Pebbles and evil

Disclaimer: This post is some kind of failed allegory for something but I’m not sure what.

Little does the little pebble have going for it. It is, by definition, an unsubstantial fragment of something that was once substantial but that is now just pebbles. Pebbles—if I may be so coarse as to discuss for a moment all pebbles at once as though the whole lot shared a lineage or an ancestor—are a geological diaspora with no hope of the nostos that drives diasporas. There will be no reunion with volcanic relatives in the mantle or whatever crusty oven whence they were baked.

A pebble is certainly no boulder, rock, or stone. It is not even a shard or nugget. It ought not deserve a place in the lithic family.

Now, the stupid pebble’s raison d’etre is to give the surf an audience and the stone skimmer a hobby as it makes little prayers for surface tension. I don’t know what it prays for. An abrasive life on the beach destined for even smaller pebblehood or a very similar life amid currents and crustaceans where pebblehood is rock bottom. Either way, pebblehood ends with sandhood after much wailing and gnashing of pebbles.

I don’t know if the pebble is endowed with a soul. Maybe some are. The good ones. Or, more likely, the bad ones. Because why would a good pebble have a soul? An evil pebble needs a soul because a soul can be punished. And pebblehood is, if you accept the forecoming conclusions, certainly enough punishment for any soul. Thus all pebbles are, quite likely, evil by nature. Well that’s surprising.

All is right and just in a world where evil meets with its punishment at no cost to the taxpayer.

Screenplay: Providence's Wildebeest

This is an excerpt from a screenplay by the legendary Ingvar Stig Ogvsbrotkulniiskaa. This was his last work before his death in 1994 of lutefisk poisoning and also exposure. Notably, it is the first screenplay ever to require audience participation in the form of sound effects during the diabetic baby fight scene, which was nominated for a Golden Ice Pick at the Kirovsk Novelty Film Party in 1993. His works focused largely on the unknown and some of the known, though in some cases he also included the marginally familiar as well as some of the fairly obvious (though this was rare and indeed included merely as satire). In retrospect, there is a clear progression of political views in his works from pure ignorance to ignorant indifference to confused apathy that has made his film adaptations of newspaper articles compelling for so many disaffected youth as well as the illiterate.

Mr Ogvsbrotkulniiskaa was known for translating his works into many different languages himself, a remarkable talent in its own right especially since it is almost a certainty that he only spoke Finnish and a few words of Russian (enough, it has been rumored, to get him arrested by the MVD once in 1958 for public lakeside pessimism in Novgorod; he was later released following revocation of his ice fishing license and a promise never to return).

Now, I include the author's own English translation of the first scene of Providence's Wildebeest, a powerful condemnation of cowardice and theft and a loving collage of stunningly poignant dialogue. In this, the opening scene, we learn that knowledge is ignorance and age is meaningless in a world where years are frozen to the ceiling like icicles that may fall at any moment and hurt someone--or worse, cause an insurance flap.

INT. ROOM -- NIGHT

The room is dark. There is 1 window through which light from a street lamp comes. But even the light is dark. A man sits at a table. We see him from behind. The door opens behind us and a yellow rectangle briefly dances on the man's back around the silhouette of another man. The DOOR CLOSES.

MAN #1

(Staring out the window, motionless.)

I knew you'd come.

MAN #2

(Still out of view. He has a deep, aged voice.)

Quiet. You know nothing.

We see MAN #1 jump out of his chair and face MAN #2, and now we see that MAN #2 is dressed in a black three-piece suit and thin black tie set against an agonizingly starched white shirt. He is smoking an ivory pipe filled beyond the bowl-brim with rarefied yak hair.

MAN #1

(Wide-eyed, panting, savoring the smoke.)

Your yak hair is magnificent.

MAN #2

Indeed. Your sense of smell is profoundly uncanny. My yak hair is cut fresh morningly with a pair of cheap aluminium scissors. It was the way of the ancients.

MAN #1

(Starting to pace.)

You abuse your position sir. You know it and I know it.

MAN #2

(Slaps MAN #1 with a velvet undergarment from Belgrade.)

Silence. I've brought you here for more than your sassy insolence.

MAN #1

(Weeping.)

You promised me that which was undeliverable. I should have known!

MAN #2

You had the longing of a broken heart. Fool! Yes, you should've known that the banana-Nutella-banana crepe you desired was not attainable.

(He removes his spectacles and peers into MAN #1's nostrils.)

No man has the acumen to place Nutella between two layers of banana. No man would dare to even try. Cardinal Greigel von Nusselkopf-Schokolade himself was excommunicated for merely slicing a plantain near some cocoa not a half-century ago. That for which your loins pine is implausible.

MAN #1

(Removes an unconscious wildebeest from his pocket and now wears a look of horrified indifference on his gaunt face.)

You leave me no choice, old man.

MAN #2

Come to your senses child!

The streetlight flickers and the sun rises immediately. A glass of orange juice from the countryside appears on the table, which we now see is made of wax. We can also now see that MAN #1 is MAN #4, to whom we have not yet been introduced. We gasp.

MAN #1/MAN #4

You bastard!

MAN #2

(His handkerchief is ablaze and he savors the acrid smoke like a connoisseur.)

You have brandished your last wildebeest, ignorant roach!

MAN #2 waters his suit with the orange juice. A beautiful plant sprouts from his lapel and flowers before our eyes. It bears an ugly poisonous fruit which kills MAN #1 with a blow to the spine. The sun sets and the streetlight flickers on and we fade to black. MAN #2's VOICE can now be heard, menacing, old, and decrepit.

MAN #2

It was not hate that was this man's undoing, nor was it love. It was apathy. And a vicious genetically-modified apple with an unlicensed firearm.

END SCENE

When Yignaz Boroslovosibirskov directed this masterpiece in his film of the same title in 1993, it is said that he exhausted his body's supply of tears and resorted to a lacrimal gland transplant to regain his ability to weep (he has since died of complications of immunosuppressive therapy for graft rejection). The entire film was shot on location on the smooth side of an ancient mud-brick wall in Kamchatka in glorious black and grey for a grainy look that pummels the heart with relevance and gravitas. The writer of this note himself has only just recovered--after 15 years and 3 colonoscopies.

HMR, December 27, 2008

Helsinki

L'homme de 70 kg est mort !

I am the exemplar. I am the specimen in your anatomy atlas, the most deeply understood datum in your pathology textbook, the model to whom the parameters of pharmacology apply the most accurately. I am the standard-issue chassis: medically, humanly--decidedly--average. I am the 70-kg male.

Yet an exhausting week weaving up and down midtown Manhattan clearly leaves me thinking that the 70-kg male is dead--at least economically--in the estimation of clothiers and cobblers. Especially this 70-kg male, searching for a simple white shirt with a french cuff that does not make me look like I'm wearing my daddy's nightshirt for walkies. Or for a light jacket, or a pair of trousers, or even a pair of shoes that actually measure what they portend to measure.

As usual, several things are bothering me at the moment and if you know me, then you know that I wouldn't have it any other way.

The fattest common denominator.

It seems that clothing manufacturers and their retail henchmen are complicit in this plot to systematically disrobe those no longer falling within the nation's ballooning average. Put another way, they are seeking to surreptitiously recreate 'average' in their own bloated overgrown image.

This runs deep. Oh I'll feed you, children. Gargle this mindful of truth-flavored listerine:

The people eat. The people get fat. The people try to buy clothes but oh! now they've moved up a couple of sizes and they feel bad, guilt-stricken by their doctors and ridiculed by bufoons in fat suits. Meanwhile, they are herded into Big & Tall and have to start dressing like Cedric the Entertainer. No, you're not going to like the way you look, I guarantee it.

Oh but here's the hat-trick.

The clothing giants, hand-in-dirty-hand with the food conglomerates, agree to slowly increase the real sizes of their clothes while maintaining their labeled sizes. In essence a medium is now the size of what was previously large and a small is now what used to be medium. And the little guy gets shut out. We, the old mediums, are now sifting through piles of small and extra-small and shopping at Petite Sophisticate which is very gay because the stretch-pants-and-skirt look is not unisex.

Système International d'Unités? Bah and harumph.

It doesn't stop there. Not content with the outerwear and the casual vestments of the commonfolk (sized as they are in an appropriately common and course scale: s, m, l, xl, xxl, xxxl, 4xl, 5xl, and two-seat-minimum), the sartorial serpents are infusing their venom into our all-important standard units.

How else could it be that, despite being a very clear 9.5 on the Brannock device (pictured here), I must purchase Johnston and Murphy's in a size 8.5? Or Kenneth Cole's and Aston Grey's in a size 8? So what if I wasn't going to buy them anyway? I should be able to try on a pair of $350 shoes at the store with confidence as I gather the necessary capital over the next few years.

Why is there so much variability in 30x30 trousers? Some fit perfectly, yet many hang from my frame like wet underpants.

Why is it that the neck of this 70-kg male--an exquisitely empiric 14.5 inches--happens to be the smallest size in production anywhere? Still, there is not a 14.5 shirt that will fit me adequately enough to look presentable. When I am told by the helpful salesman at Thomas Pink that I'd be hard pressed to find 'a man's shirt' in my size without having it tailored, and that--if pressed for time--I should shop in the boys' department, I feel so very small. And little boys don't wear shirts with French cuffs, sir. Cufflinks are a choking hazard.

From the ashes, a gaunt phoenix arises!

I know that I am not the smallest man on Fifth Avenue. I know there are people in the Village who share my travails, who've felt the diminution of standing next to the mother of a prepubescent scamp trying not to cringe at the horrible things t-shirts have stamped on them these days. I've seen these men: skinny, lanky men, wispy even. It is as though our money is stained yet we have no voice.

Brothers!

We must speak as one. Join me now to fight the tyrany of these coddlers of the corpulent, these pamperers of the portly, these indulgers of the inhumanly big! They subserviently change their tallies for the tall and the tubby, and yet they spurn the business of the slim and the slight! We say they can't have it both ways! We say we can no longer be the average when it suits science, while being the extra-small when it suits suits. We can no longer abide the slights of this...this obesity-industrial complex! React! Rebel! Revolt!

Or we could just go for coffee. Either way we can meet for sandwiches at Ben's Deli on 38th and 7th but I can't be out too late (my wife, she worries). Or bring a sack lunch why don't you, we might eat outside if it's nice. And a beverage maybe? Whatever.