EVERYONE'S AN EXPERT

A skunk sat on a stump and thunk the stump stunk, but the stump thunk the skunk stunk. Then an adjoining tree, not yet cut down to a stump, began to emit a noise from a bough that protruded from its trunk, a hissing sound that was soon discernible as speech. The tree, via its limb’s hiss-speech, remarked loudly that the animal and vegetable kingdoms did in fact both possess a sense of smell, of a fashion, but that animals had honed it to a sharp sensory tool whereas plants more imprecisely detect volatile organic compounds, which allowed for favorable or unfavorable orientation vis-à-vis  zoological allies and pests, toxins (whether zoological, botanical, or protistan) and so forth, but that notwithstanding the finer points of olfaction, this or any other summation of the thoughts of the skunk and the stump regarding odors and their relative pleasantness was irresponsible speculation. It went on for a while in that vein. Finally, the skunk sitting on the stump jumped down, bumping his rump on a hump in the mud, and then debunked as junk science what the adjunct to the trunk had uttered. “Not to mention,” the skunk said, “that trees can’t talk.” The hissing fell away to reveal the sound of the wind coming through the leaves. “Right you are,” the wind said to the skunk. “Right you are.”

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THREE POINTS

The three points met for lunch and discussed, as always, why they made a triangle, why it was satisfying in some respects, frustrating in others, how they felt represented them but also limited them, would people ever see them as anything else, and then, as always, one of them brought up the possibility that they could sit in a straight line to erase the shape but that devolved, as always, into a disagreement about who would be in the middle and an observation that the two points on the ends would not be able to see each other, tone matter-of-fact with an undertone of plaintive, and another one of them brought up the possibility that they could invite a fourth point to lunch, and they voted, knowing they only needed a majority to pass the measure, defeating it unanimously.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

HE SET DOWN HIS BAGS, KNOWING HE’D NEVER LEAVE

He traveled to a town where people were born jaded, with hardened ideas and bone-weary thoughts, and acquired simplicity they aged. Young children were crammed full of certainty and made it painfully clear at every turn. When they opened their mouths, their opinions tumbled out of them like pebbles. Seniors asked nothing but questions and listened for answers with lambent eyes. Every leaf on every tree, every wavelet in every creek, was a song they longed to sing. At first he thought it was a crazy place, but he got used to it. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

HAPPY HE MARRIED HER

“You and I both know,” she said, “that a large nation should be governed as if it is a series of chocolate-covered candies taken from a dish, one by one. They should never be scooped, these candies, never greedily grabbed. They should not be eaten all at once, but rather one by one, to savor the taste, to preserve the period in which the dish can be viewed as still mostly full. Wise leaders cause no harm intentionally. Any harm is a single shard of candied shell, thrown free of the chocolate.” The president turned and smiled at his wife. She had done it again!

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

IT'S CHINATOWN, NED

“Didn’t he call on her? Before that last time, I mean?” The man with red hair didn’t answer at first. He stepped off the path onto the grass and then back onto the path. It was like he was resetting himself. “Okay if you don’t want to say,” the bald man said. “We know.” They knew that he called on her because they found a paper on the front lawn, a receipt from a dry cleaner across town, near where he lived. When they picked him up and told him about the paper he said that he didn’t use that dry cleaner anymore but they had already been to the place and showed his picture and the lady there had nodded once quickly and said “Ned, yes,” and got back to shaking pants straight. And they had even taken apart the story he had told about taking his car to the drive-in movie and getting back around ten because a drunk had leaned on it around ten past and had told them that the hood was cold and they knew the drunk to be honest. The man with red hair must have known that he was caught because off he went again from the path, and then back. “Make the call,” said the bald man, and the man with red hair slowly took out his phone and even more slowly began to dial Ned, a number at a time, the space between them widening as he went. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

HEALTH CODES

One of the Senator’s young staffers made the rounds of the restaurants the next morning. Most of the staffers were young, but this one was not excessively so,  twenty-two, maybe a year more, with a degree from a top-end Eastern college and a manner to go with it, an expensive suit worn casually enough that it seemed he had been able to afford it with ease, long hands that unfolded and folded like wings as they explained complex concepts, an earnest expression that did not quite conceal his contempt (and was not intended to), and that was how he came to the explain the new regulations to the town’s restaurateurs, mostly using words, sometimes gestures, touching fingertips together for gentle emphasis. In this manner was cannibalism  eliminated.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

MAKE SURE

Make sure you check out yesterday’s show. Make sure you check out tomorrow’s. Make sure today’s show is not the same as either. Make sure you know everything you need to know before you step into the room. Make sure you listen in a small or at least smallish place with low light, few distractions, a locked door, a comfortable chair. Make sure there’s a glass of water nearby. Make sure your shoes are the right size, or off. Make sure no one knows you’re in there. Make sure you have put your lands in order. Make sure you’re sure. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

