Friday, December 31, 2021

TIME UPON TIME

Jesse knew roughly, but not exactly, when she had first met Peter. She was living in the city for the first time, which meant that she must have been twenty-eight. She had bought a car from a guy who lived down the block, a little green Ford with a driver’s seat that was wrenched sideways and a radio with a volume dial that leapt up when you turned it. It was spring and she was driving out to the beach most days to sit and listen to the ocean while she drank her coffee. This was the center of the day, even though it happened early in the morning. No: the fact that it happened early in the morning reshaped the rest of the day. What happened at the other end of it found her in a state of weakness, from which she wondered if she would ever recover, and it was not until the next morning, the next cup of coffee that she drank as quietly as possible so as to most clearly hear the surging and subsiding of the surf, that she found herself again. “Or maybe it’s more a matter of allowing myself to be found,” she said. She was certain of nothing except that she was speaking to the man who was helping her start her car. She gave him a ride back to her neighborhood, also his, during which they fell in love. When spring ended, they had parted. Keeping in touch struck them both as hopelessly bourgeois. The next time she lived in the city, she looked for him everywhere but to no avail. She met and married another man. She must have been thirty.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas


ALLEGEDLY HORSEHAIR

When he had first been asked to make an inspirational speech at Francesco P. Ribiero’s retirement party, he had agreed, in part because his manager told him never to turn down a gig, especially one with an appreciable fee, and in part because he thought he knew something about Ribiero’s career, beginning with his invention of the Sound Engine in 1978, continuing through his late resurgence as a newspaper opinion columnist. Perhaps he was also taken by Ribiero’s height and his fashionable mustache. Many were. But when he conducted further research to fill out his speech, he found that the man was odious in every respect: a brat as a child, a cheat as a schoolboy, cruel to his wife and children, peremptory in nearly every opinion column. The Sound Engine, in conception and execution both, had most likely been stolen from Ribiero’s colleague Anton Whisperton, who had died in poverty and shame. Even the mustache was allegedly horsehair. The extravagance of the party now felt curdled. The check burned in his pocket. He didn’t think he could do much with the material. To go through with it was a type of atrocity. And yet, he was a professional. The run of show had him on at eight-fifteen. Two minutes prior, he was in the wings, looking at his notes. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

BEHIND THE MUSIC

Jack attended the wedding reluctantly. The bride had been his girlfriend long ago and more recently his friend, though once a month or so he had to convince someone that he no longer carried a torch, and that meant first convincing himself. “At least it’s not a destination wedding,” said Daniella, another mutual friend. “That would be hard to explain. I mean, why are you getting on a plane and flying for hours if you’re not still hung up on her?” Jack rode to the church with Daniella and her boyfriend Gerrit. Thoughts swam in his head like goldfish, innocent and not long for this world. Years later, he recorded a song called “The Pathway.” Although the song also took place at a wedding, and also featured a man who was lamenting the loss of the woman he considered to be his true love, the setting was not a church in town but a large stone house with a succession of “unpopulated formal rooms” (in the song it was rhymed with “inoculations, storms, and fumes”). In the song, the man did not stand timidly as the bride and groom exchanged vows. He took action. The song ended with a repetition of the chorus: “The earth was scorched / The place was torched.” He reused the line about the goldfish because he liked it. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Thursday, December 30, 2021

THE CONSTERNATED CROWD

People kept getting up from the couch with a vertical energy that suggested that they wanted to leave not just the party but the earth. Walter wondered why until he turned and saw what was on the TV—the video of his wedding to Doreen. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened during the ceremony, the introduction of the couple, the reception line. But then there was a purling in the rear of the room, and the crowd turned to face a man dressed entirely as a circus clown. “Doreen,” the clown called out, “Doreen!” “It’s her father,” a man close to the microphone had said. But it was not. It was her ex-husband Gerald, come to claim her back. He juggled a trio of wine glasses. He danced slap-shoe. He blew up a balloon and squeaked out a poodle. “He has to go,” said the man on the microphone. But Doreen was tipsy and forgiving. She danced with Gerald and then, when he took a knee, put on the wig and nose that he offered. When she began to laugh, it was not a shock to anyone. When it became clear that she was laughing not at Gerald but at Walter, the shock settled upon Walter, and the consternated crowd ate hors d’oeuvres as if their lives depended on it. Doreen left with Gerald that night. By now, the two of them had been remarried for more than a year. Walter could not understand why he had kept the video.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

BETTER READ THAN WED

More than a decade ago, during the final years of Aileen’s marriage to the famed poet Terence Antopol, a marriage that had given her both immense confidence in her own writing and also taken away all of her belief in her ability to love and be loved—this only felt like a paradox, she would later tell interviewers, until you were in a situation just like it, where a brilliant mind mirrored yours, rewarding your most profound thoughts, but where, too, a flesh-and-blood man whose knees you wanted to go at least a little weak in your presence affronted you so regularly with the basest insults that you could not for a moment find yourself attractive in any traditional sense—she undertook an inquiry into just how much poison she could spoon into her husband’s coffee before he died. Her prison novels were critically acclaimed and sold well.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE THEORIST

One of the fundamental concepts in narratology is the distinction between plot and the way that the plot is deployed within a literary work. Some writers define the former as story and the latter as discourse; some use other terms (events/account, incidents/history, hap/tale). Readers enter a text, or are invited into it, to untangle one from the other, using syntactical strategies, chronological clues, and so forth. The process is not simple by any means, but it seems encoded to some degree as a fundamental capability of our species. We do not know if other species can peel the hap from the tale. Take, for example, a man at a desk. He holds a pen in one hand and a gun in the other. Both are loaded. Handwritten on the paper in front of him is this paragraph. Has he written it or is he despondent that he has not? The man enters the room but he is already there. The man uses what is in one of his hands to leave the room. The paragraph writes the man. One of the fundamental concepts is. Outside, bees form a funnel by a window that will now never again be opened.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas 

LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS

On a distant planet not very much like ours save for the presence of art and venality, a famous singer stood onstage next to a famous author. Down the line was a famous painter, a famous actor, another famous singer, and then the president of the planet. They shook one another’s hands. The first famous singer, the most famous person onstage, far more famous than even the president of the planet, stepped up to the microphone. “The more I learn,” the famous singer said, “the less I know.” The audience laughed appreciatively. “The more I do,” he said, “the less I have done.” More laughter. “I am four hundred years old but I don’t feel a day over seventy.” When the applause died down, the rest of the luminaries took their turns. The author read from a new poem. The painter exalted the eyes. The actor read from a monologue that had been written by one of the author’s chief rivals, an ex-wife. The other famous singer approached the microphone in a slouch. “Hey there,” he said. He considered the crowd levelly. His long pause brought as much laughter as the other singer’s dicta. Finally he spoke again. “One thing I hope not to feel when I am four hundred is seventy.” The first famous singer, the more famous one, came to his feet as if he had been challenged to a duel. The president hurried to the microphone to repair any damaged feelings. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE MOVIE STAR AND THE NOBELIST

He had dated her originally to get a better sense of science. All those hours in the lab, all those books devoured—she knew so much and there was so much she did not share. He would suggest fancy restaurants that he knew impressed her, some so expensive that only men like him could get reservations, and through the entire meal he would ask her questions. How do we know black holes are real? Does a memory make a difference in a cell? What exactly is inside-out water? Astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, all were fair game, because all were the same to him. She answered his questions patiently, though there were many she brushed past on the way to the expertly prepared food, the fine wine, his chauffeured limousine, his bedroom. He allowed all of it, even with the sinking sensation that he was, if not exactly being used, being flattened somewhat by the circumstance. When would he be allowed to go deeper, to unlock the secrets of the universe? What if he was simply not smart enough? Sometimes he would hold her head between his hands, look into her eyes, glimpse a thought darting through the middle distance, and experience an amazement that he was in contact with this brilliant energy, even though his contact was largely limited to muscles pressed against one another in resistance, frustration transformed into pleasure, nerves deliriously overloaded. That was biology, wasn’t it? 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Wednesday, December 29, 2021

