sacrifice. They are the high priests in the world’s most successful religion. Every store is a church, every ad a psalm, every entrepreneur a preacher, every buyer a believer. And it all rests on a solid spiritual principle: since material goods are insignificant and money crass, why not always give a little more than the material is worth? What harm there? The Government Cookie Flyer makes this abundantly clear, inadvertently I’m sure. But a machine of this genius has unpredictable powers, few limitations, a broad adaptability for perhaps unlimited uses. Among them — and this application I am certain was not intentional, for it strikes at the heart of a large market just now, if not the largest market on earth — is that I need not use a phone. I may think of a call and let the Cookie Flyer fly, and the matter is done, not one dial tone, fiber optic, roam, message, beep, vibration, satellite involved. The called party strangely knows the import of my call and communicates his or her response on the return fly, coterminous with his receipt of my call. Thus, in effect, I can communicate with everyone on earth, just sitting here, sometimes without their being aware of it. Just a side benefit of owning the Government Cookie Flyer, like a small potato chip, or piece of a chip, on the plate of a very large and ultimately satisfying meal. With the Flyer I called my doctor about the embarrassing prospect of having him inspect my throbbing testicles and learned that only an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory is indicated, ice if I want to amuse myself with frozen parts, and that any permanent damage, unlikely, will be in the positive direction of free and non-surgical vasectomy, which I needed anyway. I have put an ice pack in my shorts and eaten some aspirin and flown a call to my malicious neighbor yet working on his car, asking him if he is absolutely certain of his tattooed wife’s fidelity, sometimes a problem with a woman so much younger than an aging, balding, overweight husband and with a woman so goddamned good-looking, a fact he overlooks, has he taken a good look at her lately? The answer that came back, as he sat staring at the wheel bearings, was No, bullshit, and he got up and went in the house, from which I now hear noise, very satisfying as I adjust the ice cubes better.
Cries For Help, Various
Cry for Help from France
My toilet is from Paris. A coward is full of bluster about living well. A coward is terrified of even being alive. He may be also afraid — and this is congruent with the more popular visions of cowardice — of the opposite, both in its extreme, final expression (death), and in its less acute expressions (injury). But fear of injury or death, running from battles or fistfights, etc., is just shallow cowardice; in fact it may not be cowardice at all. It may be mere anxiety, and usually rather rational at that. Who is to be faulted for preferring not to have his nose broken or not to die on the ground in the dirt without any painkillers or a girl to wipe one’s brow? No, that is cosmetic cowardice. True cowardice would embrace a broken nose or the spectacle of one’s guts flying while being afraid of buying a new car or getting married or having a child or changing jobs or selecting this coat over that coat or eating at a restaurant that is too expensive or one that is not expensive enough. A true coward knows the phrase Go for it and he deigns not go for it. Going for it scares him to death. He is so far from going for it that he does not even conceive what is to be gone for. This is why he does not perceive, usually, that he is a coward. Excuse me, I’ve been writing this, just now, and I’ll admit to bearing down a bit to try to get my meaning correct, and clear if it is correct, and I fancy at this point it is clear but not yet correct — when a fat boy skipped by on the street, trying to skip, so uncoordinated that it lent the impression that his bones were soft, or even possibly bending. A goofy, happy, or let us say perhaps an unhappy boy trying to be happy, badly skipping down a sunny street in France. It is likely, in my imagination, at first, that this boy is not a coward. Then I immediately correct: he is likely not yet a coward. He does not know. He is still at the level of trying to see if his overfed and underused soft body will respond to a command he gives it, which command should be fun to obey. He has gone around the corner, gone with his early unconscious exploration into cowardice, and I now sit here with my later investigations. I am at a good oak table. I have coffee. It is quiet in this nice house in France. Send me some money, you people. I am just like Robert Crumb, who has retired to south France, except he can draw.