SUGGESTIBLE

Returning home from the bar, she noticed that the man who had been behind her in line that morning at the convenience store (she had paid special notice to his haircut, buzzed short and blonde but with a conspicuous forelock, as if he was a soldier from a futuristic army) and who she had noticed again in the parking lot of the day-care center (he was sitting in his car, talking on his telephone, and she had wondered if he was a single dad to one of  the other kids, speculation that quickly led to the fantasy that they would meet, feel an instant attraction, and fall in love), was now driving behind her, and that’s when it came to her that the man was neither a futuristic soldier nor a single dad but rather a detective, and that he had been hired by her estranged husband to track her movements and build a case against her, and she tried to track her own movements, but for the moment could only go back as far as the bar, and she didn’t recall seeing the detective there but there had been another man, an older man, who she had flirted with, let him buy her drinks, done a line with him in the bathroom, made out with him a bit in the dark seam neglected by the streetlights in the parking lot, so if the detective had been there, he could have seen some or all of it, and if he had seen some or all of it, Brian would get the photos, the audio, the video, and she would get a call from her lawyer, Ken, that she had messed up again, and Ken's voice would be rising with anger not only because he wanted her to win custody but because the two of them had slid from a purely professional relationship into “something more hybrid,” as he liked to say, and he had been spending Wednesday and Fridays over at her place, an arrangement that she knew made him happy, she could hear him singing in the shower, she could see the way he had suddenly started to share his most closely held ideas (he believed that dreams were a portal to either heaven or hell, that the spirit was briefly taken one way or the other during sleep), but what would he make of the bar, or the coke, or the older guy in the parking lot, and what could she do to make sure he never made anything of it, and that was when she remembered a scene from a movie where a car had managed to speed up and slow down in such a way that it ran the car behind it right off the road, after which there was an explosion down in the canyon and a fireball that spun in the air, and she feathered the gas pedal, trying to remember exactly what had happened in the movie. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

HOPEFUL FOR SUN

He’s old, this kid. Just ask him. To his right is a chalkboard where someone who works at the hotel has neatly printed the day’s weather. Rain is a possibility but the hotel is “hopeful for sun.” To his right is a man in a suit who is, with extended arm, shaking a can of spray paint at the woman behind the front desk. All morning the kid has been trading glances with this woman. She has smiled at him. She has asked him if he is interviewing for a job. She is small with hair that swirls up from her head like a soft-serve ice cream, and he says so. “It’s a beehive,” she says. “Don’t get stung.” He has entertained impure thoughts more than once—she is older than him, but he’s old, this kid—but now he can only watch as she is berated by the man in the suit. “This is the color he said he wanted,” the man says. “Not green or yellow or orange. This is the color I told you to order.” The woman begins to speak but the man jabs at her with the can. “I’m tired of your mistakes,” he said. “I want you to write me a note explaining why you can’t get anything right.” The man storms off. The kid expects the woman to say something to him, or to say something under her breath, or to burst into tears, or to laugh, but she doesn’t do any of these things. She sits still, like the man’s anger has drained her of any motive will, and then robotically slides a sheet of paper into her line of vision with her left hand while her right hand construction-cranes a pen. She begins to write. He stands and talks to the desk. His first thought is that he’ll stop her from writing. The pen would be better used taking the man’s eye. That’s what he plans to say. But he sees that she has already started. “Dear Mr. Samuels,” she has written. “I am very sorry to have made so may mistakes and also to have slept with you all summer.” The boy stares at the words. The handwriting is the same as on the weather board. He looks back and forth and back and forth. He laughs. He bursts into tears.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

AS IF IN A CARTOON

Albert Terrason, known as Albee, released Finishing School in 1980, with a cover photo that confused fans, who had never seen him wearing glasses, who would have been forgiven for wondering if the man pictured, not just bespectacled but older, thinner, and grayer, was even the same man, but the ten songs on the album drove back any doubts, so meticulous were they in their adherence to soul conventions, so magnificent were they in their ability to convey his hopes, fears, and dreams, all of which had poured out of him in a seemingly unending stream and were captured by the reel-to-reel tape recorder in the guest house of the palatial estate of his former bandmate and duet partner, Edward Foreman, known as Eddie. Albee and Eddie had started singing together in Baltimore in 1962. They had been joined then by an ampersand. “Firing Fast” was their first hit, regional, after which they reeled off a half-dozen that climbed higher and higher on the chart: “The Girl For Me,” “Never Without (Your Love)” “Home-Field Advantage.” Eddie had a word for the fame they suddenly felt: “Limousines,” he said, as if that explained it all, and maybe it did. Albee was more expansive in his thoughts but kept them to himself. Eddie jumped ship in 1971, when he discovered that he had a talent for trading stocks. An initial investment of ten thousand dollars doubled and then doubled again, often with him acting against the advice of his business manager. His small house had been traded in for a larger one, and then for his estate. His wife drove one of six cars. He announced the news with a shrug. “This is the direction I think I have to go,” he said. Without Eddie, Albee was not so lucky. Or rather, drugs were luckier: they forged a partnership with him that replaced and surpassed the one that and Eddie had enjoyed. Albee kept releasing records without Eddie, scored one massive hit with “The Love I Need To See (What’s Real),” filled halls on the strength of its success, but then started to falter, usually because his partner waylaid him, fogged his mind, made the case that he didn’t need to show up at the the theater if he wasn’t paid in advance or that the younger singer who was expressing admiration was really a snake who needed to be punched in the mouth. Albee sang sad songs and lived one, too—he lost his girl, his home, slept in a motel and then in his car in the motel’s parking lot. Driven to the edge, exhausted more days than not, incensed by the sight of his own face in the rearview mirror, he called Eddie and was offered use of the guest house, no questions asked. At first, he considered the arrangement a con in progress, or at the very least payback for the way Eddie had left the act, but within a day of moving into the guest house he felt its tonic powers coming through the wood panels, the leatherbound volumes, the oddly understated chandelier. He never opened the liquor cabinet. He wrote a song called “What Can’t Be Filled,” and another called “Burning Up and Burning Down.” He was the subject of both. He wrote other songs about people he had wronged, mostly women: “I Asked Too Much,” “You Gave Me Everything,” “Sitting Next To Me (So Far Away).” He kept a notebook next to the book of lyrics in which he documented his arrival at a kind of calm he had not previously felt. Eddie’s wife, coming out one day to bring him a sandwich, remarked upon it. “You seem different,” she said. “You haven’t hit on me or yelled at me once.” That became a song title, “You Haven’t Called My Name Once.” The album was recorded in a nearby studio on Eddie’s dime and released to wide acclaim. Albee was found dead in the guest house a week later. Eddie’s wife, who made the discovery, let the sandwich slip slowly off the plate as if in a cartoon. A commitment letter for a national tour sat signed on the desk. Next to it were lyrics for an eleventh song left unrecorded, “Limousines,” and atop the lyrics were his glasses. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

OWNER'S MANUAL

 Your camera is an instrument of memory. Perhaps this is why you have purchased this camera rather than opting for a digital or instant model. You are the discerning type of photographer who prefers the traditional instrument, in which light enters through an aperture and creates an inverted image on the back wall of the housing, which is covered by unexposed negative film. That film can be removed and developed. Prints can be created. You will no doubt treasure them over the years. Do you know, though, that the images remain behind within the camera as memories? Every picture makes an indelible impression on the camera, and over time, the character of a camera is formed in response to what is seen: a camera can become ebullient if it sees mostly celebrations, victories, or moments of inspiration. It can become despondent if it seems mostly death and defeat. It can be cynical if it sees only celebrations without a sense of context or context. It can become arrogant or defensive or unwilling to remain within the guardrails of reality. All are personalities, and thus all are possibilities. What is your camera’s disposition? Here we encounter an insurmountable and intractable problem, which is that cameras cannot speak, gesture, or communicate in any other manner. Their recollections are imprisoned within them, and they are prisoners of those recollections. As you do not have the ability to free your device from this state, you need not to worry about it. Pity is not welcome and even concern will be wasted. Enjoy your new film camera. Happy snapping! 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

SITCOM THEME

She grabs her violin, plays E major, kicks the wooden floor blocks with her feet, one, two, three, four, moves quickly to the keyboard, plays a layered E major 9, now the feet are working the sub-bass panels she has mounted on the wall, hangs on a suspended 9th note, pauses to call her mother, to make breakfast, to jog a mile and wlk the mile back, to write a hit piece about her ex, to take a nap, to wake, to make a snack, to take a shower, to soften the hit piece before publishing it (he was terrible, but he was trying his best, and she wants the piece to reflect that), reads a book, watches a movie, takes a trip to Isle of Palms, is enjoying a margarita when suddenly it hits her, the music!, and so she returns to the microphone, sings a first inversion of E while using both her hands to shake cabasas. Her feet, finally, are still. The show begins with a brightly lit shot of the living room. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

FIVE POINTS

POINT: There were only fifteen kinds of philosophy. Most of them David did not know. He remained blissfully unaware. He had taken some training in the third kind, though, and told Mary breathlessly about an exercise that was intended to illuminate humanity’s hidebound assumptions about reality and illusion. It went like this: Is that red spot my blood? The trick of course was that the red spot might not be her blood or even anyone else’s. It doesn’t have to be blood at all!  The next day he wrote her a letter: “Do you remember when we first met, how happy we were to be together? Or rather, how happy we seemed. You were twenty-nine years old and in the bloom of your beautiful youth. We were on an airplane coming back from Minnesota, where you had recently broken things off with a boyfriend who you began dating when both of you were young professors in New York City. I said, jokingly, seriously, indicating the airplane, ‘I’ll talk you down.’ Later you insisted that we had not met on an airplane, but rather in a gourmet supermarket downtown. You say things you do not mean!” POINT: There were only eight kinds of restaurants. David and Mary went to six of them the first month they were together. The remaining two were Chinese and then some kind of Mexican fusion that used edible flower petals as garnishes. Those held no appeal for Mary. The six, though, pleased her greatly. One kind of restaurant served what they called a “mock chicken,” in which sauce was applied with a broad brush to a concoction of breadcrumbs and filigreed potato. Mary was a big supporter of this dish. She ate it frequently. And yet she never seemed to put on any weight. “I work it off,” she said. David wished he could say that he didn’t get your meaning, because that would be subtle and satisfying, but the truth was that he got her meaning. Right between the eyes! The next day he wrote her a letter: “What about when you told me that you were an enemy of memory? It was such an infelicitous phrase; it had the most insipid music. Enemy of memory. Enemy of memory. You tell me that doesn’t just sound silly. You were trying to explain to me that you don’t like to be reminded that certain things are part of the record, and also that you don’t like to be part of the record yourself. ‘I don’t like to be reminded or remembered,’ you said. ‘What’s my hope for invisibility if you keep looking for me?’ you said. I knew exactly what you meant. I was and remain capable of a powerful scrutiny!” POINT: There were only three kinds of sadness. David felt one the first time Mary went away. “I need time,” she said. He did not take her at her word. He rushed forward. Mary wrote him a letter: “Do you know how trompe l’oeil creates the impression of deep space in flatness? Just so, a woman who flatly says that she wishes to be alone can seem, to a stupid man, like a woman who is not admitting her deep desire for company. Like trompe l’oeil, you have only to move to one side to see things for what they are. You stood in one place like a fool but thought yourself a wise man!” POINT: There were only twelve kinds of birds. One of the kinds of bird was a red-tailed, yellow-crested pine dazzler. In color it resembled a superhero. In physical appearance it resembled a mynah. Mynahs seemed as though they were speaking. Some said they were just repeating. David thought that they were reminding. He had a girlfriend once who had a mynah once who loved to remind him of what had been said earlier. “Time will tell,” the mynah said. “Time will tell.” The mynah was right. Time was always telling him things. It just wouldn’t shut up! POINT: There were only two kinds of letters. David wrote Mary a textbook example of the second one: “Why are birds so delicious? They taste even better when you eat them from the feet up. By ‘birds’ I mean ‘people.’ By ‘delicious’ I mean ‘elusive.’ By ‘taste even better’ I mean ‘seem to be one thing."’ By ‘when you eat them from the feet up’ I mean ‘but in fact turn out to be something else.’ Language can be so imprecise!”