A RED-LEDGER DAY

The man pressed a button and his zipper went up on its own. “New hoodie, new technology,” the ad had said, and the ad was right. He was in his train seat, looking up at the row of screens. One was programming (a woman deep in conversation with her boss), one was advertising (insurance of course), and the third was information about the journey (current time, current weather at current location, speed of train, time to final destination). All were available through bluetooth headphones that had been handed out at the beginning of the trip. The man had slept the first hour or two, woken briefly when the chime sounded for lunch, dozed off for another forty-five. Throughout, his seat mate had been awake, assiduously writing in a large red ledger. She had boarded the train at the second stop, said a pleasant hello, and asked him to help her put her bag on the overhead rack. He had complied enthusiastically—he would have no matter who had asked, but the fact that the request was coming from an attractive woman about his age in a clearly expensive skirt and top did not escape his notice. He noticed her noticing his hoodie, which meant she probably knew how much it cost. Right after sitting down, she had stood back up to retrieve the ledger from her bag, at which point she had started writing in it. What she wrote was numbers, seemingly a random string, appearing on the page at a clip. She filled one page, turned it, filled a second, started in on a third. Her manner was not rude at all, but it was focused, and he soon lost interest in the moment and drifted off. Each time he had woken, he had glanced over to see her still writing numbers in her ledger, and each time he had weighed the appropriateness of asking her about it. Now he felt the time was right. “Excuse me,” he said. “Can I ask what you’re writing?” She answered without pausing. “This is information,” she said. “About?” he said. “About all of us,” she said. “As you know, each of us when born is assigned a number.” “A Social Security number?” he said. “No,” she said. “That’s just for Americans of course. Every human gets a number. So I am writing down all those numbers, in alphabetical order by name, which I am not writing.” “So a code?” “You could say that,” she said. “So a directory?” “Not only,” she said. “I’m writing the identifying number of every living human, which is ten digits, and then after that I am writing the time of death, which is twelve digits.” “Death?” “Yes,” she said. “Demise. Expiration. The passing out of conventional existence. Twelve digits because hour hour, minute minute, day day, month month, year year year year. I’m using military time not standard of course to avoid inserting any letters.” He tried a joke. “Have you gotten to me yet?” “Yes.” She did not change her tone or even look up from the page. “You went by about twenty minutes ago. You were sleeping.” “So when does it happen?” “What?” “Death?” “I can’t tell you that but I can tell you the number and you can figure it out.” “Okay.” “She rattled off a string of numbers. “You remember it?” he said. He was impressed. “Sure,” she said. “It’s the same as my number.” She repeated the string. This time, something sounded familiar. “That first part,” he said. “It’s the time?” “Yes,” she said. “Weird,” he said. “Because the time you said is basically right n…” He was drowned out by the screech of the train as the brakes tried and failed to grip the track. There were no survivors.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

NET LOSSES

Then one day while I was immobilized behind my desk with a bad case of post-holiday exhaustion Geraldine walked into the dappled ante-area of the office, dressed in a white skirt and top, and carrying a rolled-up poster under one arm. Her legs shone out from beneath the skirt, weeks of winter tennis in evidence. She went without a word to the table in the center of the room and unrolled the poster, putting paperweights on each end to keep it flat. When she spoke her voice was calm but by design. “This can’t be built this way,” she said. “Why would you have the main entrance all the way inside, behind a series of locked doors?” She straightened up and put one hand on a hip. The pose was accusatory. As for me I was consumed by a sense of being deeply and permanently misunderstood. Yes, I had located the main entrance deep within the structure, but had I not also put exits at every corner that locked from the outside? And what about the boundary-curve staircases, or the elastic windows, or the teacup bathtubs? Geraldine’s other hand went to her other hip. I felt myself turning pale in the glare of her distrust. I thought she was going to scream at me. But she stayed dead silent and finally lowered her hands and left the room. I knew the next time I saw her, on the security cameras, playing tennis with a zeal I would certainly misunderstand as fury, would likely be the last. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

A MODERN-DAY GHOSTBUSTER

Untrammeled spirits and demons exist all around us. The signs we once depended upon may have changed—no sepulchral wail arising from the inside of a wall, no red eyes hovering above scimitars of teeth, no sulfuric malodor and a sudden heat around the head. But new indications have arisen. Your phone and computer pitch them toward you with regularity. We need only observe the never-ending stream of unsolicited opinion, reflexive outrage, news that is not, promotional messages that in comparison with the rest seem almost genteel. This is what, as a modern-day Ghostbuster, I can tell you. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

MATTERS OF OPINION

When he saw something he didn’t like, he had to say so. That was how he became a critic. Nothing else mattered to him. He loved his wife, sure, and he had a few cheap restaurants that satisfied him, but what really got him going was gulping down someone else’s artwork and then belching out an appraisal. The metaphor was his: the crudity of it didn’t bother him. Rather, he accepted it. “We are all, all the time, judging,” he told an auditorium of college students who had been assigned his Selected Takes and Fancies, a compendium of his best-known if not always best-loved pieces. “To deny it is cowardly. People say that criticism is not creative and yet it is creating a perspective—an observation deck if you will.” A woman in the front row raised her hand. “What?” he said, expertly balancing impatience and humor. “What if we are defined not by what we create but what we refuse to destroy?” she said. “Of course,” he said, “and yet,” and he went on from there, but the woman’s words were banging in his soul like a clapper against a bell that would never again be the same. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

OLD MAN DUPREE GETS BACK TO WORK

Global war depleted the pool of young teachers at the school, which instead turned to elderly residents of the village who had, in youth, distinguished themselves in one profession or another. The administrators, familiar with my eminence as a litigator, asked me to serve as an English teacher. I was thrilled. Nothing pleased me more than the prospect of teaching my favorite poems and novels. Still, I affected skepticism, as befit an accomplished legal thinker. I came around to the idea, of course. What else would I have done, sat around my house talking to my two dogs, Lily and Rosemary, while I mourned my wife (three years buried) and lamented the absence of my children (my son flying bombing raids over Hamhung, my daughter married to a rich man in Portland and irreversibly estranged)? Still, I arrived that first morning to Hartfield High School disconsolate over my lack of confidence, which was a direct result of my lack of preparation. Butterflies had kept me from thinking about what to do other than to dwell on those butterflies, and the pep talk Lily had given me, in the form of leaping up on my lap as I unworried myself with whiskey, hadn’t taken. I was ill at ease and frightened. Would the children laugh at me, call me names? I was a tall man still, with cubic features that lent themselves to “Frankenstein.” Then I had an inspiration: a trial. Children loved drama, the more so when it appeared to have an underlying moral foundation, and the works I intended to assign could easily be reframed as trials. I selected one of my favorite novels and got to work extracting from it questions of misdeeds and redress, perspective and evidence, individual freedom and the social contract. The first day, I stood before the class and announced the name of the accused, the nature of the crime, what was known and not. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” I said. The children hung on the edges of their seats. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

ADDRESS

Is the house sturdily built but capable of being ruined by years of weather erosion, or the reverse, third-rate and tumbledown but redeemable by a visionary contractor? Will the owners work hard to match the solidity of the houses around it or feel a perverse pride that it exceeds its neighbors in achievement, even if that achievement is a negative one? The man on the porch, holding his hat in his hand, speaks slowly to the assembled reporters. “What if the house is neither thing but both things?” he says. “What if there is an optimistic area on the first floor, clustered around the kitchen, but a pessimistic one near the stairs that stretches to the second-floor bedrooms? What if one end of the dining table wishes to be sanded and stained and the other wishes to be smashed into splinters? What if one window is cracked by misadventure and the one right next to it is cracked by motive?” The man twirls his hat around one long finger. “Don’t call me Mephistopheles,” he says. “Mater of fact, my good people, don’t call me at all.”

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Monday, December 27, 2021

SOUL SURVIVORS

Carl believed in a metempsychosis that would deliver the soul of one being into the body of another. He did not, though, believe that the process was confined by the boundaries of biology. Rather, he believed—he knew—that souls could pass between different species, and moreover that the animal that was the destination of the soul revealed something about the man or woman in which that soul originated. A vicious person’s soul might drain down into a lizard or Dubia roach, where, after a brief lifetime, it rose back up into the body of an unlucky person. A person with a high heart became a rabbit or hare, a dog or a camel, a majestic hoof-thundering horse. Carl hadn’t worked it all out, but he had tons of notes.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

EMPHATIC

The Cost of Renting a Private Jet May Surprise You! Forget Expensive Roofing! Check Out How Much Dental Implants Will Actually Set You Back! Don’t Ignore Signs of Ringing In Your Ears! Purify Your Water For Less Than One Penny A Year! Think You're Escaping and Run Into Yourself! Longest Way Round Is The Shortest Way Home! Your Wedding Photos Will Be Freer Than Free! Your Car’s Love For You Is Illusory! The Burglar Alarm You Just Bought Is Made From Styrofoam And Elmer’s Glue! This Young Broker Is Changing The Game!  Is It a Parking Lot or A Pit Filled With Snakes? Shut Your Eyes and See!

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE MY SLIDES?

People talk about trips, whether external (to India, Greenland, Grand Canyon, Firenze, money saved, money spent, money transmuted into memories) or internal (that drug, this mantra, a song like a sprung pinball, a good night’s sleep). Whether one type is more powerful than the other is hard to say. It is easy to say that these stories supply a measure of reality to these people, illuminating their starting point and their path away from it to their present location. These stories gauge growth. They also—and this will come clear if you have ever been placed in a room with more than one of them, where a throat might be cleared and an aporia lobbed into the space between, I doubt youre interested but...—both conceal and lay bare the fear on the part of the teller that if they do not describe themselves thusly, no one will ever know how far they extend, outward or inward. Are they correct to believe this? A bird in the corner squawks out an answer that must have been intoned hundreds of times by the old man who owns the house. “It is impossible to guess what people know about one another,” the bird says. He adds after a pause that he also wants a cracker.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

CIVIL WAR

The dream is a drum. She is marching through mulch. The odor is rising like olives. She wheels on herself, screams out her name. Her first face melts down like a candle. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE YEAR IN REVIEW

The year begins. Hopes, not high to begin with, lower slightly. An incident occurs. A birthday is celebrated. An anniversary passes without acknowledgment. An incident that has previously occurred is studied, po-faced, by a commission. A cloud clears. Fireworks open like blanketflowers. A celebrity dies in a planned accident. A domesticated animal is born with two heads, each wearing a different expression, and quickly becomes a national icon. Peerless books fall off the shelf. Stolen forks jangle in a pocket. Two old friends lie in bed, discussing a third. A chemist, a battener, and a monk are sent for and ride up in the elevator together, each considering the other two, wondering silently what quality or qualities might possibly unite the trio and cause them to be sent for in this manner. A population is stirred by a leader. Another population is placed upon a burner and brought to a boil. A beautiful woman reads an article and understands, for a moment, everything. A beautiful child is read to and understands nothing. A technology creeps up upon unsuspecting rubes. A noise at night is a sad minor chord. The past recedes. The past recedes. The past repeats.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Sunday, December 26, 2021

LIQUID COURAGE

They were eating their steaks now, the man in the suit putting Vaseline on the lens of the past: the afternoon when he met his wife, the oppressive heat, the handheld fan, the awkward moment on the verandah, the dress slipping down a brazenly bare shoulder…. Tony couldn’t change the subject but he swiveled the camera. “My father-in-law was a barrel of a guy, as wide as tall,” he said. “He was construction biz through and through, a life lived in concrete. And you know what that means. That means water.” Tony tapped his glass in front of him to illustrate. “Concrete production requires about 180 billion gallons globally every year, eighteen gallons per ton. And you can’t use saltwater because that risks corroding the rebar. So it’s all freshwater, and yet we’re on a planet where three-quarters of a billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water. So that’s where I came in.” Tony tapped his glass again. “I have been deep into two lines of research simultaneously—concrete made from seawater, and rebar resistant to rust. I had logged thousands of hours in the structures and materials lab. I went to work convincing my father-in-law to put some money in our research. Have I said that this all was before I met his daughter? That was an extra bonus, a happy accident.” Tony paused for a sip of wine, thought of Rudy, thought of romance, prayed the man in the suit would not pick up where he had left off. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE BODY POLITIC

The guild has two hundred and forty-eight members. Thirty come from the southernmost part of the city, by which is meant the two small neighborhoods around the foothills. Ten come from the bridge zone, two from the long meadow, five from the great bend, one from the Hitch, three from the small pebbled desert encircling the Hitch, eleven from the cross-straits, thirty in what has historically been called the Fist District but which has now been renamed Oakland Glen, two in the frontage, two in the park, one in the uppermost part of the city north of the point, four in the boats docked off that uppermost part. Each of those members has a wife, husband, or partner who accompanies them, making a total of one hundred and one doubled by their others, and to this we add “Inviteds,” meaning out-of-towners who can be attached to a meeting, and who number eighteen in the Southland, nine in the Northland, eight in the Eastland, six in the Westland, and five in the close-held heart of midtown. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas


SNAPSHOTS

The music lover who plays no instrument. The blizzard, always inclement. The world unlearned by increment. The precipitating incident. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas


Saturday, December 25, 2021

I LOOK OUT FOR ED WYCHE

The young gallerist lifted the phone. “Hello,” the voice on the other end said. “This is Ed Wyche.” The young gallerist did not believe the voice. Why would the premier artist of the Hampshire School, arguably the most famous figurative American painter of the second half of the twentieth century, be calling her gallery? “Can I help you?” said the young gallerist. The voice, soft, meticulous, explained that he was about to embark on a series of landscapes—this alone was news almost too hot to handle—and that he needed someone to show him around the city. “I have lived in a barn for many years,” Wyche said. “But why me?” the young gallerist said. “As life would have it,” Wyche said, “my ex-wife Joanna is dating your ex-husband Phillip.” The young gallerist laughed. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Wyche exhaled playfully. “I wouldn’t put it like that,” he said, “but okay.” They set a time for Monday. She barely slept all weekend. She told no one. Wyche was on time, looking just as he looked in his pictures in textbooks, as expected visually as he was unexpected aurally. He had no driver. He drove himself.  She took over from there, took him to the warehouse districts with its vivid decrepit facades and cavernous laboratories of optimism, the near-belt exurbs ("nice house," he said over and over again, enlarging the irony), the aging downtown with its glass-and-steel Ozymandiases. In the passenger seat, Wyche kept careful notes, sketched nothing, asked short questions that showed his shyness. At the end of the day, he bought her dinner. “No landscapes were ever made, but we were married the following summer,” she liked to say, but the truth is that more than forty landscapes were made and Wyche only spoke to her on the telephone a single time more. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

MR. AND MRS. CLAUS

When the food was eaten and the wine was drunk, when stories were told and stories were listened to, when employees were rewarded and the entire enterprise toasted, when music was heard and movies were watched, when stairs were climbed and bed was entered, when words were spoken and hands were moved, when fasteners were unfastened and demands unforgotten, when more food was eaten and more wine was drunk, the two, each thinking that as nice as two could be it was never quite the match of two ones, that a pair was a convenient fiction at best, that loyalty was defamation and loneliness was clarification, closed their eyes and drifted off, full and also empty. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Friday, December 24, 2021

PUT YOUR FEET UP

Most days he worked so hard, not just at his job, but at keeping himself in a state of anxiety, checking to see what fresh outrage had occurred and what artificial outrages had caught fire all around it; what albums, books, and movies had been released and how he could at once collect them for to maintain a sense of his own identity and feel bad for not giving them enough time or attention; which people he needed to stay in contact with and how unrewarding that contact seemed to be, both for himself and, as far as he could see, for the others. When vacation came, freed from all that, he collapsed like a marionette with the strings cut. “Happy Holidays,” said someone. It was either his wife, his mother, a friend, or a stranger. He didn’t know. He only knew he didn’t have the energy to find out. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

A THOUGHTFUL HOLIDAY

The girl turned her head to address the cat napping in the parallelogram of sunlight. “It’s so cold, don’t you think?” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that we have to stay inside all day.” The girl, all of twelve, was imagining a life where she would talk to a husband this way. In the other room, the eight to ten adults who had spent years talking to each other this way considered the wreckage of wrapping. The younger children had been herded into the basement to watch an affably slack comedy. The one boy her age, her cousin, who she sometimes dreamed would be her eventual cat, sat in a window seat reading. “What’s he reading?” she asked the cat. The boy, without a word, held up the book to show the cover. “Wissenschaft der Logik,” he said. “Hegel. I have to say, I don’t understand a god-damned word.” The cat meowed. The boy and girl dissolved in helpless laughter.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Thursday, December 23, 2021

A VICTIM OF THE TIMES

The old man stood with effort. “I do not need lists or awards to help me see what to value,” he said. “I find my way to things randomly, experience them imperfectly, in my own way, and draw from them what I can. Why would it matter to me what has made a list or won an award?” The mob was upon him in a minute, tearing him to pieces. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

PASSION VS. TALENT

Three weeks after he received the bleakest report yet about the progress of the cancer in his bile ducts—unresectable, irreversible, a brief twisted flare in the eyes of the doctor that belied her composed expression—Herman developed insomnia. At first it struck him as a silver lining, since it meant more time to enjoy his remaining life, but then he realized that he had never enjoyed life, not even before the tumors, and the fatigue left him feeling nauseated, unable to maintain even the slightest of erotic fantasies, and even a touch crazy, to the point where he became so angry at the insomnia that sleep was newly impossible. At that point he began to write. As a younger man, he had always believed that if life was suddenly circumscribed, it would fill him with both the desire for meaning and the ability to locate it, and he wrote in that spirit. He wrote about his parents and his sister, who he loved. He wrote about men from the army he hated. He wrote about religion and about artwork. He was expansive in his efforts: most of the writings ran to ten pages at least, and one of them, about a sidewalk singer he had seen in 1974 and, after putting five-dollar bills in her guitar case every day for a month, he had worked up the courage to ask out, after which he had taken her home for surprisingly acrobatic congress, had married her, had realized the folly of that commitment (as had she, he hastened to add), had divorced her but still put money in her guitar case regularly, if you knew what he meant, that particular story, called Sidewalk Joan’s Sidewalk Song, topped out at more than one hundred pages. After Herman’s death, his brother found a box filled with these writings. He took them home, spent a week reading them at all hours of the day and night, and declared them gobbledygook. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

A MAN WHO HAD TAKEN A LIFE

On Wednesday, Amanda walked into a bakery down the street from her house, in a corner spot on the north side of the block that had contained, over the years, in order, a diner, a burger joint, a record shop, a women’s clothing store, an upscale grocery, a chocolatier, and a brief popup that sold healing crystals and painted boomerangs. None of that mattered now. What mattered was not what had been, but what was. As she went into the bakery a bell sounded, a digital version of the type that would have once announced a new customer, and the man behind the counter turned and smiled at her. He was the friend of a friend, friend of a boyfriend, actually, though even that was not quite true anymore. Bradley had already announced that he was moving to Boston, and his invitation to Amanda to accompany him was somewhere between perfunctory and pathetic. Amanda waved at the baker, Dean.  The first time she had met him, in this same place, following the same digital bell-tone and the exchange of pleasantries between him and Bradley—oh my gosh what are you doing back in town I haven’t seen you since college, said one, and the other said nearly the same—she had made a joke about a dean named Baker, and rather than condescending to her and laughing, as many men had done before, Dean had gripped her hand, looked her in the eye, and said “That idiotic pun, if in fact it is a pun, is not worthy of you.” His face wore the look of a man who had taken a life. He had then recommended a small cream-filled pastry that had utterly delighted both her and Bradley to the point of sex. Today she was coming in to tell Dean that Bradley was moving to Boston, after which she planned to cry her eyes out, and then, with only a little luck, to set Dean on a course of falling in love with her more than Bradley ever had. She would mourn Bradley but only for a minute. What mattered was not what had been, but what was. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

NO PLACE LIKE HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

In helpless disgust, Timothy watched the rich men parade through the city’s plaza, plump and sunny in the cold air, complacently afternooned, calling secretaries for assignations, calling wives with excuses, not calling children, and Timothy thought back to when he was one of these men, before he had failed at every task he had set himself, from the business that he had founded (“inventive,” a fellow millionaire had said, and Timothy had chosen not to hear the derision in his tone) to the marriage he had attempted (“I do,” she said, and all he could hear was the derision), and then on through the canvases he had, casting off his cloak of wealth, learned to paint, through the songs he had composed, through the sculptures he had fashioned with ever-weakening hands, right up to the moment when he had despaired of ever making anything of beauty and tried to take his own life, missing the vital artery by a mile. Now he stood. He bumped a plump man. “Hello, Santa,” he said, even though the man was wearing a slate-gray suit and talking a mile a minute about investments. “Merry Christmas, Santa,” he said. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

MAN ON THE MOON

To the populated moon of a distant planet went Astronaut Merrick. He landed on the moon and, upon stepping out of his ship, encountered a family of beings. They resembled humans in some regards and departed from them in others—for example the outward-facing funnels on their skin. One was tall. Astronaut Merrick thought of this one as the father-being. The slightly shorter-one was in his mind the mother-being. There was one miniature of the father-being and one of the mother-being. “Wait,” said Astronaut Merrick, and went back into the ship for a fully cooked turkey he had brought as a token of appreciation. “Like this,” he said, miming eating, rubbing his belly. The father-being nodded and took the entire group to a large round table. The beings had by now absorbed his entire language simply by remaining for a few moments in his presence with their funnels open. “You can divide up this turkey,” said the father-being. Astronaut Merrick demurred but the father-being insisted. Astronaut Merrick took out his pocket-knife and  got to work. He gave to the father-being and the mother-being the head, the smaller beings each a wing and a leg. He kept the body for himself. After the meal, the father-being spoke. “I do not understand,” said the father-being. “How did you decide upon a division of your bird?” Astronaut Merrick held up a finger. “You are the head. You are the head as well.” This he addressed to the father- and mother-beings both. “To the smaller of you I gave leg and wing, leg to show how they stand upright carrying on your legacy, wing to show how they fly away and seek their own fortune. The body looks to me like my ship, which is why I kept it.” He stood and ran for the ship. The father-being could have overtaken and devoured him, but instead he nodded to show that he had appreciated Astronaut Merrick’s reasoning, and he waved affably at the departing craft.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

REGGIE'S DAY

Reginald P. Thenslow came out of his mansion and made a beeline for his limousine. At the grand bank building that bore his name, he made a beeline from the limousine to the front door. That was two beelines and it was enough for the day. At lunchtime he did not call his driver but instead went for a stroll around the block. The second corner brought him a strange sight, an old man planting a plum tree. Reginald P. Thenslow was not ancient himself, but he had felt the first stirrings of mortality, and the sight of the old man pulled a string within him. “You there,” he said, “what’s with this tree? You don’t imagine that you’ll be around long enough to eat from it, do you?” The old man straightened up as much as he could. “You never know,” he said. “If I don’t eat them, my son will.” Reginald P. Thenslow clicked his heels impatiently. “But you do know,” he said. “How old are you?” The old man began to count on his fingers. “I am ninety-nine,” he said. Thenslow bugged his eyes comically. “My word,” he said. “Well, listen, old man, I must be on my way, but if you get to the point where you are eating plum from this tree, make sure you tell me.” He went back to the office. A year later, a knock came on the door of the bank, after hours. The guards opened it. It was the old man, even grayer and more stooped. Slung over his shoulder was a sack. “I have come to tell the bank man that I lived to see the plums,” he said. He would have been dismissed as a raving mendicant had Reginald P. Thenslow not prepared his guards. “Please come in,” said a guard. They ushered him to Reginald P. Thenslow’s office. Reginald P. Thenslow was overjoyed to see the man. “My word,” he said. “You did it!” He instructed his guards to empty the sack of plums and instead fill it with money. “It is for you and your son,” he said. The old man thanked Reginald P. Thenslow and departed. A guard followed him home to ensure he was safe. Around the block, an old woman witnessed the old man’s arrival. She was intrigued by what she saw and instructed her husband to fill a sack with plums and go to the bank. He did. The guards let him in and then, on Reginald P. Thenslow’s instruction, pelted him with his plums. He ran home. His wife greeted him not with harsh words but instead covered him with kisses. “It could have been worse,” she said. “I am thankful the old man did not plant a coconut tree.”

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas


NEVER THOUGHT IT WOULD COME TO THIS

He had taken the boat out on Sunday but felt none of the old excitement. If he could find a buyer he’d sell it. He shook the hands of his guests with a firmer grip than was expected, meaning to crush the life out of them. One of the pictures on the table in the center in the place was his daughter on a magazine cover. On The Rise was the headline, and four young men and women beneath it, faces, bodies, figures of a coming uplift. He remembered one of Kate’s quotes. “I find the movies to be a site of opportunity,” she had said. He had read the quote out loud to his wife. “Miss U.N.” he had said, resurfacing an old nickname. Kate had already captured the public’s fancy with a supporting role in Room For Improvement, a comedy about young teachers. Later that year, she had her first star turn, in a movie called Anything But Time that was described as an “erotic thriller.” He didn’t see it but he heard good things about it from Jack, his law partner. He could have done without the lip-licking but he wrote it off as subconscious. The other movies came one after the other, titles that sounded like racehorses: Presently Engaged, Wink, Sullivan’s Call. He began to attend them and was amazed not just at Kate’s abilities but at the live wire that ran through her. She bought herself a mansion and bought him the boat. Now, off the boat, in the room, listening to the decent people all around him speak in whispers, he felt his fists clench. He smiled helplessly, remembering the body going down into the earth. “My baby, my baby,” he said, for the first time since she was a baby. Famously he tried to stand but was pulled back earthward by gravity and grief. They would talk about it for years. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Sunday, December 19, 2021

HINDSIGHT IS VENTI-VENTI

It had taken a minute, and he wasn’t sure whether it was because he had come back to the counter that afternoon to complain about his coffee — the peppermint flavor was just terrible and he couldn’t hold his tongue — or because she had started her shift with a surplus of goodwill and some residual loneliness, but regardless of how it had happened it had certainly happened. And look at them now. He had begged the world for love for a decade and stopped only when he felt the shame of the empty cup. She had dated copiously, been in and out of situations that would have broken a weaker woman, and had learned to chalk it all up to experience. But he had asked for a full refund. If I had known it was this awful, he said, I certainly would not have gotten a large. I would have ordered an even smaller size than you offer. not to mention that a cup of cleaning chemicals should not cost six dollars, he had said. She had knitted her brows sternly but burst into laughter. “It seems like you’re suggesting a second use for this delicious beverage,” she said. “It is a festive holiday flavor, beloved by — checks notes — all. She had refunded him cash from her own pocket. It had been near closing time and she had mentioned that it was cold to walk home so he had offered a ride, striking the right tone between conciliatory and hopeful. His fear, which was usually his defining feature, came out as if a surgeon had removed it. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

BIRD BRAIN

Surviving the day was like threading a needle. Not actually surviving, Howard explained to Violet. His existence wasn’t in question. He loved certain pleasures in life and was at any rate far too vigorous in his cowardice to ever consider ending things. No: he meant surviving in the sense of drawing nutrition from what was around him, in the sense of advancing the case of what it meant to be in the world. Violet wasn’t listening. She was thinking about how she had heard this same speech nearly every day for the past year. She had heard it in the car and in the park, in restaurants and in bed. It was in her head like sand in clothes after a visit to the beach, preventing her from feeling anything but irritated. She was watching a bird on a branch and wishing she was married to the bird instead. She would lavish kisses on its beak. When it shed a feather, she would wear it proudly in her hair. And she would dream of it, deeply, commingling sexual and spiritual satisfaction. But she had watched too keenly. She had been sensed. The bird, not wanting to lead her on, beat its wings and cut a path through the sky.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Friday, December 17, 2021

WRITING CLASS

The old woman commanded authority. Thomas leaned in for some of it. “Writing is choreographed empathy,” she said. He wrote that down. “Timing is not everything but it is the only thing,” she said. He wrote that down too. She cleared her throat for a longer enlightenment. “I have days when my writing is better and days when it’s worse,” she said. “I have days when it’s wetter and days when it’s burse.” She rushed at him, stepped back, cackled, stabbed herself in the face with her own fingernail. She was insane. Thomas turned and grabbed the gate. He shook it. In the larger unlocked room, a ghoul with a keyring clipped to her hip appraised him to the point where she removed her headphones. “Let me out,” he said. “Let me out,” he screamed. The old woman tapped him with the stabbing finger, effervescing menace. “We are here for good,” she said, “and gear for hood.” Thomas squeezed two desperate knuckles through the bars. The ghoul grinned and clamped her headphones back on.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Thursday, December 16, 2021

The Govindan Ananthanarayanan Academy For Moral and Ethical Practice And the Treatment of Sadness Resulting From The Misapplication of the Above

By Ben Greenman

Originally written 2009

The academy only lasted a decade, though the building that housed it, a former boomerang factory, still stands on the border between India and Australia. It is a modest edifice, low and long, built in 1912 by the firm of Eyre and Ananthanarayanan, which is today best known for its construction of warehouses throughout Asia but which was at the time interested primarily in erecting a structure for the manufacture of the company’s flagship product. Sections of the factory were rebuilt several times during its first decade, but the façade has been preserved unaltered since 1920. It is a somewhat interesting façade, or at the very least distinctive. There is one window shaped like a boomerang, and another shaped like the head of Markandeya, and midway between them a large iron door, above which is inscribed the official slogan of the Kaybee Karmic Boomerang Company, “We’ll keep you coming back for more,” which was coined by Andrew Eyre, the son of one of the founders, in 1914. Above the door on the inside are two signs, one above the other, that were installed soon after. The top sign bears a picture of a piglike man whose nose appears to be on fire. No one understands that sign. Below that, there is a sign that says, “How do you feel when the person who made you the saddest feels sad?” This same question appeared, printed on a small laminated card, in selected boxes of the company’s first shipment of Karmic Boomerangs, which were sent to toy stores and Hindu bookstores. Other questions in the series included, “When a thief is robbed, should you laugh or cry?” and “How long must the good man wait for his lifetime good deeds to redound to him?” Govindan Ananthanarayanan, also the son of one of the founders, composed eight of these questions in all, and affixed one to the longer arm of each Karmic Boomerang. The question above the factory door was his favorite of them. It was the one he kept coming back to—“like you might expect,” he joked, to the very mild amusement of his family and colleagues—and for that reason he had it turned it into a sign.

The question was interesting to Govindan mainly because he could not answer it. Karmic Boomerangs, which sold slowly at first, became, in the middle years of the decade, a huge hit in both Sydney and Bombay. You could see them everywhere in public meadows and beaches. One writer noted that “these chevrons of virtue fill the sky like a child’s drawings of birds fill a child’s drawings.” Their vogue was short-lived, however. They were considered novelties, though Govindan Ananthanarayanan insisted that they were in fact “functioning ethical devices,” and as quickly as they rose to prominence they fell away into obscurity. Both of Kaybee’s founding families had made small fortunes with the ethical boomerang by then, and while the Eyres went on to become tycoons in the construction industry—taking with them the Eyre and Ananthanarayanan name, which allowed them to do business in India as well as Australia—the Ananthanarayanans, and particularly Govindan, embarked on a more scholarly course. This was not entirely surprising. Before Govindan had composed the eight questions that were packaged with the karmic boomerang, he had briefly attended Oxford University, where he had begun to assemble research for a thesis on James Harris Fairchild. Whether Govindan was inspired directly by his father’s company’s boomerang has been lost to history, but what is known is that following the conversion of the company to a construction firm, he reopened the factory as an academy of ethics. Initially, the curriculum was restricted to only nine courses, eight of which were based on the questions from the Kaybee cards. (The ninth was a late addition entitled, “Should you ever lie to a man who tells you that he has always told the truth, but whom you suspect of untruth?”) Govindan himself taught “How do you feel when the person who made you the saddest feels sad?”

Govindan’s course notes no longer exist and as enrollment was extremely limited in those early years, we do not have any extant accounts from the perspective of students. We do, however, have a letter that Govindan wrote to a friend of his, a man named James Rouse, that deals with this same set of questions. A small amount of background is necessary. Govindan was a married man. He had, like so many young Indians, consented to an arranged marriage; his bride to be was Prabhavati Priyadarshini, a young woman whose parents were friends of the Ananthanarayanans. The wedding took place in 1922, and accounts of it suggest that it was generally happy. Three years earlier, though, when Govindan was first informed of the match, he rebelled, insistent that he be allowed to find his own partner. Shortly after, in the summer of 1920, while studying once again at Oxford, he took notice of a young Englishwoman, Louisa Pelham. She was nineteen at the time. Govindan and Louisa embarked on a short and rocky romance that summer, and when he returned to Bombay that fall, he announced to his father that he would not marry Priyadarshini. The family refused to recognize Gonvindan’s refusal. The next summer, Govindan returned to Oxford, only to find that Louisa had agreed to marry another man. Throughout that winter, he expressed his suffering in a series of letters to Rouse, an Englishman he had befriended who was also close friends with Andrew Eyre. Most of the letters between Govindan and Rouse have been lost. This letter survives: in it, Govindan reacts to the news that Louisa’s marriage is an unhappy one, and addresses the same question that would become the focus of his course at the academy.

Dear Jim,


I received a letter from Louisa last week in which she was entirely despondent. Now and again a line would be smudged as a result of what I assume were her tears falling onto the page. The reasons, as I know you know, have to do with her marriage to Barrett, and his treatment of her, which I am sure that you would call “beastly.” I can see you saying that precise word and shaking your head uncomprehendingly. Your failure to understand human cruelty is one of the most worthy things about you.


I have, though, a separate issue to confront. As I am sure you remember, Louisa, after taking me higher than a woman has any right to take a man, brought me lower than I thought I could go in this lifetime. It felt like I would have to ascend at least a few levels just to reach the sadness of death. It was hardly malicious on her part—after all, I was arranged to marry another woman—but it still, at the time, felt like I had been run through with a sword. There were mornings that I could not stand. 


Last week, when I received her letter, and discovered within a few sentences that she was writing from a place of great sadness, I wondered how I should feel. I mean this exactly as I have said it. I did not know how to feel. We all know about the German notion of Schadenfreude, or the Scots Gaelic aighear millteach, or the Hungarian káröröm, but those define a class of reactions to the general sufferings of others. Here, I am wondering about how to react to the sadness of those who cause you sadness. I would have thought that there was something in Louisa’s letter that would give me, at least for a moment, a kind of joy. She had spurned me, in a sense, and the choice she made elsewhere had turned out to be a bad one. Some would say it serves her right. But then I started thinking of the times that I would sit with her in the garden, or take walks with her, and the light that would stream from her eyes as she described the type of woman she wished to become in the world. The more vividly I remembered her presence, the more crushed I was to think that any part of that light has been extinguished by fear, exhaustion, or a sense of failure. It would be melodramatic to say that I cried her tears, but inaccurate to claim that they did not at least sting my eyes and make them water. 


And yet, there is a countermovement. Does she want my sadness? Is there not some danger of her feeling it as pity, or as an attempt to regain the power and control I lost when she turned me out romantically? Perhaps I am not the right person to feel sad for her. Perhaps disinterest, while impossible, would be more appropriate. I do not know exactly, Jim, but I welcome your thoughts on the matter. 

Yours,
Govindan


Rouse’s reply has survived.

 

My Dearest Govindan,

Your question is a hard one, which is why I am making no attempt to answer it. 

My thoughts on the matter are the same as usual—I feel like fitting you for a priest’s collar and then pulling it tight around your neck until you are dead. It would be a merciful act, my friend, as you have rarely shown even the slightest inclination toward existing in the moment or on this good green earth, where blood courses through bodies until it finds expression in unmentionable articulations. Your head is in the clouds, as they say, and clouds are in your head. Down here on the ground, we live not by ideas but by impulses and consequences. For my part, I recently put a bun in the oven of a lovely little Belgian nurse. She is carrying high and believes that it will be a boy. Can I trouble you for a few Karmic Boomerangs? They are no longer available at toy shops or Hindu bookstores here in London, but I think the little one would enjoy them.

Love to Prabhavati, 
Jim

Rouse did not take delivery of the boomerangs. This can be determined from the employment records at the academy, which show that only six months after this exchange, Rouse arrived to assume the duties of grounds manager and rugby coach, which had previously been performed by Andrew Eyre, who had departed for America. Rouse came without his Belgian girlfriend or his son. A note that Eyre wrote to Govindan at that time elaborates on the circumstances that brought Rouse to the academy. It is significantly more telegraphic than the other men’s  letters: “Jim,” Eyre writes, “ran. I understand. Found out that the child wasn’t his, decided to stay and do his part. Passed through a change. Became changed man. Then found out that the child was his after all. Some men would have been happy. Jim reasoned that any woman who would have been willing to have another man’s child was—well, Jim ran. Hope he’s good for rugby.” In fact, during Rouse’s time there, the institution earned far more renown for its athletics than it did for its moral and ethical instruction. The teams, whether in rugby or football, were extremely competitive, almost martial, and showed little mercy for opponents. In fact, the marked contrast between the comportment of students in the classroom and on the field became central to the curriculum. One course dealing with the issue, taught by Govindan in 1929, was called “If you destroy an opponent, should you be eternally worried that your opponent will one day return to destroy you?” 
 
The academy was shuttered in 1931, after a protracted lawsuit brought by the father of a former student who was injured during a rugby match; the suit held that Rouse’s style of coaching led directly to the injury. All of the academy’s remaining assets, including several dozen cases of boomerangs, were sold off to pay the settlement, as was the building itself, which became a community center and a museum dedicated to the history of the transcontinental border.  Govindan, who had managed not to lose any of his personal wealth, moved to Sydney with his family—and Rouse, still single, came along. In Sydney, two months later, out walking along the waterfront and back, Govindan Ananthanarayanan encountered Louisa Pelham Bartlett, who had come to Australia after the death of her husband. The two of them resumed a friendship, and Govindan encouraged her to strike up a relationship with Rouse, who was occupying a small apartment in the back house of the Ananthanarayanan estate. “I know that this makes no sense to you, because it makes no sense to me,” he wrote to Eyre in 1933, “but I want to keep her near me, and I am hoping that if she takes up with Rouse that it will achieve the desired effect. Desired effect: that is far too neutral and scientific a phrase for the almost childish joy I am hoping I might one day feel.” It was not to be. Rouse was, by this time, a hard man, impossible to reason with, let alone love, and his abrasive manner drove Pelham Bartlett away from the Ananthanarayanan family. More to the point, it drove her out of Australia; she soon married an American businessman, who then moved to Kyoto. Rouse insisted that Pelham Bartlett’s departure did not bother him, as he had felt nothing for the woman when she was present. Nevertheless, he was keenly aware that his friend was suffering from her absence all over again, and this brought on a nervous breakdown that landed Rouse in Sacred Heart Hospital. “You didn’t want her around anyway,” Rouse wrote to Govindan from the hospital. “She had harmed you. Don’t you remember? Why would you want to keep ties with someone like that? I must confess I don’t understand you. But I am sorry if I have harmed you.” After six months, Rouse was released, and he returned to the Ananthanarayanan home, where he began to work as a driver for the family. When Rouse heard in 1940 that his former girlfriend had died in a car accident, he was at the horse track with Govindan Ananthanarayanan. “A driver killed her?” Rouse reportedly said. “That evens the score.” He took off his driver’s cap, placed it over his heart, and lowered his head. “My failure to understand human cruelty,” he said, and began to laugh.

THERE WILL BE A QUIZ

“Lessons,” says Audrey. Audrey is the teacher. She has been here for years. “Lessons,” she says again. The class isn’t listening. They are talking amongst themselves. She taps the chalkboard with a telescoping pointer. A few heads turn her way. “I see our time here today is limited,” she says. “So not lessons. Lesson.” Most heads return to their previous position. To those still facing her, she delivers the lesson. “’He or she has achieved x,’” she says,  “is not code for ‘I have not achieved x.’” She collapses the pointer. She sits down at her desk. Her lesson spreads like a glow through a room of the blind. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

ABOVE THE TREELINE, BENEATH CONTEMPT

A series of balloons, each with the image of a human face printed upon it, was released from behind the wall. A woman stationed in the yard with an air rifle took shots at them. Her aim was nearly perfect after years of practice. She took down the first balloon (which carried the face of a famous singer), then the next (famous businessman), then the next (famous politician), each time needing only a single shot. The fourth balloon had printed on it a face the woman did not recognize. “Who’s that?” she said, half-turning to the man beside her. The man, her assistant, typed quickly on his computer. “It’s a writer,” he said. “Oh,” the woman said. A look of disappointment spread across her face. She didn’t even bother shooting at it. The fourth balloon rose into the air until it was no larger than a pinpoint and drifted out of sight. The man watched it go. The woman did not. The next day, the headlines read “Sky Writer,” “Writer Triumphs!” and “Brave Writer is Sole Survivor of Balloon Massacre.” The air rifle went back on the rack, plenty of pellets left. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Wednesday, December 15, 2021

PICKING THE HIPPO

They placated me. The man who patted me on the back until I could breathe right gave some money. “When it’s gone,” he said, and then winked in a way that led me to understand that there was more where that came from. Behind him on the wall were pictures of various animals. “Pick one,” he said. Ordinarily I would not have taken his suggestion, but he had been so kind to me. I perused the pictures. The dog was mangy. The snake was flaking all along its underside. The bird, labelled “potoo,” was entirely terrifying. I selected the hippopotamus. “The man folded his fingers wisely into a tent. “Good, good,” he said. “Your choice of animal is a type of code. It tells me how you will live and, more importantly, how you will die.” He handed me a brochure, along with some more money. “It’s all in here,” he said. I took it, suddenly filled with regret that I had not chosen the bird. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE GRILLING

The state she was in? Nebraska, Ellen joked, but it was not what Francine meant. For a lady whose first vote was for Adlai Stevenson, she was still sharp and searching. She understood more than she let on and understood how little she understood. “What state are you in?” Francine said. “How does he make you feel when he is looking at you and how does he make you feel when his back is turned? The difference between those will tell you everything.” Ellen felt around for a fitting description. “It’s when,” she said, stumbled, stalled, started over. “It’s when please isn’t a request but a demand.” As soon as she finished, she feared that she had been too abstract, but Francine was murmuring knowingly on the other end of the line. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

FLESH AND HEART FAILETH

He collapsed when antique, like many men. He was discovered in the alley behind the restaurant, just feet from where his beloved brother, the proprietor of the rather profitable establishment, left meat outside overnight to thaw, engendering the animosity of the health department but steaming on despite. His brother arrived to find not one but two kinds of meat. His brother wept. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE PHILOSOPHER

