a- Anything about your micturition?
b- I wish I had better aim.
a- Oh. Yes. I see.
b- Does that help?
a- Very much. Is your hair growing thin? Would you dare to eat a peach?
b- Not at this very moment. Not at this particular moment.
a- Good. Now that is taken care of. So, this is better than rubber buggy bumpers, of course.
b- Of course. Don’t think I’ll repeat that. No. Not in mixed company.
a- Is this a poem?
b- No. Never. Nothing like that.
a- Good. I hate poems.
b- Who doesn’t? They stink. Yes, I truly believe that they are rotten. A bunch of bull.
a- Petering out I am. I walk past an old beat-up station wagon. A good old early 1970s model with fake-wood paneling and peeling verdigris paint. It is stuffed full to the gills with cardboard boxes. Some are broken down and flattened out and stuffed inside of other boxes. Some are filled with stuff. All kinds of stuff. I am prettier today than I was twelve weeks ago.
b- We get born at such odd times, don’t you think?
a- Yes, but we also get tired and angry and annoyed and hungry. Timing is everything, I do believe.
b- As do I. On this we do concur. Oh, and I also get grumpy sometimes. Sometimes I don’t.
a- That is just as well. Just the same. A small thing, really. A good thing? No. Not such a good thing, is it?
b- I’m okay with it. When the rivers are swelled with the wine of youth we go running stark naked, streaking that is, through the pastures of Heaven with boundless joy. Something like that. Yes. I am certain of it.
a- Let us try a synecdoche, if you please.
b-Could I make you a list?
a- Yes, but I only want you to include the number 8 and 9 items on the list in your response. Is that understood?
b- ‘Tis. Quite. I can only think of seven right now.
a- The other two will come. And they will be the only ideas that matter. Use your head. The first seven are the generic random ones that everyone thinks of. The last two will show your originality, if you have any.
b- I do not think that I do.
a- We will see. And no metonymies please.
b- I will attempt to do so, for a man must test his mettle. He must show his temerity and not be jejune and cowardly in his actions or he will falter, and will never kill himself with climbing to reach the stars.
a- Yes, there are benefits and bored buffalo and detrimental things too that come with the purchase.
b- Now, that price you quoted me earlier. When I asked how much these things ran…
a- And I said that they would run quite a ways if you didn’t catch them.
b- Yes, that was very humorous indeed. But, all joking aside, that price was…?
a- Eight hundred billion buckskins and zilch on the centavos.
b- An estimate?
a- An exact figure.
b- What’s the catch? I mean, excuse me but it sounds a bit on the too-good-to-be-true side there, if you catch my drift, buster.
a- Keaton? Poindexter? Brown? Or could it be that you do not think I am as affluent as I present myself?
b- All possibilities are endless. Do you feel like singing?
a- Yes! Let us try this. Moon River, wider than a mile, I’m crossing you in style, some day.
b- You dream maker, you heart breaker, wherever you’re going I’m going your way, two drifters off to see the world, there’s such a lot of world to see.
a- We’re after the same rainbow’s end, waitin’ round the bend.
b- My huckleberry friend, Moon River, and me.
a- Now. That sure was enjoyable. We can enjoy these things still.
b- Do you still drink water?
a- Do you mean when I am parched or just any old god damn time?
b- When the tap’s running with hot-water dreams and ghosts flit through the shadows of this dead movie set.
a- Oh. Then my answer would be no. I drink only limeade and cherry brandy.
b- We’re just two fellas having a conversation, that’s all.
a- That is all.
b- Sometimes when I close my eyes I see entoptic floaters. Sometimes, like say on a pluvial afternoon of washing dishes and taking out the trash and bending over to look at the dust bunnies between the crack made by the side of my refrigerator and the molding on the bottom of the wall, I cry.
a- My fingernails grow too fast. It seems I’m cutting them every other day.
b- Isn’t it strange to think of yourself as a skeleton covered with all of these muscles, and fat, and skin, and hair. And the only reason you are alive is because some bacteria find you useful.
a- My thoughts unburdened of care sluice through my head in a tidal wave of useless patter.
b- I wish I could play the harp.
a- They are speaking and the things they are saying are enormously important. Their voices are more than susurrations, more than billy clubs and boxing gloves, and they carry on the wind as if amplified from bulldozer-sized speakers. I have never owned a pet, but I once played the violin.
b- I don’t have jumper cables or pencils or a frock coat.
a- Things are never simple. Complications arise. Changes come. People never turn into fruit flies.
b- Stop grousing. We are not that far gone into anomie yet. Hope is something that still can spring now and again, though it would make a pretty pathetic campaign slogan.
a- I cannot tell if I am becoming neophobic or cainophobic, or if I am just existing, inside of my inner distance, in a horror vacui of somebody else’s imagining. That is all that is relevant to the current situation. Religion is the only campaign slogan.
b- Fear is its own slogan. It wears a balaclava of intimidation and, unmitigated, it horsewhips your sense of purpose. I am no longer eating raw pancake batter.
a- I do believe that complacency is gnawing away at the herringbone stitched fabric of our meanest, most base nature. Fortitude is a lost cause. We are trapped in this fin-de-siècle. I am not hell-bent on doing or not doing anything.
b- Lawdie, lawdie, lawdie…
a- Kiss my grits.
b- If one would or could even catch a phrase like a raindrop on the tongue, or become fashionably depressed, or covertly go gray, or shuffle off, winking, o’er the deep blue sea while mermaids do or do not sing for thee, well, it might smell of bleach.
a- A crash course in living the life you want to lead: Many things including but not limited to (a) crafting a misunderstanding between what your mind says and what your mind hears itself saying, that is self deception in its most nefarious state—a usurpation of the mind’s central mechanism for making up its own sense, (b) doing what one most wants to do the most that one can, (c) singing, (d) walking around late at night thinking about black & white movies like The World’s Greatest Sinner or Proust or Chipmunk songs, (e) recording the sound of one’s voice saying strange things over and over, (f) trying not to fall off of bridges.
b- Bored people sitting alone in kitchens of despair. These are the kinds of things I see when I look out of my window. I point my finger and it shoots.
a- Hey, don’t aim it at me, you Tom-Dick-Harry son-of-a-bitch!
b- Ah. A tableau of my private hours strikes you as vicious, or shall I say bellicose, threatening maybe?
a- Strikes me? You’re off your nut!
b- I’ve just got a bad case of the old unguis incarnatus, that’s all. I need to purchase some new shoes. My clothes are becoming threadbare and I’ve got missing buttons on all of my shirts. The streets get so dark at night. I can’t seem to find a good haberdashery that will stay open late, just diners and 7-11s.
a- Tell of some other things.
b- Stop signs are octagons. Most windows are rectangles. One Way signs are irregular pentagons. The Pentagon is the headquarters of The United States Department of defense, located in Arlington County, Virginia. As a symbol of the US military, "the Pentagon" is often used metonymically to refer to the Department of Defense rather than the building itself. Stop signs are retroreflective, which means they have cat’s eye. A plane crashed into the Pentagon once. I wasn’t born then. The arrangement of windows in a building is its fenestration. If I jump out of a window that is defenestration. I am not too smart. Going the wrong way down a one-way street can be a bad idea. Any new idea is like a light bulb. Breathing is important to staying alive. In the morning when the sun is bright it is easy to see spider webs in the trees.
a- Okay, you can shut up now. That’s quite enough of that folderol. Now, let us make some sugar water and sell it to the kids as bottled energy.
b- We are so mediocre. We are stunted. We are stifled. The television talks and we listen and obey.
a- This is a good chance to be somebody. I will tell you that this here caplet, this combination of a capsule and a tablet in a chalky white teardrop shape, is, upon digestion and what we believe will be an almost one-hundred percent absorption rate by your gut, going to take away your fears and sadness and your inability to feel empathy for another human being. And, after you come to believe the truth of what I am saying, which I am almost assured that you will, a preternatural desire will pervade your inner-consciousness, and will usurp your most basic instincts for survival with an obsessive, overwhelming demand to have more and more caplets. This will all seem normal. You will pay with tiny, lesser-used parts of your soul at first, but eventually you will resort to hawking your most cherished memories for a fix. This is a good strategy to keep the shareholders happy, happy, happy.
b- I don’t sleep easy. I stare at the ceiling. There are no easy answers. Nobody cares.
a- The price of gold is stabilizing.
b- The cost of breathing is going up. The profit margins must be shrinking. I place my complete trust in corporate wealth. Once there was a way to put words down onto paper and have them mean something.
a- That’s not true. That cannot be true. I do not believe such things. I am slowly turning into an idiot.
b- That is all there is to know.
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