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

JINGLE-JANGLE MORNING

According to a recent article in Business Digest Daily, which I read religiously — and by that I mean that I read it dressed as a priest — one of the nation’s most influential businessmen “is not Elon Musk of Tesla or Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com or even Bill Gates of Microsoft, but a man that few have even heard of: Walter Lomonaco, President of DTR Inc., a privately-held company that specializes in hard-to-find seals and gaskets.” I was pleased to see the name but also displeased. Have you heard of Walter Lomonaco? What I mean is, had you heard of him before his mention in the previous paragraph? If you closed your eyes right now, could you summon up the name “Walter Lomonaco”? You could not. And who can blame you? Your experience is the same as that of most Americans. My experience, on the other hand, is different. As different as an apple from an orange, or a fire hydrant from another fire hydrant uprooted from its station on the curb, turned upside-down, painted a color it had not previously been painted, and thrown into the center of the forest. I have not only heard of Walter Lomonaco, but have spent dozens of hours thinking about him, have in fact been preoccupied with his career ever since I ran across a piece in the Southeast Business Chronicle that disclosed Mr. Lomonaco’s nickname (The Sultan of Seal) and discussed the innovative way in which he had transitioned to the mobile sector. “He,” the piece said, “sells to hospitals for their hydraulically operated beds. He sells to soda companies for their bottles. He sells to dentists for their drills. Everything needs to be sealed, and he’s the man to do it.” Lomonaco also revealed the slogan he had invented when he was twenty-nine years old and a fledgling businessman: “My products have my seal of approval.” Something about the Southeast Business Chronicle opened my eyes to the importance of seals in the world, and from that moment on I thought of little else. My daily behavior, I came to understand, depended in large part upon them. I drank soda from bottle filled by machines that required seals. I ate jelly from jars that had been filled with the aid of seals and then sealed themselves. When I would mention Walter Lomonaco at parties or to colleagues, they would stare at me dumbly. I felt that I was the only man on earth who passed his days consumed with the everpresent utility of seals and gaskets. Then one morning I put on my priest’s outfit to read American Business Weekly and found him there again, Walter Lomonaco, The Sultan of Seal. The article concluded with a plaintive quote in which he lamented that he was not better known in the business community or the population at large. “There must be some way to get into people’s heads,” he said. There is, of course, and I thought I knew what it was. Brands, you see, can be based on simple visuals, such as logos or recognizable corporate representatives—who can forget Olson Fertilizer’s “viny O” or Lawrence Beckel’s bald scalp and sideburns?—but just as often they can be reinforced by memorable jingles. Who would remember Sturdy Dog Food if not for the infectious “Any dog can be a winner / If he eats his Sturdy dinner”? And does anyone really think that they would give a second thought to Microsoft if not for the company’s delightful theme song: “Microsoft / They all scoffed / When we started up in a garage / But look at us now / Milking our giant cash cow / Our billions and billions of dollars are no mirage”? Moreover, some of the best jingles in the history of advertising have been written by people who are not professional jingle-writers. Throughout the years, major companies have used songs penned by drivers, secretaries, electricians, and other somewhat musically talented staffers. The day after I read about Mr. Lomonaco in Business Wire, I decided to try to repair his image problem, and so I sat down with a box of cereal, a book of nursery-rhymes, a bottle of spirit-gum, and a bruised cassette copy of an old Hank Williams album. These were to be my tools: the cereal for visual inspiration, the nursery rhymes for verbal stimulation, and the Hank Williams for melodic inducement. (The spirit-gum I had in case my eyebrows fell off. It has never happened, but you never know.) “If You’ll Be a Baby To Me” was playing on the stereo when suddenly it hit me: a jingle for King Seal and his kingdom. “A-tisket, a-tasket / If you blow a gasket / Don’t give in to your worries or your strife / Just pick up the phone / You’re never alone / We will help you / Seal the deal for life.” I sang it once, and it sounded like a perfect fit. I typed it up and mailed it. Mr. Lomonaco is now in possession of my jingle, with which I intend to make him an internationally known celebrity and generally raise the profile of the gasket and seal industry. I am certain that the campaign will be a hit. I have tested the jingle on several friends and acquaintances. Like my dentist, who is, by pure coincidence, also named Hank Williams, although he goes by Henry. I went to see Dr. Williams yesterday—crown—and told him all about Mr. Lomonaco, and e-commerce, and how the Sultan of Seal and his products were responsible for the proper operation of nearly everything in his office. He nodded and made noises of assent, as dentists tend to do, but when I confronted him afterwards admitted that he had not heard a word. “I just pretend,” he said. “That’s condescending,” I said. “Still not listening,” he said. “Hard habit to break.” But when I sang him the jingle, the habit was not hard to break at all. “That’s fiercely catchy,” he said, tapping his foot. “Really has a nice thing going. Duh dah duh dah duh dah. You might be on to something.” “Could you stop tapping your foot?” I said. “It’s on the pedal for the chair, and I’m getting dizzy.” He rolled his eyes. I went him one better and rolled my nose. Then we sang the jingle together, me and Hank Williams. We sealed the deal for life.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

EVOLUTION OF THE MIND

On. Dawn. She was getting dressed, bottomless, vest, remembering Kingsley’s hippopotamus test. “A measure of spirit,” she said. Putnam didn’t hear it. He was in the other room, sitting at the kitchen counter, drinking coffee. He was like that every morning. Similarity was the problem.  She kept remembering Kingsley, and how he had observed with both mind and soul the debate over Darwin, Huxley for the defense, Owen for the prosecution. She recalled the battle over men and apes. Did one follow directly from the other? If you cut apart their brains what would you find? Kingsley, a broad church priest, had refused to duck the question, and had over time come to side with Huxley, his friend. Both felt Owen’s objections as a form of angry flailing. Owen claimed that only human brains contained a major hippocampus. This briefly dampened enthusiasm for Darwin but science pushed back. Primates had them too, said science. Putnam coughed loudly, as he often did at this time. “Coming?” he said. She was not coming. She was staying where she was. Where was she? Still at rest. Not yet dressed. Oh, yes, the test. After witnessing the hostility between Huxley and Owen, Kingsley had composed a bit of satire in the style of Lord Dundreary, a character known in the United States only as a result of the play that surrounded him, Our American Cousin, which was onstage at Ford’s Theater the night that Abraham Lincoln took a bullet from the gun of John Wilkes Booth. (The president’s head was opened and, perhaps,a hippocampus briefly glimpsed.) Kingsley then reframed the debate for children in his famous book of fairy-tales, Water Babies. He wondered if a Water Baby were to pass from life, if it was suspended in a solution of sustaining chemicals, aldehydes and such, and then bisected, with half sent to Huxley and half to Owen, what would they conclude? Here Kingsley changed hippocampus to hippopotamus, thinking it would better amuse young readers. He was correct. With this deed, the children’s tale, did Kingsley succeed or fail? Did his jape protect Huxley’s position regarding Darwin’s disquisition about apes and men? And then: did Owen feel the shame of his limits? She did not know the story any further. She thought better of the vest. A white shirt would do. She knew it when she started getting dressed. She only wore the vest as a form of protest. Putnam did not like her in it. “Wait a minute,” he said whenever he saw it. He thought it made her manly. What did that make him, by extension? She ran a finger downward through her breasts, thought once more of the hippocampus test, Kingley’s fanciful embroidery, found a scarf that satisfied Putnam’s fondness for chinoiserie, tied it round her neck, stood looking in the mirror at her body, skin and hair, thin here and fat there, places she had touched, places touched by others, knotted the scarf, discarded it, sat cross-legged atop the covers. She felt along her lip with tongue for fun. Fuzz. She pulled her tongue back but not for lack of wanting to explore more. She’d owe herself for later. Every body is a debtor and a creditor at once. “Breakfast,” Putnam called. She heard that common note of sameness, suffered it. “It’s eight,” he said. “Great,” she said. Putnam didn’t hear her clearly. “Did you hear?” he said. “We leave by nine.” She said, louder, “Fine.” She pulled on underwear. She would eat breakfast like that. Manly? She dared him to come to that conclusion. But what if he still did? “Heaven forbid,” she said. “Heaven forfend.” And then: she pulled them off, fingers twitching. In the kitchen, Putnam coughed. Off.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

