That Most Critics Would Say a Shark

I’m a living miserablometer. Like this: look here and find the greyblue night clouds bouncing urban lights and Gaea power off their soft heads. But Crunchy Man (known as such for the way he stays crunchy in milk) kneeling down in the silty clay keeps thinking he has to dig rotten hearts out of this patch of earth by the bay shore with nothing but a shark fin, just a way to distract him from his brainwash addiction... Always used to come out of the shack at the edge of town, the one hosting the radical speakers, spouting some propaganda about burning the fucking Jews one week, then the horrors of a central government wearing nihilistic black the next week, until he finds himself arguing over the intense relevance of wheat grass in a diet– didn’t matter what so long as it was someone else’s rhetoric-- because the words were so much stronger than him until “they” burnt the shack down and where will he get his fix now. So he digs away with his organism abused by the profound sadness of the sopping hearts until his salty eye wetness foams white in the dirt so sickly he can’t breathe reminding him of a good ovulating pussy such that he has to scourge himself for dirty thoughts. And blast it all to hell, this fruiting garshdarn Pythagorean mud is so full of ricks BALL!– oh hush child, the old man now with his hand over his mouth knowing that God is hanging over his head with a long list of Anglo-Saxon words he’s not allowed to say inscribed on a lead plate that he uses to beat the fuck out of naughty little boys. There! You’ve gone and thought a dirty word, a nasty, putrid, disgusting word, a must-be-controlled word of great cosmic importance, a must-be-empowered word that every good misery farm should fear. Just then the old man pulls up a heart all squishy and grey and oozing, turns to me in hatred and do-what-I-wilt fire pointed my direction for the way I’m mocking God there in my huge pink sombrero, a limp wrist and foppish manner. But dearie, where’s the laughter...?
Gracie Starlo White is somewhere promising me new habits with a jar of urine in one hand and a stack of shark teeth in the other, poised to attack, spring with an Anglo-Saxon word. “The modern world is simply predatory, society so deceitful... all about masking how we really feel, who we really are, pretending not to have a personality with a sharkish business smile,” her hand already bleeding. Phew! I thought she was going to say– “Shit! I mean, piss.” Oh she’s gone and ruined it. “The easiest way to make somebody uncomfortable is to tell the truth.” It just now becomes obvious that the radio is on way too loud, speakers distorted from overload, blasting a man’s voice: “Bicycle tire. Bicycle tire. Bicycle tire. Bicycle tire. Bicycle tire.” Gracie, relieved at last, lets he guard down, just glad to know what she’s supposed to buy next. Right after the lecture:
“... that most critics would say a shark, but my contention has always been that an Ostrich is much more accurate, most particularly in consideration of the fact that an Ostrich brain is the same size as one of its eyes. That simply can’t be a coincidence. Nature is always telling us that A plus B equals C or that C divided by A equals B or that C minus B equals A; or then again that we are mistaken through and through and that all along A equals B equals C: we’ve been wasting our time the whole while. But to step back a moment, it most certainly should not go unnoticed that the Ostrich, while it can’t actually achieve, contrary to our stereotypes about what it is to be a bird, can run up to 60 miles per hour. With it’s long neck and bulbous center, often idiotic demeanor and surly attitude it can trump the shark every time...”
The bell goes off and you’re standing on stage singing one of your most popular songs, “Go Back to Jeremyville.” The crowd loves you, they adore you, they just want to touch you.
“Cause baby you been kissing those eels behind my back and selling my record collection in a burlap sack...”
You see something in the crowd that you know is not supposed to be there. You try to look down at the moldy stage, hoping it will go away. You look back and there he is, hard to miss in that green top hat and sunglasses at night (only this is no Corey Heart). You almost lose focus on the lyrics.
“... I been shot in the face one too many times, I can’t even make a fucking guitar stand...”
You don’t know who he is, only that he’s not supposed to be there. And it’s true, you realize, the unbearable weight of it, that anything you think, anyone you think about, anything you breathe, anything towards which you direct your attention will be profoundly affected by your Will. Oh the responsibility! Oh the discipline required! That when everything happens. With a flash, ‘bang’ his mouth even lips it with a snap of thumb and middle finger while he faces at a 90 degree angle from most of the rest of the crowd, everything being consumed in white light with an ameboid slurp of bright bulbous things of astral sharks trumped by stupid looking toads who (you know, for some reason) are named Genri and Hagat, such a special disaster as your lyrics fall off the now largely blank page of your cerebral cortex
cuz it ain’t
my fault
the toaster
was
in the
bathtub
and what you can still “see” in the room (yes, because it’s more like feeling with astral antlers) is the green-hatted hero actually splattering paint all over the collective unconsious and splattering what was missing all along, no not the cold rotted hearts or obsessive commercialbots or any given part of the Ostrich, but the ink the ink the ink...