A VERY SHORT STORY ASSESSES ITSELF

 The idea came to him and he couldn’t hold onto it. He wanted the world to know even if it was going out in an imperfect form. A different person might have kept it to himself for a while, refined it, constructed an elegant frame around it. Bill would have done that. Bill was always recommending that kind of thing. “When you wait,” Bill said, and then waited himself, not bothering to fill in the second part of the sentence. No matter. He had filled it in repeatedly over the years, with words and actions both. Everyone knew what Bill believed. Bill believed that patience was a virtue and that refinement and frame-construction increased visibility and reputation—and in turn the rewards that redounded to the creator of the idea. But he was not Bill. He could not wait or at least would not. The idea came to him and he couldn’t hold onto it. He released it into the world. Response trickled back, mostly positive, some remarking admiringly upon the brilliance of the idea, but a rivulet. He got in the car and started driving to Bill’s house, demoralized by the rivulet, already suffering from the ebb in ego that would intensify when he arrived at the house, pulled into the circular driveway past Bill’s many cars, and found Bill sitting out on his front patio being patient. Servants would be bringing Bill cheese and shoe polish and whatever else he desired. He braced himself for this ebb in ego as he drove up the hill, but he also opened himself up to the surge in excitement he would feel when the next idea came, which, if history was any indication, would be well before he arrived at the house. He wondered if he would have to excuse himself to use the bathroom and instead run out behind the house and release that idea, too. It had happened before. It would happen again. He steered the car with his imperfect hands and felt his own heart beating faster than Bill’s ever could.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

SALES CALL

The salesman was knocking on the door, and then he stopped knocking, and took the door down, removing the hinge pins by tapping on the bottom of them with a nail, just enough to get a grasp, then pulling with his fingers, then sliding a piece of cardboard under the door and lifting at the knob and the hinge. The door was off. Then he opened his case—this operation was considerably easier—and showed a series of samples to the lady of the house, her husband, their children, a visiting cousin. Products were purchased at the advertised price, after which the youngest son was designated as the pack-mule to carry everything upstairs to people’s rooms. He had to do all of it, and quickly, because his parents were watching. The case was now empty, and the door was returned to the frame, hung from the top hinge, reacquainted with the bottom hinge, repositioned, shut, and latched. “Knock knock,” the salesman said sarcastically. “Who’s there?”

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

IN-PERSON VOTING

“She won’t wake up.” It is important to take the temperature of the tone immediately. Is it panicked, with a worst-case-scenario rising of pitch, a dad shouting down the stairs that something’s wrong, or is it compressed frustration, coal on the way to diamonds, a parent wagging a finger w/r/t a lazy daughter? It’s the latter. “I told her that we’re leaving in a half-hour.” The voice comes back from the home office, Mom, distracted: “Sleeping teenagers can’t tell time.” And then Dad again, put upon, though he’s put it upon himself, transferring his frustration from daughter to wife, “You’re not helping.” Pull the camera up, quickly, not even by crane but by spring-loaded launch, vertically along the pole that’s rises along the southeast edge of the cutaway bedroom, to an altitude where it reveals that on the other side of the daughter’s night table there’s a figure, crouching, dressed in all black, a knife in his hand that catches the key light and produce a visible glint that won’t need to be digitally enhanced later on, and the camera then swings slightly northwest so it’s over the figure, which stands and stretches so that the blade hangs down like a descender from the end of the arm. Anyone who was pretending to sleep is not pretending now. “Why?” says the daughter, and the actress playing the daughter, and the audience watching the actress play the daughter. “She won’t wake up,” the figure repeats, in a voice the audience recognizes as that of the mayor. Title card, in dripping red: “Election Day.”

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Idea

HORROR MOVIE

The kid’s at the door. He wants to talk to your kid. The kid at the door insists that you should let him in, even when you tell him that your kid’s not home. “Let me in,” he says. “I have to get something from his room.” You don’t let him in. That’s ridiculous. “That’s ridiculous,” you say. “He said,” he says. You don’t care, and say so. “I can’t let you in,” you say. “You’ll have to stay at the door.” He stays at the door. You call your kid. “I don’t know that kid,” your kid says. You go back to the door. The kid’s gone. There’s a car idling by the curb, the heavenly harmonies of “Helplessly Hoping” wafting from the windows, which are rolled most of the way up. You walk your front path down to the car, peek inside. It’s empty. You look back toward your house. The kid’s at the door. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

EXTENSIVE PREPARATION

Up along the tower he went. Down from the tower came the handbills. On each handbill was instructions for what to do. On the back of each handbill was instructions for what not to do. He had hand-lettered the original and then run off copies in the print shop, careful to give each one a unique touch, maybe a decorated letter that create a sense of illuminated manuscript, maybe an extra slogan in all gaps. The handbills fell through the air to where people would have been standing had the place not been empty. The handbills fell to the ground. He stayed in the tower, waiting for people to come and read the instructions and learn what to do and what not to do. The sun set and rose and set again, signaling a long wait.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

YET ANOTHER 48 HRS

He traveled all day, leaving his equipment behind. He traveled all night, leaving the day behind. He traveled all the next day, leaving himself behind. He traveled all the next night, coming to a small village, entering the first building he saw, finding it unoccupied to his eyes but hearing voices, climbing a flight of stairs to a second level that was brightly lit but also empty, still hearing voices, walking through a door at back and coming into a room that was dark and close, with music that pleased him, wondering if this is what he had been hearing, meeting a woman who offered him a drink, turning to sit with her and instead seeing himself motionless in a chair, eyes closed, holding a box that contained his equipment. Two days on the road, and nothing had been obtained except for complete knowledge of himself. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

FOR COMPARISON PURPOSES ONLY

He invented glasses that allowed him to see the world in focus, but not optically, not just: they bathed people in one of two auras: a red one if the person was doing better than he was, a blue one if the person was doing worse. When he first prototyped them he had only a single pair, and each morning he took them out of the ionized bath in which they spent the night and set out for his walk, beginning outside a banker’s club where the first man out, the biggest banker, was fully crimsoned and nearly everyone was red (nearly everyone, because the glasses could sense suicidal thoughts, impending divorce, or even financial imposture), continuing on through downtown, where the reds and blues were mixed in equal measure, though with some surprises (a famous actress emerging from a limousine was a royal blue, and a man slumped at the head of an alley with a “Will Tell Jokes For Food” sign propped in front of him and no apparent teeth, was a bright red), and then on into the warehouse district, filled with optimistically red young people in flannel and corduroy and older blue backers in suits. After his walk, he went home and took notes, tightening the algorithm, ensuring that what the glasses saw was more than simple net worth or even average mood, but that they were delving deeper, measuring true human potential and confidence in the delta of that potential, and he capped off most nights by putting on the glasses and looking in the mirror, marveling at the perfect purple hue with the faint blue edge, which told him that he was doing the same as he was (this was tautological but also the baseline calibration for the glasses) but ever so slightly better than his reflection, which was a version of him that belonged to the past. This was one of the first selling points of the glasses when they went to market — that they could be used not only in public but in private. “Hue for you” went one tagline. “Eye color or I-color?” went another. The PerSpecs, as they were called, were an instant success, popular both as a novelty and as a spur to a thousand think pieces: “What We See When We See Others” was the headline of the first, which was one of the best, in that it came down ultimately on the side of the product, emphasizing the way they might promote and even produce empathy (he hadn’t even thought of them) and warning people that adverse reactions were illustrations of an inner imbalance in users more than the fault of the device, which was “engineered like a marvel, and available in sunglasses, single vision, and progressive.” He still went out on his walk every morning, and he felt his heart lift when more and more of the world turned blue—even, one day, the biggest banker in the club. Sometimes he even slept with the glasses on to see if they would cast an aura around the figures in his dreams. They did not. But something happened before the next time. Within a month or so, the think pieces started to turn. More magazines worried that constant assessment of relative value might have a lasting negative effect on society, and more tech sites began to carp about inconsistencies in the quality of their manufacture. And then there were the “walkabouts,” in which journalists and then celebrities wore their PerSpecs for a day or a weekend and recorded what they saw. That exposed the algorithm as subjective to some degree and possibly superfluous: one columnist saw her husband as blue and was then perplexed when her husband also saw her as blue. “In the end this was both a source of calm,” she said. “If we contain seeds of our own superiority but also furnish that same superiority to others, is this not ideal? But is it not also an indictment of the device, which is performing a task—one of comfort in self-concept—we could (and maybe should) without it.” The accompanying photo showed her in both red and blue, which he thought looked too much like a 3-D movie still and not enough like what his glasses showed.  He was not bothered by the piece. Many inventions helped people do what they were already doing. But something about it took root and a poison tree began to grow. Sales leveled off, and then plummeted. His business manager told him that he needed to think about a change in direction, and soon. “If you get a call from me some day and it’s not yet noon, it’s not good news,” she said. He was in a conference where he debated the columnist and when they both put on their glasses he saw her red, though he lied and told her it was blue. “And you are blue to me,” she said. “Does that make you feel more at home?” he said to appreciative laughter from the mostly red crowd. He stopped taking his daily walk when he saw paramedics loading the Will Joke For Food man into an ambulance, and behind their red auras he saw the prone man still faintly red. He dreamed of blue kings and models and tycoons though he knew this was just a cruel trick his mind was playing on him. He woke one morning to a feature on a talk show about “corrosive narcissism” that used his glasses as the accompanying graphic. He opened the newspaper and the first article he saw focused on “psychological reclamation of the self from others.” Again, his glasses were the graphic. His business manager called him. He looked at the clock. It was ten-thirty. He did not answer. The answering machine blinked red.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

BUCKLE DOWN FOR BOZO

The clown came in screaming. “This isn’t what I asked for,” he said, shoving the basket of fruits and cookies back in your face, and everyone laughed, but the laugh died out quick, because fundamentally all involved were professionals — all on your side at least, or maybe it’s more to the point to say that fundamentally they were all humans, trained to laugh at a clown, maybe even wired that way from birth, and later in the evening that question would nag at you, the question of whether the laughter was wrong or whether the cessation of the laughter was wrong, or maybe neither of those was wrong but something else overarching them both was wrong, namely the fact that you were putting the clown’s actions and the responses to those actions before your own needs, that you were allowing the question of his rage and its risibility to obscure the fact that you had handpicked the fruits and cookies, spent hours in fact, and that the reality of your effort was now lost in the tangle of someone else’s violent neurosis, and you wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t eat, and eventually Marcus would put his hand on your shoulder and tell you that the question needed to be answered but that perhaps it would be better answered by a psychologist and a neurologist, ideally both at once, convenient, Marcus would then say, since Drs. Borman lived down the street, he a psychologist, she a neurologist, and they stayed up late most nights watching old movies so you could just go over there and knock on the door and one of them would answer, probably her, and you’d get invited inside for a drink, and sure, maybe you’d get the sense of something a little too close in the place, not creepy exactly but sensual, maybe you wouldn’t be able to fend it off, maybe you wouldn’t even want to, since the Dr. Mrs. Borman was a beautiful woman, and you’d had your phases with women, not just college, once in Phoenix for about six months, and it was fantastic, really a transport for both of you, but in the end she said it was like “effing a mirror,” though she didn’t say effing, she went ahead and used the real word, and you let loose with an out breath of shock, though it wasn’t a word that truly shocked you, it was more like a release and a relief, though you also had to admit that she was one thousand percent correct, especially when the two of you lay side by side, and you parted as friends, and you rented a U-Haul and said goodbye to Phoenix, but how did the Dr. Mrs. Borman know any of this, I mean, the Dr. Mr. Borman maybe, he was a great listener, but you’d regain a sense of why you knocked on the door in the first place, fight down your rising feelings, there’d be plenty of women later, plenty of men, that’s not what you came for, you were here on a referral from Marcus, and you’d ask your question about the clown, and she’d say that before they answered she needed to know exactly which clown you meant, and you’d tell her, and she’d  roll their eyes, and any soupçon of seduction would be gone, suddenly, completely, and the Dr. Mrs. Borman would fold her arms across her chest and say, “Bozo? He’s just an asshole—I know him better than you think—he was our contractor for the extension for our house and he had no goddamned idea what he was doing—we drew up very specific plans with him and then he was like a man trying to climb up a greased pole—just no sense of how to make it through a process unscathed—I’m not surprised he put you through the wringer on this basket thing though I am sorry to hear it—Jesus—what a jerk—Jesus,” and you’d shake her hand, feeling a little foolish, but what else are you supposed to do in a case like that, advice given, advice received, and you’d hoof it back to Marcus in time to have him kiss you goodnight, he’d have an interview in the morning, he was really trying to catch on in local arts administration, and you’d think about climbing into bed with him, just for the warmth, you and Marcus would never think of anything beyond that, why blow up thirty years of trust, but instead you’d fall asleep on the couch dreaming of hitting Bozo with a car, a clown car, and you and all the other drivers would get out one by one, each falsely expressing concern, each leaning in to see how hurt he was, each suppressing a laugh as water shot from the flower on your lapel and splashed his already crying face. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

TIME WELL SPENT

We had climbed for hours to meet the great figure, who was, to our eyes, neither male nor female, neither old nor young, perhaps not even human except for the ways in which it was incontrovertibly human, the awareness in its eyes of the limits of others but perhaps not its own limits. Roots went deep into the earth, presumably, beneath that long taupe robe. Wild white hair shot out in all directions. We caught our breath and then turned toward the great figure. “Listen closely,” said Howard. “Shut up, Howard,” said Sally. “We climbed for hours. I think that we know to listen closely.” Howard said something else that dissipated. They were always fighting, the two of them. They never should have started dating. Joan recalled us to the moment with a handclap. The figure had been waiting but betrayed no impatience. The figure brushed aside a stray strand of hair and spoke. “Only one secret.” We waited, betraying impatience. The figure spoke again. “Read big books in small rooms.” The climb back down was lighter than air. Howard and Sally held hands.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

TWO TREES: A PARABLE

A bird ripped off another bird’s song. The second bird was just one tree away, in a shorter tree, and that first bird, in the taller tree, had practiced for weeks, maybe even months, had felt his way through the song, not only mastered the melody but added personal touches, elongating a note, shortening up a rest, beginning a thrilling trilling part toward the end and then suddenly snapping off into silence. But what did any of that matter? The Second Bird had a brain, and that brain had a maze, and that maze had arrows on the floor that indicated its mission, not especially complex, but not resistible at any rate: to listen and to lift. Listen, check. Lift, check. The maze had converted the song to community property. Had nature widened the world or narrowed it? How hard would the First Bird cry? Would the First Bird compose a new song that told the tale of the theft? An epic? Only history could say. At the base of the trees, two men punched each other in the face, shouting the names of each others’ wives and daughters. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

PERFUME THE ROOM

Coyotes at night, making the sound of a child, or was that a child making the sound of a coyote? She’s settling on a cover photo for her album, having narrowed it down to one of three scenes shot in extreme fisheye: one shows her and her husband, one her by herself and one a row of mailboxes with a little girl standing in front of them, waving a bright yellow flag. She is squinting through a loupe inspecting small prints. Why hadn’t she just asked the label to send over larger images? Because Bryan worked there, that was why, and she had, for years now, been unable to make any demands on him other than that he continue to love her. That was more than enough. That was more than more than enough. She remembered sitting with him in a bar when nearly everyone else had gone. This was the first night they had met. She was putting on an Eastern European accent. He knew it was fake, and she knew that he knew, but she kept it on anyway because she saw that it pleased him. That night, the first night, but much later, they had climbed up on wall by the river and flailed their arms like they could fly or were about to fall. That night, still the first night, but even later, she had held her head close to his ear and breathed out a lullaby even though there was no thought of either of them sleeping. The years since: love, hate, weddings for both of them to different people, a second wedding for him to a third person, cars, homes, kids, one moment of sweet backsliding in the back room of a party at Palos Verdes, gentle laughter drifting up from both of them to perfume the room. She knew in a flash that the girl with the flag was the right image for the album. What did that hue of yellow represent if not hope? The child howled in assent. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

PAID SUMMER INTERNSHIP

She took a job throwing scraps of food down to the baby dinosaurs, which were, to be clear, real dinosaurs, revived embryonically with the help of DNA extracted from blood found in the proboscis of a fossilized mosquito and brought thusly into the modern world. Matty and Patty, the babies, went for the meat almost delicately, with tapered claws that they worked like hands, and she could have sworn that Matty wiped his mouth with the back of a scaly arm afterwards. She was in love with them and in love with the owner of the zoo, who reminded her of her grandfather even though he was her age, maybe a year or two older. He maintained a rugged beard and wore unironic boots. For his part, he was the heir to a publishing empire who had opened the zoo with a fraction of his trust money (its total operating cost came to about a quarter of the fraction he had used to fund the research to bring back the dinosaurs), and the love he professed for her in return, often, on walks, at dinner, in bed, mid-act, was gainsaid by the fact that he was concealing the grisly deaths of three previous keepers, all of whom he had also dated. Money had bought the dinosaurs and it had also bought silence regarding their murderous ways. “Where should we eat tonight?” she asked him, oblivious, blissful.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

WEININGER'S MONOGRAPH

 Weininger, contemplating all that is before him, shrinks back without coming to a conclusion. Yes because he does not accurately report how much in the field he has observed, absorbed, walked through, touched, turned over, his “analytical odyssey” turns out to be slick and superficial, though sometimes with an undeniable mastery and even majesty, as in the moment early on when he describes how the shape of Harris’s cramped bedroom/office “harmonizes precisely” with the shape of Harris’s clenched first, down to the protrusion that is one case a bay window and in the other a thumb, and this is enough to recommend the entire monograph, notwithstanding the fact that it is written on rags, with crayon, and stuffed into a hole in the cell where Weininger now molders, serving out concurrent sentences for embezzlement, assault, and public indecency, dreaming his way backward through time to when he could open the door to the house he once owned and see Maria sitting on the big red chair, reading a book about pleasure, ignoring him to maximize it. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

MAY SWEEPS

What is the best opinion of all time? The show kicked off with a fistfight. A man leapt down from a tree with a scythe and went to town, slicing air primarily, as he was a Jainist. The woman who was the brains of the program, its architect and shadow host, took rapid notes in a leather-bound journal whose spine identified it, puckishly, as “The Holy Bible.” And then the opinions started to roll up the aisle: political, philosophical, culinary, sexual, aesthetic less often than would have been assumed, increasingly cultural-representational, some about the weather, some about the relative appeal of different breeds of dog, and finally pinpoint ethical assessments of specific humans in specific situations, current and historical both. The welter ended. The judges were wheeled out. The woman who was the brains of the program cued them one by one. The audience fell silent. What was the best opinion of all time? 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

ARMED INSURGENTS

The military is prepared to act. There are noises in the room downstairs. A group of people is clustering by the door, listening to the dogs bark. The kids (don't call them kids--they are teens, and one might even be twenty) have put on novelty t-shirts, the boys and girls alike, and are in the process of eyeing each other, deciding when what was donned can be doffed. One is sweating too much. One is giggling without full control. One is already thinking about which bed she'll use. She's the one who's twenty. The people listening to the dogs are much older, mostly bald. Their thoughts are chaste. Someone somewhere calls out the name of a great song. A bald voice begins to sing it. The one who is twenty makes up her own lyrics, which have everything to do with geopolitics and philosophy, and nothing to do with love. A grasp of dogs is clustered by the gate, listening to her sing. "Hot Shit University," says one shirt. "Cinco de Mayonnaise," says another. "Take My Hand, Contraband," says a third. The song is almost finished. The dogs are almost finished. The military is prepared to act. 

⊙2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

LATE FOR HIS APPOINTMENT

Energy savings. Homestead builders. Serving the community. Family owned. Patio chairs. Scatterings of seeds. A dead hand. A dead phone. A call never made. Green overalls: signifying what? A flat tire on the workman’s van, no visible damage, supports the theory that it’s the consequence of a slow leak, meaning that the van has been at this location for a while, detective work, the house abandoned, a double-hung window replacement leaning up against the front door, no one home, has anyone ever been home, close your eyes and the house disappears back through the years, Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Cordilleran Ice Sheet, Pleistocene epoch, no house, no convenience store, only grassland, striated by ice, occasional trees, no van. Time recovers its footing. The dead hand moves around the dead phone which is suddenly illuminated. Thousands of satisfied customers. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

"ONE MAN SAID IT / THE OTHER TOOK THE CREDIT"

Eight. Ninety. Impossible to believe without substantiation. Twenty. Twelve. Dragging ass through the field, heading to work. Is that you, Mo-dean? Sinking upward into a field of stars. Eleven unquestionably. So this advice we now must give: the father must die so the child may live. Four? Sixteen? Seven? Orderliness requires a full rethink. Arriving at work to find the doors already closed and the lock stuffed with chewing gum, he reached into the left pocket of his jacket, which was the same brown color as the dead grass that ringed the building, took out his phone, and called home, knowing she wouldn't answer. A motley of other numbers tumbled incapably from an upper window.

@2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

TOP OF THE LINE

Would that I had a series of notebooks to fill, or even a single notebook, instead of this paltry paragraph, then I might illustrate how we are at the mercy of forces larger than us, forces that not only steer the vehicle in which we ride through life, but construct the vehicle, appoint it, paint it, place within it a state-of-the-art stereo system that allows some of those within the vehicle—the driver, primarily—to listen to music at extremely high volumes without sacrificing audio fidelity, thus allowing for the deciphering of lyrics that would, if transmitted via a less sophisticated system, or transmitted to someone sitting elsewhere in the car, be garbled, blurred, and muddied, to the point where one of the vehicle’s passengers might, tilting head and narrowing eyes, say ‘Did he just say, ‘Out for glub’?” to which the vehicle’s driver, positioned at the exact center of the car’s latticework of directional sonic vectors and thus at the optimal location within its immersive soundscape, would, with level head and open eyes—open not only because he is driving, but because he is confident and relaxed (the seat is also peerlessly comfortable) laugh and say ‘Out for blood—blood.’” And just like that, no more space to discuss. Has the metaphor been permitted adequate respiration? What image is in the mind of the average reader? Are people thinking of fate or of automotive specifications? A bunch of notebooks would be better for explaining, is the point.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

PERPLEXED BY TIME

It is impossible seriously to believe that a the passage of a hundred years or two hundred years will be different from the passage of twenty. He (the man I will not name, so as not to give him the satisfaction) will still stand up from the table and declare his hate for the food. She (the woman I will not name, so as not to give her the burden) will still remind him that he cooked it, that he bought the ingredients, that he insisted on the menu, so that any dissatisfaction must be borne by him and by him alone. She’s eating an apple she bought on the way home. He will yell about how it is too early to eat lunch at any rate. “The sun has just come up,” he will say. She will laugh. “That’s the moon,” she will say. “You are a fool, or at the very least perplexed by time.” The bones of the house creak. Vultures circle. If the table does not crumble into dust, it is a simple matter of luck. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

JUNIOR

First, the Boston Strangler. Then the Cleveland Mangler. Then the Philly Dangler. Then the Dallas Angler. He just fished, never killed, well, killed fish, but evidently that’s acceptable, you can just go around with a hook and a line and—look—homicide, but it’s not homicide because of the root, homine, man (maybe piscicide?). Years ago a man from Dallas on vacation, not the Angler himself but a business associate, boarded a boat and took it into the ocean, his paid captain his only companion, and out he went, kite-fishing, and about forty minutes after leaving port, a short time for the man but an eternity for the captain, who was battling cancer, who knew his days were numbered, they caught a sailfish, brought it in with difficulty, and that man, then and there, to the amusement of the captain (an amusement that he exaggerated to hide his disdain) nicknamed himself the Exuma Wrangler. Was he thinking of his friend back home? It is a safe assumption. “Good work, George,” said the captain, clapping the man on the back, his disdain darkening. The captain outlived his cancer and came to regret the months of spinning every action, thought, and utterance downward. He took up a spiritual practice that was Eastern but syncretic and spoke often of “lifting the hand off the wound and recognizing there was no body there in the first place.” George’s sister’s cousin was strangled to death in Baltimore by a man with no nickname at all. Raymond Thomas Armstrong, Jr. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

