The Pranksters Chant: Chaos!

I’ve been told
that people in the army
do more by 7:00 am
than I do
in an entire day

but if I wake
at 6:59 am
and turn to you
to trace the outline of your lips
with mine
I will have done enough
and killed no one
in the process.

Today:  My eyes are watery like the bowels of a cave and old memoirs are seeping in through the stones.  There is a hidden side to love, yet it is hidden only to those who find themselves in it.  For all those out of love, it is blaringly vocal.  It is the hidden edge of the lake where the water drops off into a void and the moment you step off that edge  you lose yourself and fall, grasping and reaching into thin air for someone else’s hand.  But this void is so primal and so particular that there could never be another hand that enters it.  You will never come back.  Only your shadows will be reflected back to stand on the other side of the shore.

I think the only way I could have gotten here is luck. Luck drawn out of a bag of dice and rolling sixes on the first try. Whatever fortune may be, I was and I am fortunate. I am in luck. In the proverbial sense, not the literal one. The literal Luck (the one with the capital L) is a town in Polk County, Wisconsin. 881 farmers, wood carvers, and antique store enthusiasts wake up and find themselves in Luck every morning. But when September hunting season opens up and the wood carvers grab their guns off of their fireplace mantles and wander down the Gandy Dancer Trail, there is rarely a buck in sight. Fortune and favor rarely smile down on this rough and tumbly folk.

But I’m not in Wisconsin. I am here, in a Vietnamese long boat with the sails flying haywire because we didn’t know it was monsoon season. A week ago I was lying naked outside a monastery in Thailand.   Here, because of luck. It couldn’t have been very much work because I don’t think I have done any real work in years. It couldn’t have been God because I’m not sure what he/it/that/? looks like. It couldn’t have been fate, because fate died out with the Renaissance and was buried six feet under in the age of the postmodern. I marvel at my happenstance, sitting so utterly alone in a boat halfway around the world. What amazes me most isn’t the banana trees or the women in the rice fields. It isn’t the buildings, seven stories high speaking of French colonialism while their tenants sell pineapple and shoes in the street. It isn’t even the exchange rate of the U.S. dollar. I marvel at the house, and that I made it out alive.

You see, the house never wanted us there. It told us the night we moved in that we were less than welcome, like a pack of wolves in an Inuit village. The people, the ones of snow and ice we here the wolves calling out in the distance and would set their traditions in motion. Their hoods were lined with fur and their boots were covered in the carcasses of their trophies, marking their victory over nature and her enemy. Upon hearing the howl of a wolf, they would take a buck knife and dip it in blood. They would hold it out above the freezing waters until the blood steam ceased and the red water solidified around the knife. Then they would dip it again, back into the blood. Baptism after baptism, the knife would be thrust into the bucket and taken out until the blood froze all around it. The knife was then wrapped and tied with leather chords around a spear and stuck into the ground outside of the snow town.

At night, when the Inuits lowered the rugs over the doorways of their ice palaces, the wolves would come, started by the scent of the blood. They would find the frozen blood, and frenzied by the taste, would begin to lick at the knife. When the old caribou blood was gone, the knife began to slit away at their own tongues. The ravenous wolves barely noticed the sting and it wasn’t until morning that they would notice their own blood had left their veins. By noon, the pack would be dead, without the Inuit even lifting a frostbitten finger. The wolves would drive themselves mad, and then their death would be their own.

So, you see, it would have been a round about, artificial confession to blame the house alone. The house would have urged us to do it, but it would have turned up in the tabloids as suicide and no one would have been the wiser. And to be fair, it did warn us. The house was the one that told us to leave. The night we moved in, Sarah and I slept on a second floor when the doorbell rang. There was no one through the peephole. It rang again. And again and again and again as if a child on Halloween knew the parents were home. But there was no one. No neighbor to warn us one way or another. It was the house telling us to leave But we took no heed of a telltale symbol and woke the next morning and pushed our mysterious thoughts away.

We named it the Dasein.

This is not my story. It is the story that came from the fired synapsi in the brain of my dear roomate. One evening when we were sitting around the fireplace at the Manor, Cole asked us, “What if there was a bucket?” His question was realisitically much longer but I shortened it due to the inconvenience of quotation marks and proper formatting in block paragraph form. Not to mention, it would make the introduction to the story much longer than the story itself. The thoughts and details surrounding this mysterious bucket belong in originality to Cole Hanson; the philosophy belongs to G.W.F. Hegel.

This is not my story. It is the story of a little boy who found a mysterious pail and never properly calculated the consequences of placing things into a pail. It was a seemingly normal pail without any anomaly in appearances and was presumably used to carry vegetables or very small amounts of milk at one point in time. It had a silver rim laced with the tiniest traces of rust around the edges, and the handle made the distinct twang of metal scraping against metal whenever it moved. If you were to stumble upon the pail sitting next to any old wicker chair you may have never given it a second glance. Perhaps you may have kicked it over on your way to have a seat.

Perhaps something else. Perhaps you had a tiny piece of plastic crumpled up in your pocket from the mint you had that morning. The sharp edges poked through your sweater and by the time you had taken your seat in the wicker chair, you couldn’t stand the itch anymore and properly disposed of the plastic wrapper in the apparently common pail. Nothing would happen immediately, until you would go into the kitchen moments later and realize that the plastic wrap that had been covering your leftovers had disappeared. The thin plastic coating that used to line the inside of your Starbucks cup to keep it water resistant had slipped right of the cup and now your coffee had leaked through the paper and was sitting in a puddle on your kitchen counter. The vitamins kept in bottles above the microwave were now bottles of powder as the thin plastic casings had disappeared off of each pill. Even your contacts seemed to have gone somewhere else.

You see, the pail was not just a disposal for a simple piece of trash. That very particular plastic wrapper, similar to all plastic wrappers in form, was grounded in the content of time and space. It followed a history from a specific factory in Iowa where it was wrapped around a mint to a tray at the Denny’s, into your particular purse, and was then eaten and the wrapper was placed into your pocket before you threw it away at the exact time that you did. Trashcans should only destroy the content of a substance.  

This magical pail, however, destroys all forms of a substance thrown into it including all forms that have been and will be. In the hypothetical wrapper -trash situation that we are discussing, your momentary waste destroyed all forms of thin plastic since its invention by Swiss chemist Jacques Brandenberger in 1911.

But this isn’t your story either. It is the story of that little boy who found the pail one day on his way home from school and in an eruption of frustration, threw his math homework into a pail that was turned over on the side of the road. His backpack felt lighter. (He wouldn’t find out until later that his entire math text book had disappeared.) He had left three problems unanswered when he couldn’t find the values of the x’s on a triangle and basic trigonometry read like a foreign language to him. Finding the values of triangular angles seemed trivial and unimportant. After he threw his unfinished homework into the bucket, the angles of triangles became so unimportant that no one even remembered the formula a2+b2=c2 anymore. The roofs of houses appeared to be slightly flatter and more curved. No one spoke of “love triangles” but began to call them “love webs” instead. All triangular forms had disappeared from history. The boy used his basic deductive reasoning (which wasn’t highly mathematical and hadn’t been thrown into the bucket yet) to conclude that it must have been the pail and its magic. He retrieved it the next day.

The story continues. All sorts of things are thrown into the bucket and all sorts of scenarios are discussed. Originally, the boy feels no sort of guilt for the disposal of all the history of certain substances. He cannot predict the future because it is without time and a history. Therefore, he feels no guilt about ruining the future by removing scientific theories or the invention of cement. A hypothetical future has no prophets to judge it. Instead, the boy plays the part of a mad scientist and a judge, removing elements from history, looking back on it, and judging accordingly.

“Humans should have never invented Cheez Whiz,” he concluded after an experiment that left people in a slightly healthier state of being.

“Oops, turns out they were correct in inventing both floss and crop rotation.”

This is a story that hasn’t been written yet. It’s a story of a little boy and his responsibility when he finds a pail. Or, perhaps this story has been written; a story similar to this has already composed before but it was destroyed in a very real pail, kicked over by a little boy on the gutters of the road.

It was St. Louis, Missouri, down heart south, where the summer cicadas were louder than the Mississippi river.  The woods in the back grew thick and the air seemed to lay like a blanket over your shoulders that would pin you down like when you wake up paralyzed in the middle of the night and can’t move your head.   But it felt perfect. 

It was the summer after my second grade year.  Summer, so that my stories of standing in lines like little military guards and the incident with the spoiled cafeteria milk were irrelevant.  My heartbreak over Dmitri had waned and my love affair with Mrs. Goodman had subsided.  Instead, Ashley and I spent our afternoons exploring those blanket-heavy backwoods.

The woods held secrets.  If you followed the creek bed through the sewer and past the Big Log with the raccoon poop on it, over the TreasureBrush Cave, and through the Mud Pits of Doom, you would find our castles.  They were old slave homes.  Ashley and I saw for what they were: old whitewashed wooden shacks that dotted the wooded canyon.  We didn’t remark on the secret stories that passed through the homes, or the political scenarios that arose from Northwest Missouri, a stop on the train to Canada where the Civil War North soldiers put up camps, but Missouri still held onto its wooden washed shacks.  We didn’t comment on the social irony the pervaded the scene as these worndown huts lived in the woods behind the surbuban block housing, where housewives and househusbands would never know they existed.   We didn’t understand the irony then.

But we did understand that we had to cross the mud pits of doom if we were going to make it.  We had crossed them twice before, but that didn’t mean much.  The first time the pits were frozen, and the second time they took my red cowboy boots as an offereing.  I had taken two steps into the mud before the mud twisted its fingers around my ankles and started nabbing at the threading.  It tugged a little at the heel and I sank three inches.  I moved my left foot forward and it sunk further into the mud.  A quick start of panic and the mud stopped asking nicely and started using profanity until it had my bootstraps a foot under the earth and me scrambling to wiggle my toes free.   That second time made the castes worth going to.

The third time was worse.  The third time is always worse, whether its birthdays or heartbreaks or amusement parks.  The third time I came to the pits I had my laces tied tight on my black tennis shoes.  Tied so tight that the mudpit couldn’t ask nicely or couldn’t ask harshly but grabbed by ankles with violent audacity and pulled me down.  Down, ankle deep.  Down, knees battered bloody.  Down,  reckless hips writhed in the cold earth.  If I remember correctlym Ashley was crying.  I didn’t mind much.  I thought my mom would be angry, and I thought that it would be quite unfortunated to never get to sit in the bigger desk in the thir grade classrooms.  I was particularly irritated that Ross would probably get my room to himself and I never thought that was fair.  I was sad that I would never see Dmitiri again and get to tell him that I loved him even though he hit me with the ball at recess and never picked me for soccer and one time yelled at me and called me Veronica which isn’t my name.  While I was categorizing my emotions and  trying to make sure I was actually saved if I was staring a sinking mud death in the face.  But by then I was out.  I had pulled myself up on my elbows and wriggled my ankles out of my shoes and my stubby knees out of my pants.  Ashley had done the same.  We looked at each other. 

We ran stark naked back to the house. And everything was beautiful and nothing ever hurt.

Would you rather be an expert at everything you do the first time you do it, or have to work towards your expertise?

Stipulation: If you choose the former, every time you complete a task you get less and less capeable of performing it.  Case in point, the very first heart surgery you ever perform is flawless, as if you have been performing them for a decade.  However, the next one is a little less perfect.  By the fourth you start to lose faith in the nimbleness of your fingers and by the time you try and perform your 10th,  you have to stop because you are worried you may destroy your patient’s blood-pumping organ.

The longevity of your expertise takes as long to decay as it would to learn.  For example, if you choose the expertise option you can speak a foreign language fluently but only for the time it would take you to learn that language.  Say it would take 5 years of living in France to be completely fluent in a normal world.  In the World of Expertise, you would speak it perfectly at first but it would begin to decline over the next five years until you could no longer speak it above a very basic level.

Things to consider:

1) The amount of occupations you could explore.  You could write the Great American Novel before inventing a specific plastic that makes space suits so that humans can walk on Mars.  Then, you could be the best baker in the south of France for a summer.

But, if you could never find something you truly loved because you would be incapeable of sustaining it.  If you realized your true passion was farming you would know that you would have to leave it and move on in only a few years.

2) Parenting.  You would begin with as the best parent one could imagine, but over the years your relationships could become strained.  In the latter teen years, you would be at a loss for how to comfort your child.  But, at the same time, their early childhood could have impacted them in such a positive way that their teenage years breeze by smoothly and your relationship with them is stronger than ever.

It comes down to creativity.  I think if you could think of enough ways to sustain new ideas and activities, the World of Expertise would be a wonderful one full of adventure and exploration.  But movement would always be necessary.

I sat on the roof and teetered near the edge

Down

Down

Down

Three stories wood shingled rotting red

And rings unfurled from my lips

A burnt offering to the obscenities in City Lights and an ode to tragedies of Blake in a communist mind.

Disengage Neo Romance. Of Whitman and Thoreau.

In 46 Denver you met a man

Of Love of depression, sex-obsessed, of the Road.

And then they called you Beats (beaten down beatific beautiful beat of a different drum)

And your hero was arrested, tied up in white cloth,

Electro shocked,

To be fixed.

With all that you escaped West and South to see Burroughs and your Denver man

It left you with thoughts three weeks long

And a rough manuscript

Later, your beau drove a van with the Pranksters chanting

Chaos!

You made the Beatles turn on and turned the Haight, heroin-driven and rough-skirted,

But I blame the government.

You said-

Accept Loss Forever

Visionary tics shivering in the chest

Scribbled in secret notebooks and wild typewritten pages for whose joy?

Mine.

When I looked at your house with a pen in your hand and

The sea-soaked air and roasted espresso beans,

A story seeped through the cracks in the sidewalks

And I cried.