Work Reprimand

Larry, how’s it going? Please step into the office if you don’t mind and close the door quietly behind you. Terrific. Okay, look, this isn’t the first time I’ve called you in here and I suspect it won’t be the last, which is okay…I remain confident that we can all work together to develop a more evolved mindset. But you’re actually getting worse, and that is an issue. You remain clumsy, slow, accident prone, and increasingly you are menacing and surly when approached by most anyone. I mean, look at this. At 7:35 this morning you commented Bro, I fuckin hate you on a Facebook post from a complete stranger with a ridiculous moniker. What was it? Oh, yeah, CrispixAlpha. That is a horrible way to start your day, Larry! I know you have a chronic mental illness and that that means having a hard and baffling life with chilling abyssal zones of harsh incoherence, the psyche is the nesting place of traumas, but, really, though, you must have been the kind of kid who fiercely protected all his toys and lashed out at anybody who’d approach within a certain perimeter. You have the deep and deeply unhealthy hacking cough of someone who’s swallowed a silo. You are self-protective and defiant. You know, hell, I absolutely used to be like that myself. Somebody would come up to me and say who are you? And I’d say I ain’t anybody you need to worry yourself about, buster. Don’t fret as of yet, kid. Speaking of kids, that young woman you were sort of dating was awfully young. It didn’t look good. And from what I could tell, though she had a sweet temperament she also had a fucked-up heart and contaminated worldview. That’s on you only in the sense that you didn’t see it coming and then it flattened you. It’s also on you because you shouldn’t have pursued anything with this person in the damned first. The first gal in her twenties you meet who’s into jazz music and you go all disco oblivion. The ladies in Interstellar Transmissions call you the Jazz Spaniel. How do you feel about that? You still snorting coke? It’s the same basic set-up wherever you go…have gone…you’re bounced about like a pinball to the tune of almost no actual productivity and eventually you attain pitiful burnout, nothing but lint in your pockets. Do you think of your online life as a kind of therapeutic harassment or something? That’s just incredibly sad. No sensible person would want to spend any time extending it a thought. Why blacken the horizons any further? We need to have a No Identities office party. Leave Your Identities at the Door. I want you to connect with Clark. His energy is extremely unthreatening and frankly it makes me a little jealous. And I want you to implement a particular adjustment with respect to your daily meditations and your daily self-talk. The universal consciousness suggests referring to yourself as human instead of any other noun, proper or not. Not Larry, but, you know: hey, human, what’s the lowdown? I hope this can help maybe get you way outside of yourself for a while so you can see the world and see that you aren’t any more special than us other dick-lickers. Right? Don’t look despondent. It’s all gravy. I’m expecting you at the Nondenominational Cleansing Ceremony. 2:00, Larry. Try and put on a good face, a'ight? 

Astrophage

I hadn’t seen Theresa since we’d played a wedding at Lake Louise in January and now it was April already and here she was walking down the street with her bass clarinet and some fella I’d never laid eyes on previous. I couldn’t get much of a read on the guy. He had the beard of a craft beer aficionado. Seemed like the kind of guy who’d always be ready to oblige you with a handshake or broad grin. I literally did a 180° and booked it back in the direction from which I’d come.  It hasn’t yet been easy for me to find ease anywhere, my childhood having been plagued by all kinds of visions of how ghastly things were going to get, how poorly I’d handle it, and the torments and agonies I would suffer for having had so little a proper part in the part I played. Theresa doesn’t prick up her ears when I’m with her until what I’m talking about briefly overlaps with one or another of her personal interests. A conniving careerist who isn’t going anywhere special, she startled me over dinner once by angrily describing how another friend—a guy we both know, perhaps her lover or former such—avoids her and then mopes and then grandstands, all of this stuff that Theresa was doing to me at the precise moment she was clumsily delineating the thing. What are you gonna do? Someone can be looking right at you and obviously have a lot on their mind, then proceed to tell you that they have nothing to say and everything’s okay. Nothing is ever okay on this planet, Jones. I no longer have the remotest capacity to divine what is going on around me, especially with respect to people I think of or previously thought of as friends. It’s a contagion of emotional withholding; it may correspond tangentially to solar flares and shifts in planetary axis and all these sorts of things. We have the degeneration of U.S. statecraft to the level of candy floss and bumper cars. We have all-too well documented evidence of the nightmarish zeal brought to bear in Israel’s wholesale slaughter of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. This is all stuff of which I’ve been terrified since I was in grade two at Woodlands Elementary and having to see all this sordid destiny through to the end has positively shredded my last goddamn nerve. What could anybody want from me? My psychiatrist says I can start looking for employment when I stop showing up at the emergency room for a spell. Whatever I have to offer may not be there tomorrow as that is the way of all things in transit. That is the way of Heraclitean flux. It doesn’t debate or abide contracts. It’s all the different kinds of weather we know and don’t know. Who out there I wonder has the most up-to-date numbers on the unknown unknowns? I will take the Buddhist stance here and strive to live the mandate: I don’t know, and it’s terrific. “A crowd of facts,” observes Henderson in Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, “came upon me with accompanying pressure in the chest.” The philosopher Byung-Chul Han advocates immersion in a “hovering time” that can avail us visions of “temporal sedimentations issuing a phosphorescent glow.” Take this if you will, from his 2021 book The Scent of Time: “The spell of profound boredom will only be genuinely broken if the ‘vita activa’ incorporates the ‘vita contemplativa’ into its critical pole and once again serves the latter.” If you cannot read, learn, and discuss openly then you can contribute to nothing other than the real-time downfall of postindustrial society, and I’m confident you are not very likely to ever see your own personal part in it just like those clueless jet-setting billionaires can’t see theirs. Nietzsche is largely talking about the ‘Protestant work ethic’ when he writes: “Active people roll like a stone, conforming to the stupidity of mechanics.” The artless bustling business of people might be the whole imposter civilizational facade its very self. You have enough jobs, you quickly catch on that nothing on God’s earth is run all that well. The inefficiencies and redundancies are astonishing. People who are manufactured more or less by the state are prepared early to inform on one another, to compete for status, to maintain plausible deniability, and to go ahead and do what they think they can get away with. In a basic sort of inherently socio-mechanistic context like that you can very easily see how conspiracies of silence may come to predominate. I’m not good at fixing this problem. Wherever I touch it the big bad bastard gets all the more inflamed. I don’t have the illusion of permanence, breaking it all down as I do to the twelve-stepper’s twenty-four hours. I have managed one day at a time well enough to still be here. But everything has to pass through a filter in order to meet and greet the reader, so going forward now for however long I am going to do stories that are essays and essays that are stories, and all the characters are going to be composites just like all of us already are, neither selves nor mere animals, but rather something much more akin to the capricious wrath of Zeus.

Portrait of Michel Simon

La chienne (Jean Renoir, 1931)

Blanche (Walerian Borowczyk, 1971)

When Michel Simon plays a part, we penetrate the core of the human heart.

- François Truffaut

April Prose Poem

The old faithful witch of the wood is here to join me in conducting tonight’s ceremonies; there is a buffet in the church basement, help yourselves, Jezebel’s space wagon has the wingspan of twelve-hundred gulls, out in the thick jello green where there ain’t no laws at all, that’s where you find yourself granted 100% total pixilated recall, a gift you’d rather not have been given and for which you have no damn use at all, Jerusalem being marked and Rome about to fall, the blue movie shimmering on island in den, we are the outreach workers of mossy purgatory, slide down off the crucifix and fix ourselves some ripe curses to affix to the automobiles in the motorcade that reach out to us personally in damp telepathic neural-tongue, begging: please mister, get in me!

The belle of the ball could not be here with us tonight, she sends her regrets, but she had to leave seven minutes ago when I looked up her dress and told her she’s a pest, it’s not like she was brought here under duress in her little red dress with Peanuts characters on her purse, her adamant directions: make these pale Jesus-freaks understand a field agent or saboteur have to lie and dissimulate frequently so you need to understand as well as understanding may that if work lies intended to undermine and compromise crawl over into your waking life, something with fangs this way cometh, phasing-out in bisexual colorus, blue, pink, purple...and you’re Jupiter red no matter how you’re spread. 

The pure past exists in two presents that the spiritual supplicant must name, and face, and then suppress, ‘cause I assure you it’s a complete fucking mess, like going out behind the church and coming back with cum on your dress, your hair all mussed and distressed; I got two men who are precision shots at the back of the room, Libertatia in 1700, Cthulhu Club, pumping in that Studio One dub, it’s the same shit forever that we won’t stop shitting, never thinking we clever, shaded from censure, but no longer able to act out Sacher-Masoch as a cassock raiding the grain elevators of Saskatchewan, face obscured by kerchief,  cut so thin that the margins rescind and all Holly Golightlys go lightly, the old faithful witch of the wood cuts herself a switch, fills in the gap: make no mistake, Jezel, it is cannibalistically that I chew on your lip just as the identity of an overcoded aggregate cannot be certified legit.

    

The My Dinner with Andre Dinner

 Yev;

Miraculously, it's April, 2025. In the process of organizing and getting all the myriad stuff set up for packing, I have this week had the advantage of consulting notebooks and journals I have not laid eyes upon in many a moon, such that I now may state, with other unmentioned bits of evidence also in underhanded hand covering my back, that the two of us have not been in the same room or on the same hot tarmac or any such place in very nearly seventeen years. Having fallen headlong into criminal misadventures intended to enrich us but clearly more inclined to imperil us mortally, we came to the stark conclusion that your mentor and personal handler Augie had been spot on the money when he said that sometimes you see a bullet coming at you very slow and it infuriates you that there's nothing you can do to move yourself out of the way. We figured we'd hedge on the yet-unproven prophecy and drive up into Ontario through Michigan and up to Québec's Laurentian Mountains, near the town of Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, right on Lac Brûlé, where you had a group of friends and co-conspiracists likewise squatting in tense anonymity and waiting for the heat to blow off. Your friends were holding their nerves together like weathered bundles of frazzled red wool utilizing the tried-and-true Canadian method of sitting by the lake and remaining agreeably inebriated all the livelong day on Labatt 50 and Canadian Club. They pumped me full of beer and whisky, not that I was exactly fending them off, and by nightfall I was wobbly and nauseous, just in time for the guys to give me psilocybin mushrooms. Shortly thereafter I was peaking on the hallucinogenics in the back of a car looking out the sunroof at the gigantic towering trees of the forest as they zoomed by majestically and "Tainted Love" played on the sound system. And then I was puking all over somebody's boat house. I could not locate you the next morning and have not seen you since, though it pleases me to see we've both kept busy, and you can go right ahead and apprise me of where you see my narrative veering from yours.

It should already be clear that I miss you still and reflect upon you regularly, though not in some lovesick puppydog way you'd obviously never expect or tolerate of me. This really funny thing happened tonight and I'm confident it will make for a good story; it also happens to centrally hinge on a lovely woman I just met for the first time who reminds me more than a little of you. I have these friends who live over in the Renfrew neighbourhood near the detox facility. In a lovely old stucco house with two dogs and a big fenced-in backyard with a fire pit where my friends are wont to host parties and barbecues. His name is Maurizio and hers is Sarah. He is a multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer while she does drawings and tapestries and works as a university administrator. Normally, Maurizio would text to invite me over for a dinner or a fire pit hang, but earlier today it was Sarah who messaged me, extending an invitation to both join them tonight for barbecued hamburgers and to meet an old university friend of Sarah's named Cecilia who is just in town for a few days and is assuredly the kind of lady out of whom I'd be liable to get a kick.    

      

Cecilia looks a bit like you, there can't be any denying it, though originally she's from Belize and definitely has that hotblooded Latina thing going on...to go with her vivacious physicality and slender, athletic build. She came to Canada at thirteen, lived in Nova Scotia until the end of high school, and has resided in Montreal ever since. Sarah was right. I was pretty taken with this comely visitor right off the bat. While we were out back by the barbecue with the dogs running around and fetching, Sarah told Cecilia that I'm writing a book on the whole history of movies and then it was indicated that I ought to explain said (totally unwritten) book. I told them that the book begins with Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers, and the birth of cinema in the late 19th century and ends prognosticating at length about possible image cultures of the future, but that right now I'm looking at Hong Kong action films and melodramas of the '80s and '90s with a critical eye for considerations of urban infrastructure and the metaphysics of simultaneity. I elaborated by means of example: in one of my all-time favourite Hong Kong films, PTU by Johnny To, the operative viewpoint is less 'bird's eye' than 'malfunctioning satellite.' To hopefully further clarify: I'm looking at basic problems of geophysical locality. Maurizio in chef's chapeau was engrossed in his burger-flipping responsibilities and Sarah did not appear to make a mental mark of so much as a single thing I'd said, but Cecilia grew both animated and visibly pensive. She could see that the implications of my concept were extensive, perhaps too much so, and she was doubtlessly right on both fronts. She told me she had loved the movies and almost hid under them like a big, safe blanket when she'd been a child. She said she was lonesome and squirrely all the way back to the cabbage patch. Classical Hollywood movies are Cecilia's favourites and she attributes this to her ongoing tendency to seek refuge in Turner Classic Movies when visiting her mother, also a fan of the station, in Nova Scotia. This really popped my lids open because it's the exact same way with me: how is one supposed to manage Halloween without Bride of Frankenstein or Christmas without The Bishop's Wife? After we laughed a little about that I asked if she had any standout Classical Hollywood favourites to which she answered: Marlene Dietrich movies! especially Shanghai Express and The Scarlet Empress. I had to confess in direct honesty and a spirit of openness that Shanghai Express might well also be my favourite of Dietrich's pictures if only because it pairs her with the incandescent and searing Anna May Wong. Cecilia said the cutest thing: they are ancestral astral cousins.      

Meandering chatter pertaining and not pertaining to motion pictures and the gods and goddesses of the hallowed silver screen led us circuitously back to the kitchen and the unfussily-set dining table. While we were all sitting down Cecilia got excited and said that she'd almost forgotten the wonderful semi-old classic movie she'd just seen in a small boutique theatre in Montreal before her departure and brief journey west. The film was My Dinner with Andre (from '81), which I'm confident you recall is the widely-beloved pic in which Louis Malle films Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn having dinner at some chic joint in Manhattan. I've seen the film numerous times and was about say so when out of the blue Sarah, who had not for some while appeared to be paying much attention, burst out almost as though without the remotest capacity to suppress the impulse, with: I hate that movie! Maurizio stiffened in his seat and cleared his throat, eyes wandering slightly askance. Cecilia sat there with her hands folded and was obviously crestfallen and a mite thrown but she didn't appear to be all that damaged or perturbed. After a brief silence, I asked Sarah if she wanted to walk us through the animosity. Her first point was that she'd spent a good deal more time than the rest of us with these fake metropolitan NYC New Yorker magazine dweebs and that she'd been to their parties and beheld the inconceivable and apparently invincible tedium vouchsafed therein. Plus also Wallace Shawn has an annoying nasally voice and an annoying goblin laugh. I said I was reminded of a bit in Don DeLillo about hip high society parties that are boring and demoralizing in the manner of the most punishing stretches in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Maurizio perked up, being a fan of the author, as I knew well he was, and asked if I knew which DeLillo that was from. I said I thought it was Americana, the first one. Letting out a hardy laugh, Maurizio said Americana was the first DeLillo he had read as a teenager and that when asked by his father what it was about he'd said it's about a troubled advertising executive who sits around his office masturbating, only for his father to respond, quick, sharp as a tack: this man sounds more like a lawyer to me. After this there was some pregnant silence and burger-gnoshing. 

Having sat on it for a good two or three minutes—all of us mostly sort of just sitting and munching our burgers—Cecilia said that it's true that Wallace Shawn has the conspicuous vocal-type characteristics attributed to him by surly old college buddy Sarah, and it's kind of interesting because it is actually true that Cecilia underwent a gradual transfer of identification while watching MY DINNER WITH ANDRE with an audience in Montreal, first identifying with Wallace Shawn's beaten-down playwright, who in the film is after all 36, same age as Cecilia, and whose grievances with respect to work, time, and money seemed timely and pertinent for her personally, and then identifying gradually much more with Andre Gregory, who at first seems a little slick and smarmy but who ultimately wins the love of the audience because he is full of, per Cecilia herself: sweetness, gentility, and joie de vivre. It's true also, she added, that Gregory's gospel of the fall of a mankind already plenty fallen seems ineffaceable, whether by virtue of the hordes of zombie consumers we encounter every day or all those who have outsourced their neural programming to the most unscrupulous of agents. And then this additional and very direct tidbit directly from the mouth of Cecilia: I really like the author Malcolm Gladwell and I pay attention, you might catch a good read on the stuff that's tipping and get yourself way off to the periphery to own the good humour you deserve having had the opportunity to reflect and to see that what you have done are good works and that you deserve in serenity whatever it is that is going to happen to you, because that impassable future distance is right here and right now the full measure of you. At this moment I noticed that while Maurizio and Sarah were enjoying their customary canned India Pale Ale, Cecilia was drinking soda like me. I asked her if she goes to church. Yes, I love it best when the priest can't sing but tries very, very hard.

           

We didn't talk into the night. We're getting old and Cecilia and I were sober and somnolent. As it had seemed to be the case that Blue Velvet was the one film all four of us had agreed monumentally altered the topographies of our respective youths, I thought I might shoot my shot, her attenuated presence in this slow prairie city notwithstanding, and ask Cecilia as I was leaving if she wanted to go see Wild at Heart with me tomorrow (almost tonight!) at Chinook Centre. It's true. They are doing a David Lynch retrospective at a shopping mall near here. There didn't appear anything fake or phoney about it when Cecilia stood there bouncing a little on her heels and told me she'd love to. You know all too well I'd have tracked it if her affect had been the slightest bit off.

Ever,

Jason   

Fuzzy Peach Crucifaction: Self on a Shelf

 

Louis C.K.

There is a woman on our work network who would not want me using her name (just as I wouldn’t want her trotting mine around neither). We were talking and the subject of the comedian and fallen idol Louis C.K. came up. She was saying that she once believed very powerfully in the whole culture of standup comedy and improv workshops and that she never really stopped believing in the whole vaguely emancipatory ideal, it was simply that she’d more or less stopped finding anybody all that funny. Something especially miffed her about the relative success of the objectively pitiful Eugene Mirman, then she had a very ugly personal encounter with David Cross, and finally, because she has a trans sibling, she was disgusted with Louis C.K.’s trans material precisely because it was too lazy, unimaginative, and self-righteous to even be transphobic. Like, step out of yourself for a second, buddy. I brought up the matter of C.K.’s chronic unwanted masturbating-in-front-of-people. She said she couldn’t really understand it. Like, she lacked that critical point of reference or whatnot. Who does that? I really had no choice, I had to tell her. It happened to me. What?!! A good friend of mine was sitting across the room from me…a good ways away. We were talking and we were high. Suddenly he whipped his cock out, it was fully erect, and he started stroking it while looking at me with the entreaty of some half-assed geisha. He was five or six steps away from me at best and there was no chance in hell I was getting up. What he saw me looking at him with was a different sort of challenge. But it all resolved politely and without fanfare. The woman on our work network said I probably better not ever tell that story to anybody else. 

Louis XVI Prepares for His Execution

 

La petite Aurore et Guy Damien Lafleur

La petite Aurore, quelle horreur, you lived twelve months on oatmeal and Planters peanuts and doll hair, so I'd imagine, being imaginative, and they whipped you with a belt and burned your hands and cheeks on the stove, and all the good Catholic boys and girls of Dear Québec were traumatized forever because they made a movie about it and put it on TV, and of course there were only two or three channels back then, and this poor tortured girl became the best ever emblem of Québec's mongrel Catholicism and all the little French Canadian kids knew it plain as day, even as the so-called adults prevaricate, just as the plains of Abraham stand dismal and grey...je me souviens...

Guy Damien Lafleur, born in Thurso, Québec the year after my parents were born, but not in Québec, remains an all-time leading scorer for the Montreal Canadiens hockey franchise, his numbers right up there with those of Maurice “Rocket” Richard, the only other player who competes with him for status as most popular among true traditionalist Canadiens fans. At fifteen years of age and a paltry one-hundred-thirty-five pounds, Lafleur joined the Québec Jr. Aces and managed to somehow score a whopping one-hundred-sixty-one goals in one hundred games.