The first chocolate factory. First personal ad. Friends add on to long running jokes. Young Beethoven goes deaf from his father beating the shit out of him. Dogs get annoyed at having their ears inspected. Deadly fever epidemics kill thousands. A band of adventurers plot to overtake something. The year without summer. June snow comes down in sheets. The seventeen-year-old girl gets arrested for wearing pants. First safety pin. First saxophone. A pencil with an eraser attached. Two people say the same thing at the same time and laugh. Diamonds are discovered in Africa. Diaries discovered in underwear drawers. First White House Easter egg roll. First train robbery. Boxers start wearing gloves. Flush toilets work with new sewage systems. Everyone begins to pee on water.
At the World’s Fair, someone rolls a waffle and scoops ice cream in it. Plastic is invented. Neon lights. One hundred twenty-seven kisses in a single movie. Fire department horses retire. Men feel cool driving cars. Chuck Berry fucks time into place, pulls it into beats and it hangs. It plays. Women use Lysol disinfectant in their vaginas to prevent pregnancy. Crowds of bodies are buried in the ground. Bombs are made with chemicals about to freak out. The seventeen-year-old girl looks into the toilet at the shape of shit that sits there, complete as one thing, a size similar to her boyfriend’s penis. Not right, but close maybe, and she puts her hand above the water, widening her fingers to remember the length.
Cars come close to smashing. Flags paraded around, then stuck on the moon. A little sister orders her baseball card collection by cuteness. Wild animals have no more room. Land gets so full of buildings, when town girls and city boys escape into the open, “God” is waiting in the fields. Cars smash, glass in a crowd of shards. Huge ambivalent teen models lounge across highway billboards. Dust gathers between VCR remote buttons.
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A bunch of fifth-grade girls hang out with fifth-grade boys and the boys start looking through the videotapes for something to show the girls. The girls don’t know what but they giggle and try to sit up so their stomachs don’t bunch but they bunch anyway. A boy sticks in the video and it’s of a man raping a woman against a pinball machine. The fifth graders stare, leaving the potato chips alone in the bowl. A boy laughs. A girl tries it out, laughs a little too.
Dog walkers pick up after their dogs. Shit in plastic. Shit in trash. Shit on grass. Pee on grass. Pee on pavement. Pee on pee. Cars come close to smashing. Ketchup proudly won’t leave bottle. Underwear inches up in butts. Bullets find their snug way into bodies. Moms and dads talk in whispers while children pretend to sleep in the backseat. Snow falls all night, everyone wakes to good moods. Guitars, bought optimistically, lean grandly forgotten against bedroom walls. Raindrops race on car windows.
Harper dribbles the ball down the court, guarded by Ward, head fakes right, passes left to Pippen. Pippen up against Oakley, looks to see if Longley has posted, but Longley hasn’t posted, Longley is tangled with Ewing. Longley’s arms curl around Ewing while Longley’s little eyes look to lock with Steve Javie’s eyes, but Javie’s eyes follow the ball. Pippen drives by Oakley, then passes to Kerr, who bounces it to Jordan. Jordan holds the ball, his eyes twinkle. He passes it back. Alone behind the three-point line, Kerr takes a breath, grimaces, shoots the ball into a spiraling three-point attempt, which hits the rim and sails out of bounds.
Someone is killed wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt. Blood on head. Blood on mouse. Blood on pavement. The mouse still smiles. The sun is in a rhythm. The sky stays put. Babies grow into sturdier shapes. The rocks stay. The paintings stay. The people leave. Blood slows and then sits. Tongues get hot and hurt in their mouths. The sitcoms play on. Newly dead bodies get put in wood. Spacemen invade space. Dog catchers catch dogs. Then the sound, dirt on wood.
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Girls sit outside a mall in the cold. One girl is sure life stops at dirt on wood. Black like outer space. But the seventeen-year-old girl says firmly, “When you die, you watch movie remakes of your life.” The girls smile, but the cold tells them it is dirt on wood. A boy rides loops in the parking lot, his butt high off his bike seat. Sperm bite eggs. Wet new eyes. Tongues on tongues, dirt on wood.
Cell phones are used as weak flashlights. City teenagers discover grass. People strap bombs under their outfits and enter buildings. Religions are dragged through time. A pet dog catches a rabbit, hears his name called, turns around, loses the rabbit.
The buildings get straighter, sturdier, simpler, shinier. On New Year’s, everyone looks funny in their 2020 glasses, 2050 glasses, 2086 glasses. Every famous person born finds the time to die. The newspaper isn’t on paper. Scientists are still trying to make pain less painful.
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Wake to half thoughts and a dirty mouth. Remember your first name and last. Toothpaste on the toothbrush. The day cut into hours. Stream your pee onto water. Remember the fields of trees, the wayward grass? We couldn’t help crowd everything with squares. Dictionaries, mattresses, apartment complexes. All buildings with flat faces, with rows and rows of square eyes. Pages, screens, tiles. The curves got covered with lines. The birds have sex. The bears eat trash. Life still runs enough years. Plenty more than before. Fur ruffles in the wind. Candles coy and shy their hot face. Many parts are still the same. The day is light and easy to see in. A soap bar slims down to a sliver.
LOVE IS A THING ON SALE FOR MORE MONEY THAN THERE EXISTS by Tao Lin
This was the month that people began to suspect that terrorists had infiltrated Middle America, set up underground tunnels in the rural areas, like gophers. During any moment, it was feared, a terrorist might tunnel up into your house and replace your dog with something that resembled your dog but was actually a bomb. This was a new era in terrorism. The terrorists were now quicker, wittier, and more streetwise. They spoke the vernacular, and claimed to be philosophically sound. They would whisper into the wind something mordant and culturally damning about McDonald’s, Jesus, and America — and then, if they wanted to, if the situation eschatologically called for it, they would slice your face off with a KFC spork.
People began to quit their jobs. They saw that their lives were small and threatened, and so they tried to cherish more, to calm down and appreciate things for once. But in the end, bored in their homes, they just became depressed and susceptible to head colds. They filled their apartments with pets, but then neglected to name them. They became nauseous and unbelieving. They did not believe that they themselves were nauseous, but that it was someone else who was nauseous — that it was all, somehow, a trick. A fun joke. “Ha,” they thought. Then they went and took a nap. Sometimes, late at night and in Tylenol-Cold hazes, crouched and blanket-hooded on their beds, they dared to squint out into their lives, and what they saw was a grass of bad things, miasmic and low to the ground, depraved, scratching, and furry — and squinting back! It was all their pets, and they wanted names. They just wanted to be named!
Life, people learned, was not easy. Life was not cake. Life was not a carrot cake. It was something else. A get-together on Easter Island. You, the botched clone of you, the Miami Dolphins, Cocoa Puffs, paper plates, a dwindling supply of clam juice. That was life.
The economy was up, though, and crime was down. The president brought out graphs on TV, pointed at them. He reminded the people that he was not an evil man, that he, of course, come on now — he just wanted everyone to be happy! In bed, he contemplated the abolition of both anger and unhappiness, the outlawing of them. Could he do that? Did he have the resources? Why hadn’t he thought of this before? These days he felt that his thinking was off. Either that, or his thinking about his thinking was off. He began to take pills. Ginseng, Ginkoba. Tic Tacs. It was an election year, and the future was very uncertain. Leaders all over the globe began to go on TV with graphs, pie charts, and precariously long series of rhetorical questions.