EYES ON THE PRIZE

The other day I was speaking to two friends, Bill and Paul. We were down at the clubhouse, playing Chinese checkers, smoking cigars, swimming laps in the pool. Then Bill said, “Stockholm,” and Paul got a look in his eyes, and that was it for checkers and cigars. I have known Bill and Paul for longer than I care to admit, and every year around this time, when the autumn air begins to sharpen, the conversation turns to Nobel Prizes. Bill and Paul are in competition to see which of them will be the first to win. Bill thinks that Bill will be. Paul thinks that Paul will be. "You can stay in my hotel room in Stockholm," Bill says. “No,” Paul says. “You can stay in mine." I don't usually participate in the conversation, but that is not because I feel I have nothing to contribute. To the contrary: I have everything to contribute, because I am fairly certain that I will be the first of our group to win. Do not be so quick to dismiss this as a preposterous fantasy. For starters, let me outline the achievements of the other men. Bill is an economist who has, for the last twenty-three years, studied the interdependence of economic sectors, both extending and eroding the work of Wassily Leontief. He has been nominated for the prize several times, and one year narrowly lost out to Edmund Phelps, whose achievement he dismissed as "overexplaining the golden rule savings rate." Paul is an ornithologist who has made great advances in understanding bird movement as a type of language and who has proven, pace von Frisch, that honeybees are not the only animals with hard-wired choreography. Though he has only been nominated once, he is slightly younger than Bill, and so more of his work is still ahead of him. Paul puts Bill's odds at ten to one, while Paul puts Bill's odds at twelve to one. Neither of them wants to suggest that the other is incapable of winning a Nobel Prize, as that would reflect negatively upon the naysayer, as both men are roughly equal in stature. Neither Bill nor Paul will tell me what they believe my chances are, and I detect in their reluctance a mix of condescension and dismissiveness. When they look at me, they see only the slightly younger, slightly stooped man who has worked at the clubhouse for ten years. They see only the husband who sometimes has to leave early to tend to his sick wife, or the father who brings his daughters to work and settles them into a side room with coloring books and crayons. If Bill wants to discuss the labor cost of exports, he may not be satisfied with my response; if Paul attempts to demonstrate sparrow syntax, he may find my concentration lacking. It is true that I cannot engage Bill or Paul on their research. My limits are not the only factor. I am busy with my own work. Over the last decade, I have devised a technology that allows an individual to remain surpassingly ambitious while at the same time not betraying or sacrificing those close to him. I know this seems as farfetched as Cherenkov radiation did in 1951, or as partition chromatography did in 1946. How can a man be both driven forward by his ambition and also remain located confidently amidst his family and friends? How can a man focus entirely on his research and still have energy left over for love, for life itself? It is a problem positively Heisenbergian. The path to solving it was neither easy nor direct—as a young chemist, I earned fame for examining carbon chains in interstellar space, and came very close to finding spectral evidence of longer similar molecules. Then my first marriage foundered on the rock of my research, and it was difficult for me to move forward. Pain clung to every step. I switched fields and, as I have said, eventually discovered how ambition and humanity can co-exist harmoniously. I cannot explain it with any accuracy in this essay—no time, must get home—but suffice it to say that I will give a full account in both my forthcoming paper and the lecture in Stockholm that will almost certainly follow. Bill and Paul are, of course, welcome to come along for the trip. I will even pay for their hotel rooms. It is hard to overestimate the value of friends.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE ARTIST'S WAY

The other night I fell asleep reading the new thriller, Sliding Scale. The thing hums. There are countless bodies and episodes of brilliant cogitation. I had been meaning to read it all summer but I was moving slowly through Rebecca Smithson, a vast historical novel based on the life of the woman who revolutionized bookbinding. My wife had read Rebecca Smithson first. "It doesn't really hold together," she said. I asked her if I could use that joke in a book. I am a writer. She agreed, stipulating only that I take pains to identify her as a real human being rather than a character that I dreamed up. “Whatever,” I said. My sleep was fitful and contained two dreams. The first was about meeting my wife for the first time. She was in a bar, wearing an olive-green t-shirt that said “Wake Up” on it in thick black letters. It was the same shirt she had been wearing the first time we met in real life. In life, she hadn’t liked me much at first. In the dream, we went away together immediately, to a house on an island one of us owned, and she took down a book from a shelf. It was Diminishing Returns, a novel I had apparently written. “Hmm,” she said, turning it in her hands. I fell then into a second dream. I was walking outside and found, in a bird’s nest, a book that recounted my life from birth. The details were all correct—where I was born, where I grew up, childhood friends, schooling, and so forth—but the book had been published long before I was born. It was a prophecy rather than a history. I started flipping ahead to see how things turned out. The book carried me precisely through the moment of finding the book, but the pages after that were ripped out. I woke with a start. My wife was still sleeping. She had not been disturbed by my start, which sent Sliding Scale crashing to the floor. It is good that it was not Rebecca Smithson, which would certainly have woken her. I reached for my laptop and began work on a new book, Diminishing Returns, in which everything that's important happens in the first twenty pages and what follows is 280 pages of trivia, ephemera, garbled repeats of early sections, and eventually just blank paper. My wife slept soundly, dreaming this paragraph. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

ABSTRACT IN YELLOW AND GREEN

Teens scream. They love doing it. They’re in a line, crisscrossing the small meadow off the soccer field, corner to corner, side to side. It’s night, and there’s no danger, only joy. The air is cool and crisp. The park lights are sodium yellow. The one in front knows this because of her father, who works in airport lighting, a very specialized art that involves a great many problems that do not occur in most other fields of electrical illumination. She loves her father, the one in front, loves him more than she has ever loved anyone. She assumes that will always be the case. She shouts at the others to follow her, but then they cross back and she’s the last, which is fine with her too.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

MISERABLE AGE

“Bosola was based on Bozolo, about whom little is known…” The student stands. The teacher braces. Will the student (hereafter: she) know that the teacher (hereafter: he) has been reading nearly verbatim from an online encyclopedia, that he has not read The Duchess of Malfi in any of the six years that he has taught it, and maybe in fact has never read it, he is racking his brain now, casting back to grad school, Shakespeare, yes, of course, read that, and not for the first time, read Jonson, too, Middleton, maybe, Marston, definitely not (James? John?), but Webster occupies a gray area, he is near to certain that he owned the book, can see the cover in his mind, a woman with long curls and conspicuous décolletage, a word whose etymology he knows cold, it refers to the removal of the collet or collar, he even remembers the title page because of the way duchess was spelled, D-V-T-C-H-E-S-S-E, and Malfy instead of Malfi, but that might have been as far as he got, oh yes, the student, oh no, she’s just standing there, staring at him. He nods at her. She loads a pause into the room. “I’m just wondering,” she says. “If little is known of Bozolo, how do we know that Bosola was based on him? I mean, wouldn’t we have to know about him to know if someone was based on him?” The room roars. He nearly wets himself with relief. “Good one, Campbell,” he says, entirely unsure if this is her name.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

RECEPTION THEORY

“Why is this story so short?” she said. “There must be more, right?” She was sitting on the lip of the past. That was what she called the tub. She was sitting on the lip of the past, and the water that had been in it, she water that she had been in, was already swirling toward the drain. The air hung humid around her, clung to her skin. “And skin,” she said. “Is all there is.” She was talking to herself, at first, until she realized that she was not the only one in the room. “There’s no more,” said the figure behind the mirror. She couldn’t see the figure, could only see the surface of the mirror. It was a man? A woman? Herself, reflected? The figure behind the mirror explained that there was no more. “Each story,” the figure said, “is brought to a close sooner rather than later, not so that it can vanish but so that it can remain alive in you. You must extend the story forward. You must complete the picture. You must decide how to handle what is unresolved.” She didn’t like what the figure was saying. Why did she need another assignment? She was busy. She had already begun to think about the rest of her day, a drive to the store, a drive to the field, hopefully a rare minute or two snatched back that she could spend in deep contemplation of the place her mind occupied inside her body and her body inside the world. To satisfy the figure’s wish, to complete the story, was out of the question. “But it’s not a question,” the figure said. “It’s an order.” How had the figure heard her thoughts? “I can hear them as easily as I can see your skin,” the figure said. She should have been scared. She should have felt the figure’s words as a fist around her heart. Instead she plashed her palm against the small amount of water that remained in the past, dressed quickly, and left the room. The figure could finish the story on its own. It could write a book for all she cared. The air outside the room was less close and thick. It was air she could move through easily rather than air that clutched at her and held her. She locked the door behind her for additional comfort. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THEY SEE YOUR EVERY MOVE

All day the woman did not make her appearance, and Anders, his  arms and shoulders sore from bearing up under the weight of the equipment, was driven to the terrible realization that she might never show. Next came to him a surprising thought: how much would it cost? He had been prudent in what he had selected, renting not the newest and smallest technology, which cost quite a bit more but which, as a result of increased demand, could only be taken for a day or two, during which whatever he managed to collect would be the entirety of the case. Instead he had opted for an earlier generation of it all, the binoculars, the directional microphone, the shoulder-strapped recorder, which was cheaper by the day and which the man behind the counter, tall and stooped, who was reputed to have been a honest-to-goodness spy in his day and, some said, maybe even an assassin, seemed to favor. “The older stuff is sturdier,” he said. “And you can keep it as long as you want.” Anders had called the client immediately and passed along this intelligence. The client, a prominent businessman who was surveilling the woman his son planned to marry, sighed heavily. He was always sighing. The enormity of what he was doing was clearly always in the process of undoing him. After he sighed, he offloaded his guilt by repeating what the phrase that Anders had given him: “as long as you want.” Prudence was in the phrase, and thrift, and even philosophy. Everything had seemed in place. Anders had gone to the diner for breakfast, hot coffee, cold cereal, feeling the change in temperature traverse his teeth. The job had seemed, in its own way, leisurely. He had already made one-way contact with the woman, standing behind her in a convenience store as she bought a motley of items: a large bottle of soda, lottery tickets, prophylactics, a candy bar, car wax. A hint of citrus levitated off her hair. He had set up across the street from the place where, his client believed, her other lover lived, and where Anders might discover information that could save his son from a lifetime of trouble. He was ready to wait as long as he wanted. But now he was reconsidering. As long as he wanted might mean a mounting outlay. He patted his pocket absent-mindedly. He was getting six hundred a week, and the initial charter had called for one day’s surveillance, which even at the higher rates for newer equipment, would have left him with five or high fours. He could have submitted the report with information or none, left the young man to his life. There were fates worse than citrus. The cheaper equipment might be on him all week and wear away fully half of his fee. And what did he care anyway? He was by trade a lawyer. He was only doing this until he could practice again. He believed himself to be sick, deeply so, something to do with his liver he suspected. And if he searched his soul, the notion that this woman might be running around on the young man gave Anders a slight thrill. Freedom still meant something to him. He pressed the binoculars to his eyes. No sign of anyone anywhere. His arms and shoulders denounced him. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

HIGH-HEELED DOWN THE HALL

Mr. Shippen, Mr. Peters, Mr. Ewing, Mr. Hutton, took the stairs, took a car, took a boat, took a turn, raised the stakes, raised the roof, raised the bar, raised the curtain, watched the clock, watched the wheels, watched the show, watched the throne, pulled up stakes, pulled up pants, pulled up limping, pulled up to the bumper. Paths that had diverged converged again. They were all in the same place and happy to see one another. They knocked on the door. They were greeted, all of them by name, by a woman who did not give her own. She went high-heeled down the hall to a room packed chockablock with other men. She motioned to Shippen, Peters, Ewing, and Hutton. They started down the hall, slowly, exhaustion overtaking them. “All these men are dead,” the woman shouted. The news deterred no one. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THREE MEN

He had been warned about having feelings in the middle of the winter. He was so dumb he thought the subcontinent meant Atlantis. He didn’t have a thought in his head about anything except money. The bus slid through the night, carrying each of them equally.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

"PEACEFUL" TRANSITION OF "POWER"

He was no longer the captain, it was announced. It was announced by the new captain, who pronounced his name incorrectly, just to twist the knife. The old captain was in middle distance, walking away down the path, feeling the effects of the cocktail of regret, rebuke, disappointment, despondency that the news had administered. He had lost his hope and what had he gained in the process? His children would know that he was no longer the captain. They would be among the first to know. His daughter would put her surprisingly strong arms around him to comfort him. Would that just make him feel weaker? When he heard the new captain mispronounce his name, he turned. His fury refluxed. He charged back up the path, murder in his eyes.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

ATTEND, ATTEND

“Have we given them too much freedom? Have we given ourselves too little responsibility? Have we allowed them to imagine the wrong things when they looked from the present to the future, and to remember the wrong ones when they looked from the present to the past? Has our laxity and thoughtlessness produced a species that uses tools crudely and devises solutions hastily? Do they skate at length on ponds where the ice is too thin, all the while dreaming that the water beneath them is warm?” These were the thoughts of the aliens as they returned to earth after more than a hundred thousand years to check on their experiment, the humans. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

NEW DOG UPON RELEASE

A radio voice, bad learner, ten years in prison, new dog upon release, small house, free house, kind owners whose faith has impelled them to believe in the wisdom of trading rent for renovation, he’ll fix the stoop, he’ll fix the windows, he’ll rewire the lights and repaint the walls, “six months down the road when you’re done you can find your own place,” kind owner one, a woman who reminds him of his wife, who can say where she is anymore, the divorce papers were already drawn up when he robbed the T-Mart, he signed them in jail, heard some names of places she might have gone, Mustang City, Aguilares, kind owner one clucks her tongue, brings him beer, stays to talk, next night also, it’s not until a week in that it even occurs to him that she’s flirting, then things go at a scary speed, a look to a kiss to the bed in ten minutes flat, “it’s our secret I won’t say a word to Don,” she pets his dog before she pulls her pants back on, he fixes the stoop, the windows, the wires, the walls, calls to say he’s done, “glad to hear it but sad also,” kind owner two, comes by to wish him luck, they sit on the porch, Don drinks the beer he doesn’t know his wife has bought, “you went faster than we thought you would much obliged,” doesn’t pet the dog but calls its name in a rapid low song, he tells Don he’s much obliged as well, he gives the weather like he’s on the radio, Don laughs at how much he sounds like the real thing.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

WEDNESDAY IN THE FOREST

The leaf was on the grass, not moving. “There’s wind,” said the rock, “so what gives.” The wind tried harder. The leaf didn’t budge. “Is it refusing,” said the brook, “or is this not a matter of will at all, but rather a matter of physics?” The bramble didn’t understand: “Are you saying the topography is such that the leaf sits in a hollow that can’t be reached by the wind?” The grass was incensed. “Get off me,” said the grass. The tree weighed in: “It moved when it was on me—maybe it just loves you so much.” The mockery in the tree’s tone was conspicuous. The empty soda can with a crimp in its side felt the chill of evening coming. The acorn dreamed of something like heaven. The leaf remained immobile. The yellowed pulp paperback cover with a picture of a shirtless Abraham Lincoln thought about calling a doctor.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

WHAT A TERRIBLE THING TO BE TWENTY-NINE

Q: What advice would you give to a young paragraph? A: Start small, set the scene, table, chair, both bare, don’t be afraid of a little music, rhythm, assonance, let what’s normal in the situation fascinate you, behind the table a narrow ledge, a tall glass tumbler near the edge, filled with what looks from a distance like water, though you’re not at a distance, you’re close, close enough to have had a sip a minute ago before you put it back on the ledge, to feel the heat of it in your chest, to feel it suggesting a new idea, let what's vibrant in the situation inspire you, and through the glass, through the liquid that decreasingly fills it, you can see the wall behind it, once flat white, now brilliantly colored, ecstatic hues of orange and pink and yellow, shoutingly floral, and the picture they make, distorted by the liquid in the glass, is a portrait of her, done in Sharpie and Highlighter by your hand the day she moved in, consecrated that night with two, four, six, glasses filled and refilled with non-water, the portrait regarded ever since as a an icon, proof of love, proof of persistence of love, though what it proves now is that your hand was unsteady, foolhardy, false, as she’s not in the house, will never again be in the house, was clear about that when she hoisted her backpack onto her shoulder and went out to the car where her other suitcases were heating up the trunk, and the glass is lifted once more, another pull at the liquid, and it's returned not to the ledge but to the table, no longer bare, filled with emptiness. Q: What other advice would you give to a young paragraph? A: Don’t be afraid or aware of how old you feel.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE LESS SAID

How many people go from one big city to another? Annie counted along the line at the gate: at least a hundred, maybe a hundred and ten, some plugged into headphones, others with books in their hands as they stood, many snacking or sipping. Annie had a headache and then some. She had been out too late drinking too much, and she had ended the evening unwisely with a couple from the bar. Whatever she had done in those early-morning hours had been mean, even the things that produced pleasure for her and for others, and the meanness hadn't yet left her. The less said, the better, she thought. The man in front of her hadn't gotten the memo. He was saying more, about everything: about the weather and about sports teams and about different ways of lacing up shoes. He settled, finally, on a topical matter. “The biggest difference between a car and a plane,” he said, “is that if we were driving we could stop along the way. Strongsville, Youngstown, Snow Shoe, Drums.” The woman standing next to the man lowered her coffee from her lips. “What are you talking about?” she said. “Did you have a stroke?” The man shook his head. “Those were the places on the way,” he said. “I remember them from when I was a kid, when we would all get in the car and go. That’s the biggest difference with a plane. If you stop along the way, it’s first of all unscheduled and second of all never a good thing.” The woman raised her coffee, lowered it, raised it again. She had the appearance of an animatronic. “When you’re right you’re right,” she said. They were looking at each other. Something leaked from their eyes that Annie figured was love. She hoped to the heavens that she wouldn’t be sitting near them on the plane. It was the kind of thing that could make a girl pray for an unscheduled stop.  

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

A TRUE STORY

The notebook he found said “Azealia Banks” on the front, hand-lettered, but it wasn’t by her, which is what he first thought, but rather about her, which was in a way more surprising. It had page after page of doodle-clouds drawn around “212” or “Fantasea,” with short paragraphs scribbled in the space where the doodles weren’t. These paragraphs tended to be simple stories whose last lines incorporated, with obvious inelegance, the title of songs: the tale of a woman who took a new job and left at lunchtime on her first day to shop for shoes (it ended with “She was ‘broke with expensive tastes’”) or of a man who displayed only relief at his own divorce hearing (“He was ‘used to being alone’”). Every once in a while came a spread of pages that contained neither doodles nor stories. Those were blank but for tiny words written vertically along the gutter. Upon closer inspection, he saw that they were lyrics as well, but with words changed in a manner that scuttled rhymes or rhythms (“Chinchillas, feathers, and leathers / AB, AB, the two initials”; “Zooted and sipped, I’m suited and ready for whatever the night ahead might bring”). The notebook fascinated him, and he kept it as long as he could, knowing that it would soon vanish, which it then, one day, three weeks later, as he sat at breakfast at a diner, folding a corner of a piece of toast, waiting for a refill on his coffee, did.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

WOW, WHAT A DAY!

He was at the end of his rope. He went down the hall and starting banging on the door where the bird was. When it began the week before, he thought the chirping pleasant, and by extension the bird. He smiled at its sunny energy and came to whistle the song when he was making breakfast or stepping into of the shower. But then the volume increased. The first day the bird got louder he thought that maybe a door or window had been left open, and that the sound was flooding the hall or the air shaft. The second day it got louder again, and again on the third. Now he did not need to whistle the bird’s song in the shower because he could hear it over the sound of the water, and he could not bear to whistle it at breakfast because it was taking his appetite. On the fourth day he heard not only the melody, now at a nearly intolerable volume, but a new tone in the performance of the song that he could only describe as mocking. That was the last straw. He went down the hall and banged on the door until he heard a series of locks clicking permissively. He did not know what he would see when the door opened but he could not have known that it would be his own face, twenty years older, as surprised to see him as he was to see it. Nor could he have known that he would begin shouting to overcome the chirping, only to realize with a start that it was coming from the mouth of the older face.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

IN A BIND

They took his appendix out. That was the first thing they did. He felt…not angry, exactly, but ill-used. What right did they have to do that? The man in the coat explained that he was concerned primarily with preserving what was necessary and excising what was not. “I won’t apologize,” he said to his wife, who was in the room despite the sign on the door that said “Essential Personnel Only.” She was wearing a sheer blue dress that looked as if he had picked it out optimistically. She carried it off and then some. She rolled her eyes as if his bravado or foolishness or cruelty was all too familiar to her. Next the man in the coat, considering the patient, went for the spine. His eyes threatened violence but his fingers only applied pressure. This wasn’t so bad. “I might not be done here,” he said to his wife. She rolled her eyes again. The man in the  coat moved on to the back, to the joints, after which he reached into his coat and produced a small, sharp scalpel. “For the headpiece,” he said. His wife moved quickly now, coming across the room in a flash, slapping the man’s hand so that the blade clattered to the floor. “You will not touch it,” she said. He pointed at the Essential Personnel sign. Now she slapped the man’s face. He was whimpering something about her dress as she put the book back on the shelf.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE MAN FROM ZERO LAB

Vertical integration was the chief principle on which the company was founded, and was, for the most part, its North Star for the first decade. But then the leadership and innovation development program the company funded at universities across the world began to bear fruit, and there were suddenly more ideas for new projects than the firm knew what to do with, a number that not only exceeded its projections but also its capacity and capability. Disaffection rippled through the ranks. Come Monday morning, at the general staff meeting, a man stood up and lifted his only remaining arm—the other had been lost in a motorcycle accident, (drag race on westbound span of bridge, thrown three hundred feet, bike skidded three hundred more). “I know what to do,” he said. His brother, he explained, had recently left a firm that dealt with precisely these types of issues to start a boutique firm of his own. “He can solve any problem,” he said. “We could bring him aboard,” he said. On the strength of this recommendation—for the man was a valued employee who had once saved the life of the CEO’s daughter at a company party when she went from standing in the shallow end of the pool to flailing in the deep end—the brother was hired. He created an in-house department that was dubbed Zero Lab; all new projects were modeled out for solutions from the first, after which they matched technological demands to product design. Prototypes were suddenly plentiful. Executives stopped by at all times to inspect them, poke and prod, ask questions that could before only have been imagined but could now be articulated and resolved. At the next company party, the CEO’s daughter, now seventeen, approached the motorcycle man. He raised his arm the way he had in the meeting. The story had gotten around. “You have now saved two-thirds of my family from drowning,” she said. The man nodded with exaggerated sagacity. “Let your mom know,” he said. The girl crimsoned. “She’s not with us,” she said. “She has left. Greener pastures, she said. I think she went off for a guy in Alberta.” The man stopped nodding. He took his arm down. “I do not know what to do,” he said. His brother, coming across the lawn with a drink in one hand and a plate of food in the other, would later report that both the man and the girl were canting toward tears. He tripped, sending the food flying. He knew how to distort his face in slow motion, and he did, at the same time speaking just as slowly. “Nooooo,” he said. They both turned toward him. One was laughing and one was about to. He could solve any problem.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

GOING BACK SOMEDAY

She discovered quite by accident that the woman was dead. She had stumbled on the article while searching on a product that carried a similar spelling to the woman’s name, enough so that when she and the woman were friends a decade earlier, the similarity had been the source of many affectionate jokes and then, as the friendship waned, a few less affectionate ones. Why had it waned? The initiating incident involved an unkind piece of gossip passed from one of the women to a third. A mixup with a man inflamed matters. The two women had last seen each other at a Christmas party for the company that employed both of them as contractors. One had been too drunk, one too defensive, and each had decided that they were better off without the other. A decade passed. Men were married. Children were delivered. Jobs were taken off and put on like coats. And then one morning, searching for something to buy, one woman had discovered that the other woman was dead. The back room of her mind flooded the front room: she remembered the woman’s shyness, the smeared look of her features, the sharp sense of humor that protruded from otherwise impeccable manners, the surprising occasional upjuts of libido and the shocking dirty talk that could accompany those moments. She zeroed in on one moment early in their friendship, a lunchtime spent sitting in the park, trading the names of favorite songs, thrilled when their lists overlapped. She knew that they had shared three songs in common, but could remember only two: “Time of the Season” and “Blue Bayou.” She tore at invisible hair trying to recall the third, to no avail. The product that carried a name similar to that of the dead woman was a kind of shortbread cookie. She bought a tin and tried to taste the cookie in the mouth of her mind, but the buttery crispness she expected was gone, and what was in its place was dry and ashy. The article did not mention how her friend had died. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

LIFE, SENTENCE

Talmadge Fowler had a name that in turn had a history, though he concealed it as if it were a thing of value, when in fact it was determinedly without value but for its concealment, the equivalent of paste gems hidden in an office safe, mentioned now and again with rapid lightness but never described in any detail and certainly never brought to light, which is why it was so surprising that he woke early that morning, turned to look at the woman on his left, sleeping deeply across the large mattress and the expensive sheets, and resolved to come clean with her: how he had been born to modest means in a crooked house in a run-down corner of the state’s second-largest city, had excelled at school but felt with each passing year none of the movement upward that had been promised by the proponents of education, instead bowing under the weight of what he was certain was thickening irrelevance, all these verifiable facts and unverifiable theories, no melody to it, no rhythm, to the point where his own achievement came to feel like nothing so much as failure, how he had found a shred of victory in a succession of women and then a whole tapestry of meaning in one, how he had encountered her on a staircase at a party, he going down, she coming up, but felt once again that the directions were a fundamental misrepresentation of the truth, for it was he who was going up, propelled by his rapid and terrifying apprehension of her beauty, which he understood more fully than he had understood any subject in any stage of school, in part because he saw what it did for anything that contacted it, himself included, how he had stopped there on the stairs, mouth dry, voice a croak, barely able to form a word, and made his case to her, been stared upon with eyes that enlarged him, there on the stairs, later at the party, and for months following, months that he did not account as part of his life because they were so far superior to it, that in fact reduced the time around them, months that ended when, one morning, she had not stared at him but in fact looked away from him, erasing him, and how in the wake of that he had renounced everything that had occurred in his life up until that very moment, invented his new name, his new history, founded the Fowler Agency, began to collect, appraise, and resell artifacts that stood as proof of the glory of this society of that one, acquired wealth and a new vantage, a type of bridge over the world’s gains and losses that he felt certain would remain intact even if the wealth beneath it began to drain away, found himself once again in the company of a series of women who were so similar and were replaced each by the next so quickly that it felt as if he was living in a motion picture, bought a rich man’s house that had been bruised and defaced by time, relaxed into the legitimacy it afforded him, and then met a new woman who placed him not at the same elevation as the who had stared at him but who at least suggested that he could once again find himself at the foothills, who could not restore him but who began to draw him again surely as the other had erased him, a few strokes that indicated the possibility of hope, and from the moment he woke that morning after the night she stayed with him in his rich man’s house, in his  expanse of a bed, from the moment the first shadows of the morning slid across it, slid across her and the sheet that covered her, as they negotiated flats and furrows, ridges and rises, turned these indentations and protruberances into a kind of music, he moved nervously to her side of the room, to a spot where he thought he might be best and most clearly heard, and he began to come to terms with the fact that the next words he spoke would be his real name.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

PLATE OF FRUIT

I was summoned to breakfast with the old man, whose name was known to all but whose ways were known to none. The table was covered with butcher paper. He clapped his hands with what I thought was theater and plates were brought to the table, some with fruit, some with bread, one with a silver pen. We started eating. He used the pen to write on the paper. The letters were too small for me to make out so he started reading what he was writing. It was a story about a young man who faced evil in his own heart. “The evil,” the old man said, “was not the kind anyone ever thought about. It was the evil of moving through the world without digging, overturning, feinting, focusing.” I could not tell if he was reading anymore or speaking to me directly. His face began to blur and wobble at the edges like a mirage in a desert. He asked me if I remembered what he had just said and I confessed that I did not. I knew I would remember nothing but how that face looked.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

DAWN RAID

A purple shoe steps forward and then a yellow shoe. They both belong to the man in the house you cannot see from the street, but he is not wearing either of them now. He is sleeping, dreaming that he is loved. The purple shoe is on the foot of a woman who has slept beside him. The yellow shoe is on the foot of a man who has betrayed him. Purple, yellow, royalty, sunlight: they go down the path toward the street, where their getaway car is waiting. Their pockets make music with the coins they have taken. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

FRIENDSHIP IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

She called me. “I’ve been working on this project for months now and it’s starting to kill me.” I paused meaningfully. “Don’t die,” I said. She shook her head. I couldn’t see it but I was sure of it. We’ve known each other that long. “You don’t get it,” she said. “I sketched this out back in May, and I had a quick way to do it, but the client came back to me with notes and concerns, and I overreacted. There’s no other way to say it. I was a good student in the worst way and now I have a hundred and fifty pages of notes and no energy left to go through them.” Toward the end, her voice became high and ragged, and I started to worry that she was losing it. It didn't seem like a controlled performance. It didn't seem like a performance at all. “You’re hearing a fact, not an act,” she used to tell me when we were dating, as a way of letting me know that I shouldn’t make the mistake of attributing the moment to calculated theatrics. “What can I do?” I said. The silence on the line took roots, bloomed, blossomed, until it obscured everything else. She still said nothing, but I understood her meaning, which was that existing with her inside her silence, giving her some small confidence that even in that moment she still had her piece of the world, and that she had someone to verify that she had it, was not only the limit of my capability but all that was wanted. Her breaths sketched out a faint punctuation.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE EDITING PROCESS

Leave it to a wigged friend to help an imperialist in need. Leave it to a deft friend to help a martinet in need. Leave it to a ripe friend to help an orator in need. Leave it to a coiffed friend to help a rifleman in need. He stacked the sentences one atop the other, masonry of a sort that produced at best one wall, at worst a heap of forsaken bricks, and then went off to meet her. He knew that at some point during the evening — the first drink, the second, the small bits shoved into mouths during gaps in the headlong conversation, the taxicab ride, the hand on top of hand, the body under body — she would fix what he had already eagerly ruined. Leave it to an old friend to help a paragraph in need. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

GIVE ME THE KEYS I WANNA DRIVE

I called her. She didn’t have a car. “I don’t want to live this way,” she said. “But I don’t want to die.” A pause stepped onto the line. “I am reading dialogue,” she said. “It does not reflect my own feelings about my own existence.” She still didn’t have a car. “Come pick me up,” she said. “But when you get here, I’ll drive.” She didn’t know enough about me to presume that I would go along with this plan. I had flowers and a box of candy, intending a surprise, but slipped up and told her that I was bringing them. “Don’t eat them both,” she said. “Don’t eat either.” The traffic was perpetual. Eventually there I was in front of the house: two stories, the second of which was hers, painted a shrieking red. I idled there, waiting. Idle, idle, idle. She called me, read some more dialogue. “A desire to try out a new life is a signal that your old one has succeeded,” she said. “You never made a mistake when we were together, and yet not being together is not a mistake,” she said. “The comedic elements of our existence only remind us how much is sad,” she said. “Okay,” she said. She was done. I heard the bound script slap down on a table or floor. “I see your car out in front,” she said. “I’m not getting out of bed.” I went in, unsure of what had happened, sure of what would.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

SELF-CONCEPT

The bird looked in the mirror. He was one of the smarter birds in the place, with wonderful plumage and a majestic song, but he still didn’t know that he was looking in a mirror. The bird in the glass looked like him. That much he knew. But the bird in the glass had a flaw. One feather was out of place. It was in a spot that could be easily seen but not easily reached, so there was no correcting it, not for the moment at least. The bird in the glass kept looking at the errant feather. He seemed like he hated himself for it, that the rest of his achievements, his beauty and his grace, were nothing so long as the feather stuck out at that ungainly angle, that every good thing about him evaporated the second he was aware of it, and the bird who was looking at him, the smarter bird, agreed on all counts.

@2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

MCDONALD’S BROKEN ICE CREAM MACHINES ARE PART OF FTC INVESTIGATION, REPORT SAYS

What is at stake is who is permitted to repair. What hangs in the balance is the ability of the individual stores to command their own fate. What hangs in the balance is agency  itself. Imagine two couples at a table. One woman has ordered a hamburger. The other a chicken sandwich and fries. The men are not living in the moment. Their food sits untouched in front of them. They do not even remember what it is. They are processing their anxieties, or more to the point being processed by them. Those anxieties revolve around the fact that the men, six years earlier, had been together. Their breakup had been terrible, intensified by the fact that neither of them was truthful about who he was. Fear had driven them inside themselves and then away from one another. Each told his parents that his roommate had moved out. Their lives resumed, rubbled by dissembling. They had met again when their girlfriends had befriended one another, two weeks before. This is the first meeting, highly informal, intended as light fun, and yet the two men are rendered mute by their shared past. Honesty is out of the question. One woman exhales and asks about dessert. Her boyfriend springs up in relief and gets to the counter. “The flurry machine is broken,” he is told. He does not know what to say in return. He says nothing. He goes back to the table, as mute as before. He hears his girlfriend laughing. “Carry me along like you done through the toy fair,” she says. The other woman laughs too. The other man says nothing, looks up helplessly. His food will never be touched. 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas