SOCIAL DISTANCING CHANGES THINGS WE HAVE SEEN

By Ben Greenman
©2020 / Stupid Ideas

NOTE: These are all things I made during quarantine from the coronavirus pandemic in March of 2020. Some are funny but almost all are, once you think about them, sad.

1. American Gothic, now with social distancing.



2. The Creation of Adam, now with social distancing.



3. Wish You Were Here, now with social distancing.



4. Meet the Beatles!, now with social distancing.



5. Abbey Road, now with social distancing.



6. Forrest Gump, now with social distancing.



7. E.T., now with social distancing.




8. The Wonder Twins, now with social distancing.



9. Pulp Fiction, now with social distancing.



10. Run the Jewels, now with social distancing.



11. 1999, now with social distancing.



12. The Shining, now with social distancing.



13. Remain in Light, now with social distancing.



14. Lady and the Tramp, now with social distancing.



15. Follow the Leader, now with social distancing.



16. Psychocandy, now with social distancing.



17. Mount Rushmore, now with social distancing.



18. Easter Island, now with social distancing.



19. Where's Waldo, now with social distancing.

WAIT FOR SURPRISE ENDING

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Last month more than a dozen people were summoned to Clorkenwelt Street, to the Medical Court, where they stood against charges for refusing to comply with orders to administer the vaccine to themselves, their children, or their parents, also being without exemption certificates that would have permitted a two-month extension for reasons of faith, illiteracy, or mental illness.  Mr. Robert “Duke” Anderson, the Vaccination Enforcement Officer for Slice Province, acknowledged that some of the defendants did in fact possess exemptions but that they were obtained from local Justices of the Peace who did not possess the right under law to contravene provincial law. The judge who heard the case agreed with Mr. Anderson that the practice was highly irregular, and then launched into a long and perhaps not pertinent story of a boy he once knew at summer camp who had contracted polio but still managed to “court one of the prettiest girls in the entire state.” The surprise ending was that the boy was him.

ONE MORNING AT THE DESK

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

One morning he sat down at his desk and made a list of all the things that were inconsequential. It was long—longer, he imagined, than the list of the things that were consequential. He obtained a mental picture of himself composing the consequential list. In it, he was still sitting at his desk. It was still morning. A red bird was perched on a tree outside the window; he turned his head and saw the same bird on the same tree. He focused in on the center of the mental picture, which was occupied by his face, and paid special attention to his expression, to the way the muscles around his mouth were set, to the cast of his eyes and the nature of the light in them. He was searching for signs of happiness. He found none.

FUTURE MAYOR JEREMY

Speaking yesterday at Town Hall, Jeremy Hantford, a candidate for mayor, said that there was a danger of people growing increasingly fatigued by the current crisis, and admitted that after two hundred and forty nine days of what he called “assaultive news and circumstance” he has begun to suffer from a variety of aches, pains, nausea-type sensations, and occasional ideations of self-harm. “If this should continue to happen,” he said, “I can see the possibility of going into a dark room, turning up music as loud as I can stand—maybe it’ll be Public Enemy, maybe Baroness, maybe Diamanda Galas, maybe the African Broken Glass Orchestra, maybe Scott Walker, maybe L7, maybe Iodine Face Freddy, maybe Arturo Roll, maybe Horse Leathers, maybe MC Barbara Anne Harris, maybe Season's Best, maybe Deafheaven—and feeling all of the spirits, both good and bad, both benevolent and malign, flow out of my body. When I’m fully empty, dead in life, I can start to breathe again, with an eye to inhaling only that which sustains.” Several people in the crowd clapped fervently. “He has my vote!” said one man.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

SUMMER SUNLIGHT

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Once (this was in the part of town that has now detached and called itself Siggertsville, which the rest of town calls “Cigarettesville,” and it was in the year of the unexplained fires) there were two young people sitting on a wall. One of them was a boy, about eighteen, tall, thin, with light brown hair that had been bleached lighter by the summer sun and surprisingly dark eyes—they gave up nothing about his mood and only one thing about his character, which is that he was the kind of person who gave up nothing about his mood—and a frown that he thought of as recent but which would turn out to be permanent, since the forces that placed it there, the unjust forces represented by parents and teachers, pastors and teammates, would only harden around him as he aged (and he would harden, too, faster than he could predict or even imagine, and by the time he was thirty he would look forty, and by the time he was forty he would look fifty-five, and that would only be the halfway point of his life, and for the rest of it, his look would continue to run away from his actual span on the earth) and he would respond to those forces by putting his head down and making money, which he converted to power, which he converted to more money, and then more power; there would be times when he had so much of both that he would hardly know what to do with it, and so he would give some of either away, as a game he was playing with only himself as adversary (no one else was powerful enough to truly oppose him) and as a result a game in which he would, even as he lost, win. The other was the boy who would become his husband. He opened a can of beer and passed it over and declared the town deader then a cat smashed flat by a pickup truck and just then a pickup truck sped by and the two boys laughed and kicked their legs like kids.

STRESS CESSATION

We sat and watched the cars pass. Dozens and dozens went by in a rush, and then there were none. The highway filled with silence, embolism-like. It was peaceful at first and then I noticed my own leg juddering. “Maybe it’s just that some were going faster than others,” Kelly said. “What I mean is that maybe the fast ones whizzed by first — they would, you know – and then the slightly slower ones, and now we’re in a position of waiting for the slowest ones.” Kelly had studied speed and cars and the overlap between the two, so I gave the statement weight. I shifted in my chair and prepared for the resumption of...I do not know how to express what I was prepared for the resumption of, exactly...of things, it is perhaps most accurate to say. I went forward to the edge, sharpened how I was seeing what I saw. But no more cars came, not slow ones, not any, and it was just the road there for us to look at, black tending gray, scabbed dashes of yellow going right up the middle as far as we could see. “Still, much can be done with the open road, space interleaved with space,” Kelly said. “We are at our best when we are not at the throat of a problem. Open the floodgates and let ideas come on through.” I had forgotten that the brain was another thing that Kelly had studied. I did what he said: gates, flow. Theta waves climbed back over betas. It is not surprising to be influenced by an expert.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

RIGHT AWAY KNOWING SOMETHING’S WRONG

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

A young-un (that’s what the sheriff calls her—that’s what he calls any of the town’s residents aged under twenty—though to be fair to him he’s said that same thing since he was twenty—it’s not discriminatory—it’s affectionate—there were times that the town would have agreed) comes to the microphone. She unfolds a piece of paper and slowly reads the essay she has written in school on the subject of “Moderate to Severe Views Of The World In Which We Are Trapped.” The school principal and an English teacher beam in seats onstage as the young-un speaks:

Not everyone is Nostradamus. Not every present is branches in a box. Not every episode is cardiac. Not every explanation is either valid or invalid. Not every invalid is reading. Not every reader understands Nostradamus, especially the quatrain where he wrote “branches in a box” but meant our modern world, crisscrossed through with possibility, with hope, with life, but sealed into darkness, wood dragooning wood. It is thick sadness. It stops the heart.