DIAMOND LIFE: A PLAY BY ME AND CHATGPT

 ME: Can you write a short play where United States Pharmacopeia meets a woman named Alice, falls in love with her, and begins to experience doubt about their fitness for one another, all the while worrying that her favorite baseball team, the Toronto Blue Jays, will lose the World Series because of a freak lawnmower injury to a star pitcher?

CHATGPT:

Title: Doubts and Dilemmas

Cast of Characters:

 
United States Pharmacopeia (USP)
Alice
Toronto Blue Jays Fan

Act 1, Scene 1:

USP: Good morning. I'm United States Pharmacopeia, and I'm here to talk to Alice.
Alice: Hi. Nice to meet you.
USP: Alice, I must confess that I'm instantly drawn to you. Your wit and intelligence are captivating.
Alice: That's very flattering, USP. But I must warn you, I'm a big Toronto Blue Jays fan.
USP: That's not a problem. I respect your love for the game.
Alice: Great! So, what brings you here?
USP: Well, Alice, I must be honest. I've been experiencing doubts about our compatibility. I mean, I'm a set of standards for drug purity and quality, and you're a person.
Alice: I understand your concerns, USP. But don't forget, your work is vital to the health and well-being of millions of people. I admire that about you.
USP: Thank you, Alice. That means a lot. But I can't help but worry about the Blue Jays. They're playing in the World Series, and I heard that their star pitcher got injured by a lawnmower accident.
Alice: Oh, no! That's terrible news. I hope he'll be okay.
Toronto Blue Jays Fan (offstage): No, he won't! We're doomed!

Act 2, Scene 1:

USP: Alice, I can't shake off my worries about the Blue Jays. I know it sounds silly, but I feel like their fate is somehow connected to our relationship.
Alice: That's a strange thing to say, USP. The outcome of a baseball game has nothing to do with us.
USP: I know, I know. It's just that I'm struggling to reconcile my duty to ensure drug safety with my feelings for you and your passion for the Blue Jays.
Alice: Maybe it's time to take a break and clear your head. Let's go to a game together and enjoy ourselves. It might help you put things into perspective.
USP: That's a great idea, Alice. Thank you.

Act 3, Scene 1:

Toronto Blue Jays Fan (offstage): And the Blue Jays are the 2023 World Series champions!
USP: Yes! We did it, Alice! The Blue Jays won!
Alice: I'm so happy for you, USP. You seem like a weight has been lifted from your shoulders.
USP: You know what, Alice? You're right. Watching the game with you reminded me that life is about balance. It's okay to have doubts and fears, but we shouldn't let them consume us.
Alice: I couldn't agree more, USP.
USP: And who knows? Maybe I can find a way to support your love for the Blue Jays while fulfilling my duty to promote drug safety.
Alice: That's the spirit, USP. Now, let's go celebrate with the rest of the fans.

BAD LUCK FOR BOB

Some people will offer you a hand. Others will pull that hand away. Robert was the former, pretending to be the latter, which gave him a reputation in our office. “Robert,” Amelia would say, “is a puzzle-box.” Amelia was the boss, which was bad luck for Bob. She was also his ex-wife, which was worse. Which is not to say it was a relationship defined entirely by animosity. “You know,” she would say, “as a young man, when life was all trips to Mississippi and articulated pleasures, there was no one better. But he has aged and stiffened, and not in the good way."  At least one of these things was a euphemism, and at least one was a double entendre. Robert didn't say much about Amelia, positive or negative. He had moved on, to Tess, his second wife, with whom he had a young daughter.  Word around the office was that he was creeping on her. For a year or so he had made a practice of announcing that he was going on a business trip to some far-off place that we all knew was a lie or a joke or an irresponsible exaggeration. “Off to China,” he would say, or “Sahara-bound,” or “Packing up for the moon.” Most thought that there was some underlying truth to his statement—that there was in fact a trip.  Theories circulated as to where that trip was actually taking him. Consensus landed on Waterville, two towns over, and the bed of a young regional manager named Karen Koechner. Amelia did not engage in speculation one way or the other. The rest of us may have suspected that Robert was creeping. didn't laugh. Amelia knew it for certain. Once upon a time, she had been in the Terri seat.  She held in her mind not a single doubt what Robert was up to, but that was only one reason she did not talk with the rest of us. She was the boss, which was a second reason. Thirdly, she worried that if she discussed Robert and Terri and Karen Koechner she might arrive at a place of sympathy for one party or another, and that was at cross-purposes with the rest of her motives. Amelia was, though she would not have admitted it, a bit of a sadist. The notion that Terri and Robert might eventually squirm filled her with pleasure. It heated her from the inside out. She did not want any conversation that might end with a sad shrug or a vague “I feel bad for her” or “him.” It would douse her ardor and ardor was what she wanted after a long day pushing numbers through the strainer of a spreadsheet. I am not sure if everyone knew that about her. I knew it, of course, because after Amelia had split up with Robert she had married me. Was it strange to be married to your boss? There were evidently many people in the office to ask. We had a daughter of our own, about the same age as Robert and Terri's daughter. Once a month or so we all got together at a steakhouse or Thai place, drank one too many drinks, pretended to like one another. "You cannot say that that we are not civilized," Amelia would say on our drive home, usually while in the process of unbuttoning something on the clothes that surrounded her body or mine. Amelia mostly only wanted to be filled: with pleasure, anger, with flesh, with money, with any flame that burned away the thin layer of death that always seemed to accumulate between one morning and the next.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

 

SEEN AND HERD

The observations discussed in the paper being presented today were all made from aircraft, the method of flying being that reported by Welsh (2180) and Tannabon (2189b). In the tracking of wolf-human hybrids—a species that, as all present here today are well aware, first appeared in the year 2099, following full environment apocalypse—the following aircraft were used (in order of size): Wiggs Cantabile, Simon Spotlight 90, Simon Spotlight 92, and Simon Spotlight 96. The smaller of these aircraft were superb at holding in tight circles over the herds but had poor airspeed and insufficient heating; the largest, the Cantabile, was toasty but could not turn.

©2022 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

FRAGMENTS FROM ELECTION! THE MUSICAL

Originally Composed December 2000 and published in McSweeneys.

by Ben Greenman

 

[The curtain rises on a NEWS REPORTER standing before the national electoral map.]

 

NEWS REPORTER:

Over my two decades in the business

Some of my work has been just superb.

I once did a piece

On the civil war in Greece

And then there was the series on the Serbs.

 

This year, I thought that I’d take it easy,

Sit behind a desk election night,

Watch the exit polls

Eat a bunch of coffee rolls,

The race, they said, would probably be tight.

 

[The night before the election, the candidates appear before their campaigns.]

 

GORE:

I plan to win

The country knows

What shape it’s in.

 

BUSH:

I will prevail,

If that means “win.”

I cannot fail.

 

[The night of the election, the news media awaits the results.]

 

NEWS REPORTER:

Florida goes for Gore,

Bush’s hopes are slim,

In the Electoral score,

Things are looking grim.

 

Florida’s swinging back,

Our earlier pronouncement,

Has come under attack.

Please wait for an announcement.

 

Bush has Florida now.

He will win the race.

We cannot say just how

This egg got on our face.

 

Scratch that “Bush Wins” news.

Scratch this whole election.

This vaunted right to choose

Is democracy’s infection.

 

[The day after the election, voters across the country are confused, but nowhere more than in Florida.]

 

FLORIDA VOTER:

I’d rather be shot from a cannon

Than vote for that Nazi Buchanan.

I thought that I voted for Gore

But I just don’t know anymore.

 

[Days pass without decisive results]

 

NEWS REPORTER:

An election with no President

Is like a perfume with no scent

Or a spice rack with no salt or pepper.

 

BILL CLINTON:

Hey, jackass! Don’t get too upset

I’m not done as Big Chief yet.

I’m a lame duck, buddy, not a leper!

 

[KATHERINE HARRIS, Florida Secretary of State, vows to get to the bottom of the election results. The media descends upon Florida to watch as recounts begin.]

 

KATHERINE HARRIS:

Nice to meet you!

Nice to meet you!

Yes, I have okayed

Some limited recounting.

 

Nice to meet you!

Nice to meet you!

Yes, the pressure on me

Is steadily mounting.

 

THE MEDIA:

Day one was fun.

Day two was, too.

Day three and day four were exciting for Gore.

Day five and day six smacked of dirty tricks.

Days seven and eight, we awaited our fate.

Day nine and day ten, we started over again.

 

KATHERINE HARRIS:

Nice to meet you!

Nice to meet you!

In the state GOP

My star is ascendant.

 

Nice to meet you!

Nice to meet you!

Do you think that I look

Like a flight attendant?

 

THE MEDIA:

Day thirteen, day thirteen.

Cigarettes and caffeine

Are the only things keeping us awake.

Day fourteen, day fourteen

That damned voting machine!

We’ve had about all we can take.

 

KATHERINE HARRIS:

Nice to meet you!

Nice to meet you!

I thank you all so much

For enduring this frustration.

 

Nice to meet you!

Nice to meet you!

I will soon have results

To bring before the nation.

 

[KATHERINE HARRIS calls a meeting to announce Florida’s final tallies.]

 

KATHERINE HARRIS:

I said that I’d be calm,

I said that I’d be cool,

I said that I’d be smooth,

I wouldn’t act the fool.

 

Well, I lied.

Because he’s certified!

I swear to you he’s certified!

This feeling that I have inside

Can’t be denied!

I feel like a beautiful new bride!

George W. Bush is

Cer-ti-fied!!!

 

[The candidates react to the announcement.]

 

BUSH:

Some people pay attention in the classroom.

Others like to have a real good time.

(What’s the point of being rich and famous

If partying is treated as a crime?)

At any rate, I wasn’t much for schoolbooks.

But there’s one thing that is clear as a bell:

Parents pass along traits like height and brains.

My daddy gave me something else as well:

I am President!

I am President!

Because of that, the other guy is not!

I am President!

I am President!

I got more in the college than he got!

 

They say that I’m stupid and dullish and dense

But I understand things that make perfect sense.

 

I am President!

I am President!

Because of that the other guy is not!

I am President!

I am President!

I got more in the college than he got!

 

Number One.

It’s so fun.

Like father, like son!

 

GORE:

In these kinds of environments

It’s very customary

To speak in rhyming prose or even sing.

But I fear that such a practice

Will simply blur the issue

Which is that the results mentioned by Ms. Harris include illegal votes

And do not include legal votes that were improperly rejected.

The number of such votes is more than sufficient to place in doubt

The result of this election.

Thank you.

SPECIAL SCREENING

“I’m going to make a demand on you,” the filmmaker said to the viewers. “I’m going to force you to actively watch. The film you see today is not the same as the film that others saw yesterday or that others will see tomorrow. If you were part of the audience yesterday or plan to be part of the audience tomorrow, know that. You are being asked to reorient yourself constantly. There is an important scene in the film of a person sleeping. In some versions, that person is a man, in others a woman. This is connected in my mind to the theory, first articulated to me by Larry, that sleep is the only effective site of resistance to capitalism. It is, despite biology’s attempt to the contrary, a rather pure articulation of community and togetherness. After you watch the film today, I will ask you all to send me videos of yourself sleeping. Some will be incorporated into later versions of the film. And let me anticipate one of your questions. Yes, nudity is fine. I cannot determine for you how you should sleep. And like most other people, I like a little skin. Pause for laughter. Oh, I am sorry. I have that written down: ‘Pause for laughter.’ Let’s take the house lights down and start the film.”

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

ON WEEKDAYS ED WAS A LAWYER

On weekends Ed was Easter Valiant, white gown, white wig, quasi-operatic vocals. Each year, in May, he performed one of his mother's albums in its entirety. This year it was her 1973 hit album Gee Golly, which kicked off with the title track, and as he sang the opening line—“There’s no need to be frightened / We know enough to let the light in”—he resented, as he had as a child, the veneer of cheerfulness that characterized the song and the record that followed. As he sang, though, he recognized that it was precisely that quality that had given the album its universal appeal, and he foresuffered the dread he would feel the following year, when he was scheduled to sing Same For Me, her 1975 follow-up, an album of pinched, prideful convolutions that rarely strayed beyond the boundaries of her own diminished talents.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

ELLEN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Ellen the neighborhood isn’t what you think. Nothing is. But we have to address our memories. You see, Ellen, when we came in here last April we noticed things. We both did but let’s focus on what you noticed or what you told me you did: a pastry shop that had beautiful cakes in the window,  a local theater complex with a mural on the building’s side that transfixed you for its similarity to Joseph Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge. Also when we went to the taco stand down the street, that Asaf Avidan song you like, the only one I know, was playing and you turned to me and just said “love.” I’m not saying that sold me on the place, but it didn’t hurt. We’ve been here six months now and there have been significant alterations to what was previously believed. The theater complex is closed, mural painted over. The taco place disappoints with music choice as often as it satisfied. The pastry shop was never as billed. The daughter of the owner was filming a movie so she put the cakes in the window. They deal, as it turns out, primarily in stale crossaints and decent coffee. A woman who works there treats you shabbily probably because she had a little crush on you at first and was unhappy to see me when I showed up to meet you. You have joked with me that you are planning on leaving me for her. Don’t joke. Why did we ever leave the other place? It wasn’t perfect but it was the same exact distance from perfect as this place, with the benefit of being…what’s the word?….ours. 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

JACK AND HIS FRIEND HARRY

    There is a reason Jack keeps saying “The Devil’s just a point of view.”
    He has done things that require him to subscribe to this notion.
    He scavenges out in the warehouse district all morning.
    By noon, when he comes in to take his spot at the counter, he has already made more money than most of us will ever see.
    By two, when he gets to his office and his desk, the most has disappeared.
    It’s all of us by then.
    The money’s not in what he finds out there.
    The items he brings with him to the diner and then to the office are spurs for conversation: discarded gadgets, pristine pieces of lumber cut to the wrong size, the occasional sketched self-portrait.
    He has all those conversations.
    “I could probably rewire this to be a really fantastic car alarm.”
    “This is a really fine cedar.”
    “Whoever drew this is probably more talented than he knows. Do you see how the eyes are looking down slightly in a way that suggests shame but then, when you look at it, reveals itself as arrogance?”
    He has them at the diner and he has them at the office.
    It’s possible they are intentional distractions from the money.
    The money comes from the silent distant operation of all his businesses.
    These businesses are the things that he has done.
    One develops airborne toxins for use in wartime.
    Another plainly makes armaments.
    A third deposits radioactive waste and industrial runoff in poor nations, burying it underneath fields that are then used to grow crops or as playgrounds.
    His friends, and there are many, are quick to point out the other types of companies he has started, run, profited from, the medical devices firm, the one that protects personal information from invasive technologies.
    “He’s a saint,” says Harry.
    But these are just offsets and Harry knows it, just as Jack himself knows it, though Jack also knows that it would be inappropriate for he himself to articulate it so clearly, and that is why he is grateful that Harry does.
    Harry, weekly if not daily, advances the point of view that enables Jack to move forward, safe in the belief that he is a man like any other, possessed of flaws, certainly, but also moral in other regards, a “balanced being,” in the parlance of the writer Louis R. Lancaster, who penned How to Forgive (Yourself), the slim 1994 volume that is Harry’s North Star and consequently Jack’s.
    Harry is there at the diner most days at noon when Jack drops by.
    If he is not there, he appears soon after Jack, entering quietly.
    He listens, mostly, smiles often, says nice things about Jack when Jack leaves the diner for the office.
    Harry is the Devil.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

 

ANDY DANDY

I remember that he wrote his shopping list backwards, in Hebrew, in tiny, birdlike marks before driving out to Tagus Hills, the new shopping center with the new supermarket, and then he stood in the area beyond the cashiers, the tight carpet striped green and yellow with starbursts of white splashed across it, and squinted at his list as if he needed assistance. Women stopped, asked him if he was lost, drawn in by his wispy beard, and he pointed to the list and said that his elderly mother had jotted it down, poor thing, old country, you know, mind going fast. Most would cluck their tongues and move on, mimicking his nervous motions when they gained safe distance, but every fifth or tenth (he didn’t care) would reach out and touch his wrist with their fingers. Later, when he woke in their bed, when he looked across the room and saw a brassiere hanging over a chair or remembered the whoosh of breath that had escaped from the woman’s mouth as he had taken up position, he thought of the list still tucked into his pocket. Hebrew. Who would have guessed? Porter, of course, was a name that had been designed by his great-grandfather, an American sleight. Tagus.“Take that, goyim,” he thought, and stroked his wispy beard, and stroked the bare hip of the woman who had fallen for it.  

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE TWO JENNIFERS

It's impossible to talk about Jennifer any further without noting that there are actually two distinct Jennifers, both born the same day in the same place to the same parents, entirely co-extensive, but one married to a wealthy banker with a penchant for sleazy parties and a trio of conspicuously lavish residences and the the other single for a while, nursing wounds and doubts and then married to a galumphing Irish poet whose hangdog expression concealed a wry sense of humor and a warm heart. The second husband called her “love” and meant it. The first wanted her always out of her clothes and meant it too. The first Jennifer was the tawdrier option (complete with extra flourishes like a drug problem and a short-lived affair with her husband’s female secretary, carried out right under his nose and never suspected), while the second was more measured and accomplished, even beginning to play the piano again for the first time since her teens. Both versions certainly have a right to exist and are preserved in shockingly pristine condition in the memory of the seventy-six-year old Jennifer, who has just been to the doctor and been given bad news.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL

Undergirded by a theory of interpretation, dependent upon a common set of terms, informed equally by circularity and repetition, rattling off rules and exceptions, insistent upon specific if not universal applicability, the thoughts that lay behind the words on the chalkboard possessed the students in the classroom, possessed them from the crowns of their heads to the soles of their feet, grabbed them and would not let go, began to squeeze the life out of them so that new life could be squeezed into them. Eyes and ears were prime points of entry.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

TO THE POINT WHERE

Before he died Maxwell had completed translations of two works: Tobias Durchdenwald’s furiously political Where Has It Gone? (1978), a “rot in high places” novel, and  Berm (1982) by Roy X. Scheider (not to be confused with the American actor), a largely factual history of a land dispute between two families in Emsland. Both books offer, in their own ways, vivid portraits of contemporary German society, and we have only Maxwell to thank for their existence, as he was not paid a penny (or, as he liked to joke, “a pfennig”) for his labor, and in fact was consistently mocked by his American editor, Anne T. Harris, to the point where he sought counseling that failed to console him and led him to plan the desert sojourn that resulted in his untimely demise. Harris, also his ex-wife, did not cry at his funeral.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

ENTERTAINING

The dinner table was set with expectations and disappointments. Elodie ladled from the tureen into each bowl, careful to divide equally among her guests. Service was not a time to show favoritism. It was a time to show competence, precision even. Ronald, her sister's boyfriend, began to eat without waiting for the others. He was aggressive with his spoon. He took too much too fast and began to choke on a provocation. Small-Time James, her other sister's boyfriend, started to chant something about brickbats and how they should call him Big-Time James if they called him anything at all. Elodie took the tureen back into the kitchen and began to weep. It was so hard to be a hostess, she thought. It was so hard to be anything at all.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

YOUNG CHILDREN RAN RECKLESS

She had been working since morning, and the night before that, if working was what it could be fairly called, sitting in the chair that had been her husband’s while he was alive, pulling up the top shell of the clam of the computer, and typing sentences, one first, then another one, counting them at first because it calmed her and then letting the counting fall away until they became numberless. That was when she forgot about the pains in her hips and back, forgot about the cracked back tooth that needed fixing, and when she remembered afternoons of sitting on a lounge chair while her young children ran reckless in the back yard, chattering happily, throwing balls and water balloons, screaming when a wasp’s nest was discovered, thinking about the night before or the night to come, when she would make dinner, serve said dinner, sit up late with her husband watching TV, wait until he dozed off, and then sneak across the street to find and be found by the neighbor, an older man with a mean aspect who the kids reacted to much the way they reacted to wasps. That man had died roughly a decade ago, and that was the death she truly mourned. Her husband, eh. He had been a good man, kind where it counted, and she had buried him with a curious lightness in her heart, a sense of a job well done.

@2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

HEARD THE CRACK

Ruth Burndt-Burkett remembered dearly her father, who was a gifted orator, a handsome devil, and, concomitant to those two qualities, an irresistible salesman. He sold custom glassware, tumblers into which the customer could etch up to four letters and a small illustration no larger than one in ch square, and she accompanied him on one of his trips, leaving Boston, working the hundred-miles radius, Hindale to West Mystic, Wellfleet. He called out the stops like a conductor and in a sense that was exactly what he was. He would pull up in front of a house, listening for any shattered jingling as they slowed, and then walk around and take his sample case out of the trunk. One sample was modeled on Ruth, who was at the time a simple Ruth Anne Burndt, and carried an RAB and then a small sketch of a pony. He had made one for her mother, too, MMB, the former Milly Minnard, and the sketch there was unaccountably of him, her father, holding up what she always remembered as a tube of lipstick alongside his grinning face. That glass had broken up around Casco Bay. He heard the crack back in the trunk, the second it happened, and opened both the trunk and the case with resignation. “It’s going to rain,” he said, wrapping the jagged pieces in a towel and heading for the garbage can. There was, she knew, a meteorology to the whole thing.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

SAY THREE PEOPLE

Say three people. Say two of them women. One gets a weekend bag and starts to put in a toothbrush. The other wrests the weekend bag away in played-up anger, gets out a hairbrush, and mimes to beat the first or to beat off. The third is a man, taller than either woman and taller than either woman remembers remembers, a little soft around the shoulders, “well five years from my last boxing match,” he says, laughing a little, though there’s never been boxing. He works at a grocery and a bookstore, two different stores—he is weekends at the bookstore. He switches on the radio, country soul. Both women begin to dance. One of them touches the man on the face. He touches her back on the thigh. This transpires near a doorway though the door is closed so the electricity generated dolphin-leaps over the transom. The man withdraws his hand. He has felt the weight of what might be. The two women look at each other, electricity still passing, and darkly wish the man to be out of the room, out of the house, to “put a goddamned hamburger on a grill or something,” says one, and when that happens, as soon as they can imagine smelling the smoke, the two look at each other across space that a moment before was a space of blockage but is now a space of possibility and they commence to ask questions with no answers. “Why’d you do that thing with your eyes?” one might say. And the other one will do it again at the same time saying “What do you mean?” or “Whatever do you mean?” And then the first will lift a finger and the second will laugh and the first will not anymore deny that there is anger regarding the touching of the shoulder and the thigh. “I thought this would go like this,” will say the second. The first will say “Eff you. Since I was sixteen I knew that the juice would come out of the fruit this way if you know what I mean.” The second will say “Say again.” The first will say “The juice,” but the second will then interrupt to say “The first part I mean” and the first will say “Eff you” and the second will make to bat her eyelids, got your invitation in the mail, and a voice on the radio will say “Baby it’s not like that.” 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

"HERE," SAID MATT, "LOOK, HERE, BY THE BRIDGE!"

The afternoon sizzled. The dandy, uncivil, reached out for the folds of her skirt and her skin. The dazzling stranger swung her chain into his chin. “Look,” she said. “Look,” she screamed. The dizzying stinger caught him square and clean. The afternoon sizzled, more, before mist overtook it. She fled as the heat of the day leaked away, but not before she chiseled a groove that removed evidence of her presence. A grizzled blanket blanked out what footprints could not be brushed smooth in the stubborn clay in the waning day. Rain came after the mist: an assist. The strangled dandy was laid out by the river, covered over by a hastily constructed lean-to but within range of the steady drizzle. 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

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