I’m not sure exactly how it works, but apparently there exists a mesh of hemp that is waterproof but see through. It is a window made of a plant. And if I were to talk about it on the corner of Mills and Colonial, someone might turn to me and say, “Yeah, man, that shit’s cray. I love this world.” And I’ll agree with them because, yes, it is “cray” and the world is most definitely capable of being loved.
But if I were to take a stroll around the Mall at Millenia, with all the little posh women with perfectly straightened bobs, they might scoff at me and say, “You can’t make a window out of a plant.”
And I would look her in the eye and say, “Well, glass is made of sand, so you’re kind of a cunt.”
But if she had a husband by her side, I’m sure he’d be around 6’2″ and I wouldn’t say that at all. I’d look at him and his bicep — fat with muscle and skin on which a poorly tattooed python sits — and I’d hang my head and say, “Yeah, you’re probably right. I should have taken my pills today.” And I’ll walk away after that.
Wonder is dead but alive. Wonder has his face wrapped in a towel. He pours a carafe of iced water over his head and thinks that he is choking, but he knows he can’t die from it. His throat gurgles a little frigid volcano and spits up water so cold that it numbs his esophagus. Wonder likes to play games. Wonder likes having his nipples electrocuted.
The artists aren’t artists any more, just collage-makers with access to rancid material. One guy, I’m sure, has painted a ballerina with rotten applesauce. There is nothing phenomenal about the ballerina. It’s an anatomical nightmare. That’s fine. But it lacks the quality of finesse. It lacks expression. What’s artistic about it? The fact that he used rotten applesauce to paint it. Just like a woman who paints an apple with menstrual blood or a man who hangs broccoli by a string and places a title card on the floor that reads “High Noon for Mother Nature.”
The applesauce ballerina is hanging in a gallery somewhere. She is suspended in an eternal diarrhea pirouette. The artist stands still, one sentient peg in the exhibit. He holds an impossibly tiny cup of coffee up to his chest with his right elbow propped on his left hand. His cheeks are pushed aside by a shallow smile.
A woman passes by. She thinks she’s pretty hip, so she nods her head and says — to her friend in the camouflage cardigan — “This is a delight for the eyes. The texture is incredible. It’s so crystalline I can barely stand to look at it. Breathtaking.” And the artist nods but doesn’t talk because when he opens his mouth it would betray his expressive intelligence. If he were to talk he wouldn’t know what to say, because all he really did was paint a bad painting with rotting applesauce.
But there’s a guy out there somewhere in the backwoods of blue collar America. He’s taken apart his son’s dirt bike which was just a dust-beach in the garage, so why not take it apart?
It takes him three days to weld the parts together into a shape like a human with it’s arms spread. He calls it “Man of Steel.” It sits in his garage and becomes a dust-beach again. His family sees it every once in a while and smiles.