FRAGMENTS FROM JEANNETTE! THE MUSICAL

By Ben Greenman

Originally Composed June 2007

 

This musical is a tribute to the June 1881 sinking of the USS Jeannette, which was seeking passage to the North Pole through the Bering Strait. It was originally published in the New York Herald—whose publisher, James Gordon Bennett., Jr., owned the Jeannette and co-financed the expedition—in 1891, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the tragic event. Unlike the more modern musicals, this one was written in the fashion of a Harrigan/Hart production; in fact, a critic at the time suggested that Harrigan play the role of the sailor, and that “seafaring is not so distant from The Mulligan Guards’ Surprise as one might imagine.” Because the musical itself was long—more than five hours—we have chosen to reproduce only its centerpiece, the mournful, jaunty “Sailor’s Overture.”

 

[The ghostly figure of a SAILOR appears. Icicles hang from his beard.]

 

SAILOR

 

The HMS Pandora

Her name contained a warning

Perhaps we should have heeded it

And avoided needless mourning

 

A few years after she was built

James Gordon Bennett, Jr. bought her.

From Le Havre to San Francisco:

That was where he brought her.

 

Bennett was a wild man

A rich man who lived fast

He published New York’s Herald

His fortune was quite vast

 

He made his name financing Stanley

He lived like a rogue and a dreamer

He placed his money and his trust

In this bark-rigged wooden steamer

 

He renamed the ship the Jeannette

And decided he just couldn't wait

To sail up to the North Pole

Via the Bering Strait

 

So just above the Napa River

In Mare Island Navy Yard

The Jeannette was given new boilers

Her hull was thickened and made hard

 

On the eighth of July, eighteen seventy-nine,

She departed from the dock

The weather was cold and rainy

The time was half past ten o'clock

 

She sailed under Naval command

Though she was a peacetime ship

Twenty-eight officers and enlisted men

And three civilians made the trip

 

The captain was brave George DeLong

An upright Navy man

He pledged himself to fully serve

His patron's fateful plan

 

The ship's Chief Engineer

Was George W. Melville

The names of these fine sailors

They stir my spirit still

 

It took a month or maybe more

To reach the Norton Sound

Then we sailed away from St. Lawrence Bay

And the crew was Arctic-bound

 

By September we had spotted

Herald Island. (As some tell it,

It was named for Bennett's newspaper

When in fact Henry Kellett

 

Back in eighteen forty-nine

Had landed there and named it.

Walked around it, kicked some stones,

Put a flag down and then claimed it.)

 

Near Herald Island, in the water,

Was Wrangel Island, small and cold,

DeLong tried to go east of there

His orders were perhaps too bold.

 

Then came that fateful winter day

Which began like any other

One sailor dreamed of flying,

Another of his sainted mother,

 

Another still of sitting

On a warm beach way down south.

The name of his young girlfriend

Lay gently in his mouth.

 

"Come up, come up," the captain said.

"We're locked into the ice."

It hemmed us in on both our sides

And held us like a vise.

 

At first we didn't mind it

Our eyes stayed on our goal

We were drifting Northwest

Ever closer to the Pole

 

Our instruments were working

Our spirits remained high

We took our soundings and positions

We marked the stars up in the sky

 

In May of eighteen eighty-one

We spied some islands in the distance

We gave them names and marveled

At our sturdy craft's persistence

 

But marveling is irony

And pride precedes a fall

And soon enough our progress

Had slowed down to a crawl

 

Now the ice was pressing in

And crumpling the hull

The way a great and fearsome weight

Can crush a grown man's skull

 

We jumped off the Jeannette

And unloaded our supplies

Dragging three small boats to safety

We heard our ship's last cries

 

She sank on June 13th

In the early hours of dawn

We put our packs upon our back

And went to soldier on

 

We searched for open water

Our hope was strong at first

But some were felled by cowardice

Others by hunger or thirst

 

The three small lifeboats we had manned

Eventually broke through

One drifted off, forever lost,

Thus leaving only two.

 

Of those two boats, one came to shore,

George DeLong was inside.

Some scouts were sent ahead

The men who stayed behind all died.

 

The third boat reached the Lena River

Its sailors lived. But then

Melville showed his mettle and

Went back to find the other men.

 

Beneath the frozen corpses

Were the expedition's notes.

Those he brought to safety

With a fleet of rescue boats.

 

Twenty men were lost in all

Only thirteen kept their lives

Thanks to Melville's bravery

Our memory survives

 

Time has kept on moving

It's what time tends to do

And we wish to be remembered

The lost men of that crew.

 

So I claim this month for us,

The men of the Jeannette

We are all that's happened

And what hasn't happened yet

 

Once a year, please think of us,

Who expired in polar snow,

And not J.J. Abrams's birthday

Or that of Ross Perot.

 

Do not think of Paris

Or what happened to Tony

Or the newly filed divorce papers

Of Keener and Mulroney

 

Think instead of the Jeannette

And the men who took her north

Summon up our story

Let our memories come forth

 

I was among the twenty

I perished with a groan.

The ice was all around me

And I was all alone.

 

ACHILLES HEEL

This was a remarkable admission. Here was a man who had, for decades, lectured extensively at the finest universities, at private institutions devoted to advanced thought, in the boardrooms of corporations who had recompensed him handsomely for his time, on the most difficult and dense social, economic, and political problems of the time, and who counted among his acolytes artists, captains of industry, and government officials (one of whom had become president). He had published a large book, Burning Down The House Around Us, that traced with erudition the evolution of ideas of liberation; his chapter on the necessity of seeking out new forms of pleasure had revolutionized thinking around social norms to the point where it was still de rigueur for college freshmen to quote from it from it a generation later. He had even been, in his own idiosyncratic fashion, a successful practitioner of this theory, engaging in dalliances with some of the world’s most elegant and desirable women. And yet, he could not figure out how to operate a soft-serve yogurt machine?

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE NEWS

Secret DOJ memo saying not to charge President must be released, says judge. Secret President memo saying not to charge judge must be released, says DOJ. Secret judge memo saying not to charge DOJ must be released, says President. Secret charge remembers judging president while releasing the letters “DOJ!” loudly from mouth. Memo says that DOJ releases President, secretly charges judge with saying nothing. Judge releases memo about secrets. Judge releases memo about charge. Judge releases memo about judge. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

RUSH HOUR

He had a line in psychophysics and the spectatorial imperative of public transportation systems, people on escalators, people on stairs, ups and downs both enabled and volitional (though a perceptive reader of his first big paper split a hair here, noting that “even an elevator is volitional, at start and at end—if graphed, think points rather than line—escalator a segment”), and so he was sitting on a bench at rush hour watching, doing research, when out of the crowd a single face emerged, not even a face at first, a sheet of hair, a color pitched between blonde and red, sometimes more to one end of that spectrum, sometimes more to the other (the work of light), and even before the head that held the hair turned, he knew the face he’d see, the eyes that seemed like they were looking away even when they were looking at you, the mouth that held in at least as many words as it let out, the chin that tilted up into something spiritual even in the grubbiest of places, even here, and something inside him, maybe his heart (he was a psychophysicist, not a doctor), leapt up, not fully volitionally, and it was all he could do to keep his legs from following. The air around him suddenly smelled like lust and he crushed the point of his pencil into his notebook in what he would have insisted to anyone who asked was embarrassment. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

IF THERE WAS A PLACE

If there was a place that had a right to call itself liberal in politics but conservative in tastes, it was Brooklyn in those years; and if there was a women who had a right to consider herself an ally of the former set of views and an enemy of the latter, it was [name redacted]; yet one morning at breakfast, sitting by her side, her husband heard her say to herself in her offhanded yet thoughtful way, with a smooth voice that was still somehow burred, looking across the top of her coffee cup, “I think I hate the young!” Horrified, her husband could only laugh and then protest, comically, “But [name redacted], will you make an exception for me?” She matched his laugh with her own. “You are not young,” she said. “You are old. By the young I mean those who refuse to think of how we really are, who bully us with their ill-fitting Utopianism. When you and I were their age, youth to us was an act of sanctifying humanity, a practice of seeing everyone around us in two lights at once, as responsible members of the community and as carriers of the most delightful weaknesses, and letting those people hang in the middle, to their benefit—and ours. Think of Mr. [name also redacted].” He husband knew the name. It was an older neighbor who had lived down the street from his wife when he had first met her. “He was a prattler,” said her husband. “Yes,” said [name redacted], “and quite proud of the plants in front of his house. And he smelled like camphor. But once he had a party, and he drank his weight in rum, and…well…the only way I can describe what happened is to say that he cracked and light flowed from him, light that contained dark thoughts, lyricism, a bottomlessness. His wife quarreled with him early that evening, affecting disgust, though she was probably feeling amusement, and I ended up with him up on the roof. More bottomlessness. In the morning he was a boring man again. Duality. The young cannot fathom this and thus cannot endure it, and they hide behind a veil of sanctimony.” Her husband had by now wandered away, as he was himself boring in daylight, though this story had cheered him regarding his nighttime prospects. A few minutes later, when the coast was clear or at least clearer, he came back into the room, agreeing.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas