WHEN THE WEEKEND COMES

Fishing at the mill used to be fun. Walking home through town in the middle of a cloudy afternoon used to be fun. Sitting down in front of the house and talking about movies used to be fun. Holding her hand out in front of her face and thinking about that hand one day holding another hand in love, or holding a pen and writing about love, or gripping a gavel, or a scalpel, or a microphone, all those things used to be fun, but now when she holds her hand out in front of her face all she can think about is clawing the air because the air gives her the feeling of drowning. 

©2022 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

AND AS FOR TASTE

This book is little more than two hundred pieces of paper bound together in an assault against most of the senses. I say most only because the glue used to hold together this atrocity has a pleasantly narcotic odor. But sight? That’s the first to go, rubbled by the garish cover art and the self-satisfied photograph of the author. Sound leads to misery, if not madness, when I hear the phrases the author clearly treasured echoing in my head: on page one, the protagonist “pries open the kaleidoscope of lust only to find herself there,” and it only gets worse. My fingers grow numb across the pages of this endless chore. And as for taste, that’s a lost cause. So I rate this book one half sense out of five, and I retain my sixth sense to know when I am seeing a dead narrative, brought down by poor conception and poorer execution.

 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

GROUCH

A man we know to have black hair may appear with white hair in our dreams. Is that not strange, and is it not stranger still that he is riding on a horse fashioned from twigs and leaves? This horse will run tomorrow in a stakes race. This horse will take the lead down the homestretch, only to fall a few feet short of the finish line. His leg is broken. He will have to be destroyed. Birds land on him to protect him. Flowers bloom from his joints. Fruits blister up from the holes that once were his eyes. But none of this has happened yet, which is why the man with white hair is smiling. In real life, with real black hair, he is a grouch.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THEN HE FLUNG THE PHONE

For the longest time, I was a meditation skeptic. I was a skeptic in general, but I targeted certain practices, and one of them was meditation, which I associated with soft thinking or other New Age practices like crystals or the application of oils and unguents to the forehead  in search of higher consciousness. I did not believe because I would not believe. When friends of mine spoke about their experiences with meditation, I was dismissive. I assumed that they were lying, in the same way that they were lying about getting in great shape by going to the gym and trying a new lifting or riding regimen. I mean, I could see them. Who did they think they were fooling? It was simply a stroke of luck, then, that one day I walked into the downtown studio of Master Roland Garton, who specialized in Vipassanā, and—perhaps more importantly—in a unique meditative practice of his own invention. The first day I met him, he was eating a hamburger with one hand and quickly scanning through his text messages with the other. “Ex-wife,” he said. “Ex-girlfriend. Bill collector. Reporter who wants to do a hit job on the studio. That one is an ex-girlfriend also.” Then he flung the phone as hard as he could against the nearest wall and lifted both hands in exasperation. “Okay,” he said, turning to me. “Let’s get you going.” The remainder of his hamburger floated in the air in front of him, a miracle, an advertisement.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

A MODEST PROPOSAL, BY A GUY I MET ON THE STREET

“I think there should be countdown boxes issued by the government. People can go to any grocery store, public school, or police precinct to pick up their box. It displays, for each person, what remains: how many more good meals, how many good conversations, how much satisfying sex, how many more books (records, movies) that really matter. The numbers will be fairly low, and thus each person who picks up his or her countdown box will come to understand both that they should feel daily gratitude and that anything that feels rewarding is itself a marker of mortality."

 

©2022 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

NATURAL SELECTION

Every flawed being is systematically rooted out. The earth, an empty ball, tumbles through space.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas