The Knack

 

El ángel exterminador (Luis Buñuel, 1962)

The Knack...and How to Get It (Richard Lester, 1965)

I told the ladies that it was not impossible to behold in the beloved both a new constellation in the heavens and a loser with no spine, all the brunt of it, and that I felt as though in the past year I had won an enormous battle over a vast kingdom only to attain for my troubles the right to die of exposure or dehydration under a terrible tangerine sky with the flesh slowly bubbling and gassing. Patricia was sitting right across from me and looked upon me with grave concern. She told me I should avoid getting myself isolated in remote places and advised me to be suspicious of Google Maps. Aida said also to never forget you are trapped in samsara, a learning hell meant to transform you into some much more satisfactory thing, not unlike the butterfly, newly suited for a better cosmic set-up. Reality is mystical, shimmering, and chimerical and it's chasing its own tail.

Rose is angry with the "big, bad bossy people." Cassie hates cruel and treacherous friends of the altogether false variety. Lorraine hates "stupid, noxious parasites." She is once purported to have stated outright that ethnic people smell funny because of the weird food they eat. She can't get away with that shit around here. Lol. She once bragged to me that she's better at deceit than I am. Go for it, girl. Heh heh. I'd rather have the free time and undisturbed slumber.

Aida now addresses the whole table. "When your government pitches some new 'stimulus' package as though infinite economic growth were a foreordained given, remember that in Latin 'stimulus' means a goad, prick, sting, spur, or incitement and that the plural, 'stimuli,' comes from a root related to sharp points. We are each of us born into brutal and insensate servitude." Jo agrees and extends her pint glass in salute, not forgetting to add that neither Casanova nor Lord Byron were attractive nor was either man even remotely competent as a lover, not that they failed to mount many, as legend dutifully tells. "History," she insists, "is written by the spoilage."

I told the ladies about a poem I wrote as a teenager in which there was this very lofty line about how I had set off to make love to every single person because nobody had taken the time to tell me I could not. Most of the ladies chuckled. I dated multiple people at a time until I was nineteen or twenty. I hit a wall or I hit burn-out or both. I only really needed one pretty pony with two or three tricks. Fattened on greed, the human animal pukes its own miserable, godforsaken guts out. Patricia got a little sullen and accused me of preferring to retreat from the field of battle altogether rather than potentially contribute to unnecessary or excessive carnage. Well, I mean, Christ on crutches, Patricia! Wtf? Where is it you've gone got yourself zoned? Jo, tipsy, proposes just then a toast:

"To Wayfaring—"