I Bick You
Mr. Lessmore stares at the three tattoos on his left arm. They read, "Born to Lose" in large red script, once in English, once in Latin, and once in Greek. He picks at them from time to time and gazes into a distance I cannot see. "Do you know what the word verbatim means?" I quickly ruffle through the pages of my vertabrim memory and cleverly respond, "What does it mean, Mr. Lessmore?"
"Nothing really, nothing can be word for word. There are words not intended and words not said and words said too often to be real and words said so often they go unnoticed, but no words are said word for word. Do you believe in the power of the word? Are words always the beginning and the end? I bick you." I am lost Mr. Lessmore. What are you? What has caused the sudden and rapid deterioration of your being? We have diagnosed you as schitzophrenic, but what the hell are you really and what do I do to help? For twenty-eight years you led the most normal of lives. You have one wife, two children, two cars, and two degrees from Yale. You make a good living and attend church every Sunday. Then most suddenly, four months ago, you became psychotic. There is no history of mental illness in your family. There have been no major traumas in your life during the past six years. What are you, Mr. Lessmore? Where have you gone and why, or what has come to you and why? Has it become too much and too little that you should decide to leave?
Four months ago on Friday, Mr. Lessmore walked into the center of main street at 12:00 A.M. He was nude and carried a grocery sack. He pulled six cantaloupes out of the sack and arranged them in a large circle. He then proceeded to defecate in the middle of the circle of cantaloupes. After cleaning himself with a tie ripped from the neck of a bystander, he stood and said, "Well, that about does it." He then held two hands up toward the sun stating, "Who here can deny that Jupiter has a diameter of 88,640 miles, give or take a cubit or two? Can you believe that such mass has no affect on your daily lives? I think not, my fellow travelers. I think not indeed. Do the words Fomahalut, Betelgeuse, Capella and Sirius mean nothing to you?" A crowd had encircled Mr. Lessmore. One large man with a brown paper bad yelled, "Frigging A! Capone and Spiro been screwing us as long as I can remember." At which point, he fell forward into the magic circle with a thud to mark his passing. Mr. Lessmore then attacked this fallen acolyte, but was pulled away from this task by large policemen unaware of the diameter of Jupiter. Two hours later, Mr. Lessmore arrived at our sacred grove.
Mr. Lessmore's mother came to see me yesterday. The social history is completed by his mother reads like a script from Father Knows Best. You can not find enough trauma to fill a thimble. Mr. Lessmore's mother is a small women with a quick, precise gestures. She arranged all the objects on my desk in neat, orderly rows and then went to work on my collection of inconsequintial sayings getting to alphabetical listing "u" before stopping to tell me of a prize she would share. "It's self-abuse. When he was a child, he used to abuse himself two or three times a day. I caught him at it on many an occasion and whipped him good. He had all manner of pornographic magazines too. That's what got him in this fix. It's stopped up his mind." I thank Mr. Lessmore's mother, slip a pornographic magazine into her purse, and send her on her way to organize an unsuspecting world.
Is this it? Did the maze of obsessive-compulsive magic that held the dark powers break? Could you have sustained such a superhuman effort over twenty-eight years without any suggestion of strain? Do you attempt to heal the breach by seeking the help of the old gods who held each moment of the day in their capable hands? What an agony you must have known with each second holding the infinite possibility that all the world would be unraveled. Now once again you can sleep, having summoned the very marrow of organized certainty to your side. Each blade of grass and the wind that touches it are part of an infinite pattern that unfolds exactly in its appointed place. I need this certainty too, Mr. Lessmore. I cannot reach you. I do not understand. We have given you our magic potions from the mistletoe, and now we watch for the rebirth of the boring, solid, perfectly rational Mr. Lessmore. This morning I went to the grove and sand the sun into its path across the sky. I sat beneath the great oak waiting for the touch of knowledge that would give you unto me, but only a clock came ticking to summon me from thought. I too am lost, Mr. Lessmore, and I bick you.
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Yesterday's Submarine
The water is calm. The world is all blue water as far as the eye can see. "Prepare to surface. Battle stations surface." I turn my hat back to front and clamp the periscope to my eye.
It has been a long war. We have only two torpedoes left, and no hot sauce for the beans. I am thinking of lovely Caroline Stiffwhomper, a tall blond with the brains of a train whislte. I also remember our brothers who sleep beneath the waves.
There is a knock at the door. It will be Mr. Sllystaller for his two o'clock session. I let the boat sink slowly beneath the waves and remove my captains hat. "It smells like salt water in here," says Mr. Sllystaller. He has been doing cocaine for five years since he found out it could make life momentarily interesting for him. He tests out at a 156 IQ on the WAIS and has his own investment firm.
"Did you know Freud did coke?" asks Mr. Sllystaller as he moves his chair out of a puddle of salt water. He proceeds to tell me many more things about Dr. Freud. "I don't treat Dr. Freud anymore, Mr. Sllystaller. Let's get back to you." "It is me," says Mr. Sllystaller. "Then can you tell me your real relationship with Dr. Jung and your latests concepts concerning the libido?" I ask, mind awhirl with possibility of new discovery.
"It is me because, like Freud, like everybody, all my behavior is determined by my past learning and genetic inheritance to which I am enslaved," says Mr. Sllystaller while telling Chief Warrant Officer Paulus to level the boat at sixty-nine feet. "It is not that I have no choice, it is that I have no freedom to have chosen those choices leading to the inevitability of the present choice in each becoming instant of time." The boat levels off at sixty-nine feet.
"It was inevitable that you would be addicted to cocaine?" I ask. "I am not addicted to cocaine," states Mr. Sllystaller, "I use cocaine. Yes, it was inevitable that I would use cocaine. It was inevitable that I would find the feeling of rushing joy worth the purchase price in terms of money and danger. It was inevitable that I would find the danger of purchase exhilarating. All this was inevitable, but I am not addicted," states Mr. Sllystaller while searching the horizon through the periscope for new victims.
"You are, in a sense, addicted to your past learning experiances and your genetic inheritance?" I say for no apparent reason. "You are, in a sense, playing word games," says Mr. Sllystaller as a new victim appears on the horizon. "We are, in a sense, playing word games," I state while ordering the crew to use a zig-zag course to avoid torpedos.
nnioR~ [ 08-01-2003: Message edited by: Time Dissected ]