Mrs. Watkins, who lived up on the hill, believed that there was no such thing as good, only bad and temporarily not bad, and she had lived her life that way for as long as she could remember, waking to see if the weather was bad or temporarily not bad; tidying herself and going to the kitchen where her husband Earl was reading a daily paper full of news about a world that was either bad or temporarily not bad; driving down into and then through town in a predictable if not exactly foreordained circuit that included conversations with several shopkeepers, cafe owners, and fellow customers whose products and motives were either bad or temporarily not bad; driving back up the hill via a route that took her past the prison, filled with people who were either bad or temporarily not bad; waiting for Earl to finish up his workday — he was a tobacconist — and join her for supper, a moment on the sofa, and a stretch in bed where she could finally close her eyes and shut out the world, purchasing herself a momentary oblivion until morning came and the at least mostly bad sun woke her again.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

THE SURVEILLANCE STATE

His son was out sitting in the car, talking to someone on the phone. His wife was in her office, designing a flier for her new business. His daughter was at college, between classes—he knew this because she had told him her schedule, lamenting the short lunch breaks on Tuesdays and Thursdays. His mother was in St. Louis. His father was in the grave. His sister was vacationing in Florence with her new husband, Otis, a name that had not previously entered his life. His neighbors were blowing leaves loudly. And what was he doing? He was doing nothing. That’s all he could do. It was hard to do anything when your mind was divided so fractionally into the lives of others. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE MORNING PAPER

The headline had a name and an age, just those two things, which Keith knew meant that the person named was dead, which meant in turn that the name, which Keith recognized, which named a person Keith loved, had been vacated, which meant that Keith could not longer love that person in the same way, that he would be forced now to love that person in a different way, not through looks and words and reciprocated touches but through the tunnel of memory. Keith closed his eyes and opened them. Neither the name nor the age had changed. He turned his attention to another headline, one about the town council approving a delinquent tax drive. He had paid his taxes on time. He sighed with relief. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

HOW TO FIX IT

“Welcome.” The voice on the recording was, as always, calm. “Today we are going to look into how to change your attitude. Perhaps you woke up today aggravated. Perhaps the world seems…incorrect.” Ellis nodded. “Yes,” the recording said, as if it had seen him nod. “Here is what needs to be done. While you are speaking, pause mid-word. Pick a longer word to make this easier. During that pause, imagine that you are not yourself, but someone else. Maybe you are the grocery check-out clerk who is going too slowly. Maybe you are the man behind you who is grumbling aloud what you are only thinking. Maybe you are your daughter, convinced that your rules are too restrictive. Maybe you are your wife, disconcerted about the leveling off of your libido. Maybe you are a man in an elevator in a Hong Kong office building, ascending to a meeting that you suspect may be a corporate massacre. Maybe you are a woman on a street in San Antonio, trying to find your runaway daughter. The pronouns may not be instructing you properly, so let me clarify. Within your mind, get our of your mind. Truly and fully inhabit another perspective. If you cannot think of another one, use mine. Maybe you are me, in a giant mansion, luxury cars in my driveway, horses stabled, wives and mistresses in various rooms nearby, but unable to avail myself of any of it because I am trapped here, making this tape for you.” The tone was no longer calm. “Damn you!” the voice said. The tape switched off. Ellis, refreshed, stood.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Monday, December 13, 2021

BE BACK SHORTLY

Alan put a foot in the door, but it wasn’t his foot. It belonged to the old man who worked in Morse General Store. Alan had driven down there at five of opening Monday, eager to make his week’s worth of purchases, food, bicarbonate of soda, some nails and screws. The old man wasn’t there. It was nine and then five after. Finally the old man appeared on his bicycle, a skeleton pedaling. “What you waiting for?” he said. “For you,” Alan said. The old man waved him off.  “Time is a subject,” he said, “I’ve studied longer than you’ve been alive.” He made a sniffing noise. “Courtesy of kings,” he said. Alan, suddenly white with rage, stepped toward the old man and lifted him clean off his bike. He pulled him into the car and hightailed it for home. The old man started asking questions immediately and when they weren’t answered he started singing in a high reedy voice, first “How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live,” then “I Don’t Want Your Millions Mister,” then “Evicted Tenant.” Alan knew every song, which also made him think that he should know this old man, but he didn’t. The dirt road met with the front tires and particulated around the rear ones. Arriving home, Alan dragged the old man into the front hall, put his foot in the front door, and partly closed it. “This is rank cruelty,” the old man said. “And I know why you are acting this way!” Alan wheeled on him. “Why?” Alan said. The old man stared straight at Alan. His eyes bored into several spots on Alan’s face. “Because,” the old man said, “you have tried for thirty years to kill happiness in those around you, and you have failed every time. I am hungry, but I feed myself. I am frail, but I sing out. So you can just go ahead and act like a struck match. I’m not burning.” Alan knew that he wouldn’t take the old man’s foot out of the door. He’d make him stand there forever if that’s what it took. But something in what the old man had said was a hammer upon a string in his piano. “Dad!” he cried. His dad whistled “Arroyo” but didn’t say a word.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

A MINUS

Toward the end of a long day of teaching, two students came to the door of Arielle’s office. A young man and a young woman, both freshmen, each holding a draft of the final essay for the course, which had been assigned as “an analytical piece of writing comparing a place in literature with a place from your own life, paying special attention to what is remembered and what cannot be recovered.” The young man had written about the island in Lord of the Flies as it both resembled and specifically did not resemble a treehouse that he and his brother had constructed in their yard. The young woman had written about Paradise Lost and a threadbare couch in the apartment to which her father fled after abandoning her, her mother, and her brother, and in which she cowered as a pre-teen and downed vancomycin to combat shooting pains in her stomach that her father’s new girlfriend, a nurse, insisted was bacterial colitis but which the young woman believed was divine punishment for the sexual thoughts about her drama teacher that besieged her at night and which she had begun to manually reset. Both drafts received encouragement, though the language used was different. “Good start—keep going,” Arielle wrote on the young man’s paper. On the young woman’s: “I wonder what powers this little engine of lust and liability, which in turn drives this paper forward, and to what degree you recognize how much of what you have written is fueled by joy, even if it feels like sadness. I do not know how high you take take this, or whether the sky really is your limit.” The young man, revising more assiduously, obtained a slightly better grade.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

SHE TOOK A TURN

Esme was the first person I knew who acted bored to elevate herself. Before that it was the kids who couldn’t pay attention in elementary school, or the parents who came to concerts and spent most of their time sighing and looking off to the side. Esme had a different take on it all. To be bored was to be better. The world had not done its part to entice us. She never said a word about it but her conviction was clear in her geometry, the parallel lines of her eyes and mouth: no smirk, no frown, straight horizons, rendered with power none of the rest of us could fathom. She was beautiful, too, severely so. That’s why we were all so surprised when she took a turn halfway through college, first to breathlessly study wildlife biology—she would talk about bears and wolves breathlessly, at a velocity an earlier Esme would have derided—and then to throw that over, marry a jangly, nervous man five years her junior, and became half of a famous mime act. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Sunday, December 12, 2021

REUNITED AND IT FEELS SO GOOD

“One fine Tuesday morning two people who married wrong, him to a posh Englishwoman whose monied parents had already declared that they would never accept him, her to a popular standup comedian whose act disparaged women as ‘a bucket of smashed crabs’ and ‘a sack of hot nickels’ but who insisted he had nothing but respect for her, end up sitting next to each other on a train departing New York and bound for Florida. The journey is thirty hours long. Recalibrations of a romantic nature ensue.” That was Michael’s pitch. Diane, the president of the network, tapped a pencil as she listened. She had been married to Michael once. He had been a promising writer with a weakness for homiletic memoranda, especially around the holidays. She had been a production assistant. She rose. He did not fall but remained seated, as it were, at the base of the ladder. Of all the things she remembered about him, foremost in her mind was that he made her mixtape after mixtape but never found his way to the songs that had her name in them. “I’m going to have to stop you there,” she said, and the desperate look in his eyes made her want to kiss him.


