And what had been a trickle of Styrofoam packing peanuts, adrift in the tributaries of Puget Sound, the Skagit and Nooksack rivers, these are present to welcome the thing-baby to the Pacific Ocean. More constant and numerous than the salmon and steelhead, these plastic emissaries will converge off the temperate coast of Long Beach to await the birth of the thing-baby. Far exceeding the birds of any flock or the fish of any school, these objects are baked by the sun and degrading to become a rich soup of plastic corpuscles. These nurdles. These mermaid tears. Fluoropolymers and malamine-formaldehyde. They create a simmering broth not unlike the murk isolated within the skin of the thing-baby.
Thusly do the unresolved fragments of the past linger, according to Plato, and in that manner do they coalesce to create the future. And off the shores of Long Beach one infinitesimal speck of plastic comes into contact with the thing-baby and remains, stuck. And a second fleck of plastic cleaves itself unto the graven image until the infant idol is coated in a layer of such specks. And that first layer accumulates a second layer, and the thing-baby begins to accrete layer upon layer, and to grow. And the larger the whole of it grows, the more specks it draws, becoming a fledgling. Becoming a thing-child.
And in that manner, Plato foretold that plastic will be fed plastic. A skin accrues atop its skin. Fed an ample diet of juice boxes and disposable diapers, the ordinary grows to become an abomination.
DECEMBER 21, 9:41 A.M. MST
Saint Camille: A Theory
Gentle Tweeter,
CanuckAIDSemily asks, “Do ghosts sleep?” My experience as a supernaturalist attests that no, they do not. As the occupants of this aircraft doze or peruse a wide selection of films featuring Camille Spencer—my mother is inescapable—my ghost self updates my blog. I check my texts.
The longer I consider my parents’ new role as global religious leaders, the less I’m surprised by this sacrilegious turn of events. For a decade I’ve watched my mother in filmic roles where she was China-syndromed while investigating melty overheated nuclear power stations… ax-handled by strike-breaking Pinkerton thugs who resented her efforts to organize the loomy weavers of a Deep South textile mill… poisoned Erin Brockovich–style with ground-water tainted by Republican plutocrat Christians allied with the military-industrial complex. Even at this airborne moment, the jetliner passengers surrounding me nibble peanut snacks while watching Alsatian police dogs and racist Klansmen tear the clothing from her flawless bosom.
A career of cathartic martyrdoms. Date movies. She’s died a thousand deaths so the members of her audience can live happily ever after.
Yet despite the piercing arrows and savage biting wolves, she returns to us… ever more ravishing. The woman we watch die horribly, she reappears on the red carpet at Cannes looking divine in an Alexander McQueen ball gown. As the spokeswoman for Lancôme cosmetics she’s reborn, glowing with diamonds and good health.
My point is that Camille Spencer is the closest thing our world has to a secular martyr. She is the saint of our modern era—nothing less than our Moral Compass—ritualistically sacrificed time and time again. She and my dad are the social consciousness of a generation, saving endangered species from extinction, curing pandemic plagues. No famine exists until my parents call it to our international attention and record a hit song, with all the profits going for food relief. This woman whom we’ve seen suffer and survive every cruel atrocity, for years she and my father have determined what’s good and bad for the entire globe. No political figure holds higher moral authority; thus when Camille and Antonio Spencer renounce their nondenominational lifestyle and embrace a single true faith, Boorism, three billion rudderless agnostics are bound to heel to.
Thrilled as I am to have the world’s attention, I wish it wasn’t for an ill-considered lie. My blog followers in the underworld advise me that living conditions—living conditions?—in Hades are in rapid decline. Already my calls for more expletives, more belching, more coarseness are resulting in a steady uptick in the number of inbound souls. According to CanuckAIDSemily, these newly dead are arriving with the expectation that they’ll be in Heaven. Not only are they disappointed—but they’re ticked off! Everyone blames me. Everybody’s going to Hell, and they’re all going to hate me. Even worse, they’re all going to hate my parents in every language. Perhaps my dad could handle that, but my mom’s going to hate being hated. She’s a skinny beautiful lady with perfect hair; she’s just not equipped to deal with hate.
It breaks my heart to imagine my folks killed by Japanese harpoons or a freak bong explosion, and then getting their skin flayed by demons because I sold them a bill of goods.
Outside my little airplane window, the sun is blazing away, half sunk in a tufted mattress of clouds. There are no angels. At least, no angels that I can see.
DECEMBER 21, 10:09 A.M. PST
A Birthday Offering
Gentle Tweeter,
The work of a supernaturalist never ends. As my flight begins its initial decent into Calgary or Cairo or Constantinople, you find me worming my ghost self into the port provided at my seat for stereo earphones. I’m shimmying deep into the electronic innards of the airplane. Tracing wires. Bridging relays. By satellite, I’m hacking into the various servers which control the security cameras ogling my parents’ far-flung abodes. Not so much to spy on them; no, I’m accessing the archived history files. By referencing the time codes I locate video footage of myself celebrating my tenth birthday, that long-ago, clothing-optional kids party where my parents hoisted a heavy piñata poured full of prescription pain medications and recreational hallucinogenics. There I am, that prepubescent me, mortified, clutching pastel-colored napkins to cover my exposed fleshy shame even as the naked adults disembowel my festive papier-mâché burro with their bare hands. These former-punk, former–New Wave, former-grunge scenesters, they squirm together on the littered floor like a mass of sweaty, drug-hungry eels.
It’s for the comfort of perspective that I seek out video of the most demeaning, most humiliating events of my former life. To all you predead people, please take note. Whenever you’re feeling depressed about being dead, duly remember that being alive wasn’t always a picnic. The only thing that makes the present palatable is the fact that the past was, at times, torture. For further solace I retrieve the cringe-inducing video files of my six-year-old, living-alive self Morris dancing, naked, around the base of an old-growth pine tree. I review footage of my four-year-old backside splayed to the camera as I gingerly utilize the shared bamboo toilet stick at ecology camp.
Ye gods, my childhood was atrocious.
Scanning through random video time codes, I glimpse my mother. In Tashkent or Taipei, she’s telling someone over the phone, “No, Leonard, we have yet to identify the right assassin….”
On a different time code, I watch my dad on the phone in Oslo or Orlando, saying, “Our last would-be executioner ran off with Camille’s credit cards….” Both tiny flashbacks occurred in the final few months of my life.
To savor the unhappiness of someone other than myself, I retrieve the video of my brother, Goran, on his last birthday. If you must know, Goran was my brother for about fifteen minutes. My parents adopted him from some tragic refugee-camp situation, largely as a publicity stunt. Said adoption was not, shall we say, a success. In the video they’ve rented Disney’s EPCOT Center and populated it with the outlandish players of a dozen Cirque du Soleil productions. Members of the media outnumber the guests, making sweet, sweet public relations hay for my mom and dad. Cameras and microphones broadcast every smidgen of the magic as my folks proudly trot out their birthday gift: a pretty Shetland pony. What was Goran to make of this situation, he who’d only recently arrived from some veiled post–Iron Curtain regime? Surrounding him were crowds of capering French Canadian clowns and nymphlike Chinese ribbon dancers. Here, he was clearly the guest of honor, and his hosts were presenting him with this young, tender animal. The pony’s mane and tail were braided with blue satin ribbons, its fur dusted with silver glitter. My father led the pony with the reins of a silver bridle, and a silver bow the size of a cabbage was tied around its diminutive neck.