©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas


Saturday, December 11, 2021

SEE WHERE IT LEAVES YOU

Yes, the imagery can be sublime, and no one need question his mastery of meter, but then there is the sententious manner that pervades the entire poem. That does not keep it from eminence but it keeps it from greatness. And maybe that does not matter. Maybe the images achieve altitude and the mastery maintains it. Start from the start: the red pants bespattered with blood and wine to the point where no one knows the difference anymore, the old men remembering thriving on their thefts, the best friends in love, the lovers at odds, the werewolf. See if that carries you through to the end. If not, see where it leaves you. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

A STEP AHEAD OF THE BUNCO SQUAD

Abby was explaining, for the fourth time, the game. “We’ll clear out the pension fund and then split the kitty? Know what I mean?” Herm knew what she meant. “That’s not what I meant,” Abby said. “We’ll divide up the cash.” Herm made an apologetic O with his mouth. He was not the swiftest man in the room, and there was only one man in the room. Abby loved him but she wasn’t sure how much longer she could shepherd him through all the thoughts in the world. “We’ll do this,” she said, “and then it’s happily ever after.” A coat of sincerity was already spreading across her voice, softening him to the point where he’d never notice her going for the knife.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

A PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM

There was ska on the radio and fried fish on the table and dusk light leaking through the curtains and a dog barking in someone else’s yard and a painting on the wall that showed three people standing equidistant from one another, facing front, a woman in the middle, a man on either side of her, the woman with the same hair color and sunglasses as the man on her left but the same complexion and clothing color as the man on her right, and the title of the painting was inside the painting, “Hands Off She’s Mine,” it said, on a sign over the three of them, in the window of the store whose sign said “General Store,” and the handling of the light effects in the store window, the reflections of the rear views of the three figures like a decal on the outer surface of the pane, the lights inside the store, from the overhead fluorescents to a neon beer advertisement, passing through like visual smoke through a curtain, was, taken as a whole, fully masterful. If only someone had been in the house to see it. The fish likely smelled delicious. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

NINE MINUTES TO FORGET

Fred Zevelman snorted scornfully and fretted the lapels of his suit. “I know what you mean,” he said to Arthur. “I’ve been following the progress of the country for years, and for the last five years it hasn’t been progress at all.” Fred was small, with an olive complexion and a round face that tended toward gloom. “Child of Saturn,” he liked to say. Fred had run four consecutive presidential campaigns, two successfully, two unsuccessfully. His last candidate, a Western Senator whose rough-hewn looks offset but did not obscure a brilliant mind (Rhodes scholar, practicing philosopher, chess grandmaster) had lost big. “People don’t want someone better than them,” Fred said. He gestured big to get Arthur’s attention. “But at this point, how can you give them someone worse?” Arthur jumped off the table. Arthur, a cat, licked his paws. Fred checked the clock. The reporter was due in ten minutes. That gave Fred nine minutes to forget everything he knew and instead manufacture optimism regarding the future of the nation. “And for that,” he said, “I’m going to need a drink.”

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Friday, December 10, 2021

THE BRIGHT FUTURE OF JOHN PIPPO

As for the question of why Ronald Pepper was known as “The Copper Enchiridion,” a byname given him by the newspaperman, radio commentator, and playwright Jules Hanford, we need only look to Hanford himself, who explained the sobriquet in the stage notes to his epic tragedy River Days, Ruined Nights (which ran, sadly, for only a month before the death of two of the play’s principals, the veteran actress Geraldine Grant and the rising leading man John Pippo, in a single-car wreck that the detective handling the case, Fred Furness, would not allow others to refer to as an “accident” in his presence, so certain was he that the automobile had been mechanically tampered with, the operators drugged, or the right and proper course of the vehicle otherwise doomed via malicious intervention, a belief that he pursued from the day he was called to the scene and a dying Grant croaked out two mystifying words, “Off Station”—a phrase that consumed Furness to the point that he had it tattooed on his bicep as a reminder to never give up searching for the true cause of the crash—to the day that he, Furness, was forced into retirement and moved to Phoenix with his wife Ellen and the couple’s live-in assistant, Lucy, who was rumored to be Ellen’s lover, and who, after Furness’s own death the following year from tuberculosis, moved with Ellen to a luxury condominium in Chandler, where she began to pursue the career she had set aside when she first came to work for the Furness family, pastry-making, with a specific focus on the deceptively simple but in fact immensely challenging cake, Baumkuchen).

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas


GOT YOUR BACK

Not a single word was spontaneous but not a single word seemed false. That was one of the things that she loved about him. He had been rehearsed for nearly a year, daily, always obliging, never objecting, so that when he was ushered into the boss’s office to amplify the presentation she had just given, to second her argument that she should be given not only a promotion but a raise, his words, clearly articulated, simply delivered, devoid of histrionic tone or gesture, almost granite in their authority, landed with maximum impact. The boss just stared at first. Slowly he regained enough control to make a slow and almost stunned series of nods. Afterwards, knowing they had made the best case possible, and that he had vouched for her out of a sense of deep devotion, she walked with him to the elevator. She pressed the button because he couldn’t reach. What a dog.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THIS AIN'T PROM NIGHT

Back before the world burned, Fareed had been living the life: a lucrative position with a firm of distinction, a wife who loved him or at least said she did, a significant collection of police badges, his hair. One Saturday morning he decided not to get out of bed just yet. He stayed there, first for the sex, then for the hash tea, then for the vintage cartoons on TV whose colors danced and swayed. He especially liked the theme songs, could anticipate lyrics before they were actually sung, and while it was probably memory he told himself that it was “escalated psychical ability.” The phrase, battlesuited with sharp k’s, pleased him immensely. And then he heard the high whine. He assumed it was something in the cartoon, but it stayed when he muted the set, and he furrowed his brow and frowned. The bomb hit at the corner of Warner and Weeks, vaporizing houses for a block in any direction. Eleven thousand other bombs fell upon the land that morning, dispersed randomly, deleting through blast nine hundred thousand lives. It was conventional ordnance, which the news took as a blessing. No need to worry about contamination or containment. You were either dead or you picked up and got on with it. The people in charge—mostly men, except for the Secretary of Defense—got on with it, responding in kind. And so on and so on. Fareed’s wife, visiting a frightened aunt, was exploded in the third phase.  When Saturday rolled around, the first Saturday since what he thought of as the Warner-Weeks Massacre, he tried to recapture the past: sex (with a paid companion—life was short, mourning shorter), hash tea (brewed double strength), cartoons (but none were on—only endless suited figures harrumphing about what was and what could never again be). His escalated psychical ability had failed him. Nor could he remember a single theme song. Fareed tried to turn off the TV but failed. Brenda, the escort, tried too. No luck. Had the government locked it on? Fareed paid Brenda, tipping generously, sent her home, resolved to take a long walk and compose remarks for his wife’s upcoming memorial. But he could not leave his bed until well past what would have once been dinner, and then he felt only terror stepping out onto his front lawn, where he saw dozens of other men and women also trying to emerge, sometimes waving at him, sometimes turning away, never speaking, tongueless wraiths peopling the inky night. He patted his pocket, where he had put two badges, one real, one prop, as if there was any difference anymore.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

SO ALIVE

Antonio was the youngest of six, the only son, the spitting image of his dear departed father, so there was no end to the tears when he decided to seek his fortune in California. His mother grabbed his hand and wouldn’t let go. “Pack a lunch,” said Julia, the sister he liked most, rhythming it like “Get a room.” Antonio grinned at her intervention and shoved another piece of cake into his mouth. Rosa, his oldest sister, was the car donor, the former owner of the yellow 1979 Cadillac Seville that was loaded dup and waiting on the driveway. The other sisters gave him smaller presents: a shaving kit from Luisa, a book from Bella, a stack of cassettes from Gabriella, the youngest. “I recorded introductions to the songs,” she said, “like I was a DJ.” Antonio hugged her, kissed his other sisters and his mother, chucked Julia on the shoulder, ran back up to his room to grab the bags of weed and pills he figured he’d have to deal when he first got out west. It was the last day of the 1980s, and he got in the car nearly certain that within a year he would be starring in a movie or at the very least a TV show, the toast of the town, headline material. He was wrong. It only took six months. And he was right. The headlines happened a year to the day after his drive from home: “TV Cop Found Dead,” him smiling in his headshot below, and him shot in the head and half-out of the Caddy, which was parked on the wall of the Tujunga Wash. Gabriella’s cassette was still playing in the car when the cops arrived, one song ending, her DJ voice taking over. “That was Love and Rockets,” she said, the joy in her voice frozen solid in another time. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Thursday, December 9, 2021

THE NEW HIRE

The new hire hopped into the van, radiating grudge. He hated the fall weather and the kind smiles of the women as they accepted their baskets of fruits and nuts. He insisted on driving and wore sunglasses that resembled nothing so much as the van’s back windows. Tina fiddled with the radio, knowing that he’d overwhelm whatever music she selected with his thoughts on government and the occasional necessity of fanaticism. He had very little to say about his own life, except that he was getting over a breakup, and also not getting over it. His first day he had announced in the sorting room that he had “lowered the lance, if you know what I mean,” but no one did—they just thought his name was Lance. The radio tried for holiday cheer. “I’m a talented artist,” the new hire said, and if it was anyone else, she would have thought he was hitting on her, but not this wrathful stack of cells. On they drove, into the precipitate dusk.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas