War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044) Read online

  THE WAR IS LANGUAGE: 101 SHORT WORKS

  ~

  NATH JONES

  Copyright © 2012 by Nath Jones. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-937316-04-4

  Cover Design by Ryan W. Bradley: www.aestheticallydeclined.net

  The Wichita Vortex Sutra epigraph is used with expressed permission from HarperCollins and the Allen Ginsberg Project.

  SmashWords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to SmashWords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  http://nathjones.com/

  Chicago, IL, USA

  [email protected]

  PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  The war is language,

  language abused

  for Advertisement,

  language used

  like magic for power on the planet.

  —Allen Ginsberg

  From “Wichita Vortex Sutra”

  For Melody Layne

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  89 — Dead Reckoning with Azimuth

  1 — Fragmentation Grenade

  97 — Rebel

  53 — Worth/Worthless

  41 — Artist/Entrepreneur

  4 — Ideas, People, Things

  2 — An Admissions Essay

  3 — Labor Movement

  73 — Bad Person

  85 — Content with the Status Quo

  5 — Imported Silk Wedding Veil in the Kitchen Trash

  57—Doc

  6 — Saucony After Adidas

  77 — Escapist Pleaser

  9 — Be Where

  40 — Action/Reaction

  10 — Just Your Usual Woman

  91 — Wasting Your Time

  13 — Trop Gaté

  8 — Debriefing

  14 — Blue Butterfly Falling-Out Barrette

  16 — Mothers of War

  18 — In Medias Res

  100 — Hysteria in the Street

  19 — Whimsy

  20 — Ablation

  21 — Mortifications

  67 — Sperm Donor

  22 — AT-4

  23 — Cold Open

  25 — So They Say

  26 — The Hypericum

  47 — Man/Woman

  28 —The End of Grief

  29 — Cold Sunny Morning

  30 — Inquiry

  31 — Diary with Burning Ellipsis

  27 — Ladies who Lunch on Disposable Plates

  32 — Laissez-Faire

  43 — Conservative/Liberal

  33 — boy,

  65 — Ego Confronting Mortality

  34 — Lunch Alone

  36 — Get Rich & Save the U.S. Economy in the Process!

  70 — Virgin/Whore

  12 — Ma Deuce

  38 — Grotto

  42 — Centripetal/Tangential

  44 — Creative/Destructive

  45 — Identity/Id Entity

  60 — Pussy/Deterrent Threat

  49 — Security/Insecurity

  17 — Carefully-placed Patterned Pavers

  50 — Smart/Dumb

  51 — Subjective/Objective

  7 — Commuted Fantasy

  52 — Tangible/Intangible

  94 — Stalker

  56 — Glory-Seeking Adulator

  58 — Hatemonger

  15 — The Dumbass Solidarity Project: A Facebook Forum

  90 — Cycle of Victimization

  59 — Detritus

  61 — Infantile

  35 — Breast Meat

  62 — Patriotic Anomaly

  63 — Wannabe

  54 — Hammered

  64 — Meaningless Existence

  66—Son

  11 — Rubberband Ankles

  68 — Doting Daddy

  69 — Boys Club Relic

  71 — Calm & Collected

  74 — Repressive

  75 — Embarrassing Evidence of Societal Entropy

  37 — Celebrating a 25th Anniversary

  76 — Overwhelmed

  79 — Stating the Obvious

  80 — Mommy Dearest

  81 — Slacker

  48 — Mother/Child

  82 — Judgmental

  24 — The Status Report

  83 — Poor Benighted Self-Centered Bitter Soul of Vengeance

  78 — Owner of Dynasty

  84 — Familial Run-in with Religious Hypocrisy

  86 — Should Have Gotten Knocked-Up at Fourteen

  87 — Book Worm

  39 — July Visit

  88—Want

  46 — Love/Pity

  92 — Me

  93 — Fuck-up

  95 — Self-Help Nightmare

  96 — Heretic

  98 — Sit-Down Dinner

  99 — Altruist

  55 — Pothead

  101 — Lonely Broken Heart

  About the On Impulse eBook Series

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  While I was working on this book a friend said Quit it. I said No.

  89 — Dead Reckoning with Azimuth

  I don’t suppose you would ever believe that this entire book happens in just two minutes, with a clenching chest, sweats, and hives. But it does. It happens right there. Where? Right there in the two minutes that you absolutely must sit down in the shaded sands of North Avenue beach in Chicago. Don’t collapse. That’s ridiculous. And. No. Don’t go over on the bench. Definitely not that bench. Why do you think no one’s on it? There’s something sticky there. Stop! What are you thinking? Where are you going? No. My God. Not by the water. That’s almost fifty yards from here. It’s much too far to cross the beach when this disoriented. Just sit down. Yes, yes, yes. Come on. At least try to be aware of where you are physically. And. So. Fine. There you go. South of Fullerton. North of the quaint brick bathrooms. You know. Quit worrying. And. I already said this whole thing happens in just two minutes. So. For a book that short, what more do you need for a setting? Time and place. That’s it. That’s the requirement. You’re golden. You know. That’s what you want. That’s what you need. To know. Right? So. Good. You know. You’re not on the pavement of the lakeshore path. You’re not down by the water or in anybody’s way. You’re not on the bench with that two-day-old sticky Popsicle residue. It’s not summer but it’s an abnormally hot day in spring or fall. Maybe even one of those completely freakish December days when it hits eighty degrees in the Midwest. There’s a bit of shade, perhaps an opportunity to collect yourself, maybe a friend to call, maybe a few breaths to take, maybe something pleasant to look at: if it’s not December then a volleyball game, a lifeguard walking back and forth with one of those rocket-shaped flotation devices with the harpoon cording, or, you know, whatever: the sky, the gulls preening on the breakwater, the pebbles in the sand, the bikers on the bike path, the joggers, the Mexican families grilling on the lawn, the black guy people-watching from the bench further down, the white guy trudging along getting back in shape after a second heart attack, the Asian woman training for another triathlon, and the parents with strollers. It’s all there. Whatever you want to look at to help just calm the fuck down and stop your mind from racing.

  1 — Fragmentation Grenade

  It makes no sense. Nothing’s to be done. How can anyone
expect a contract to become a riotous nation, or, my God, a happy family?

  It’s absurd.

  In our marriage there was no way to love anyone. We’d point at each other, or the mirror, or the floor, and, oh yes, we’d make our demands. It is no one’s fault. Our me-materials could not possibly shelter anyone. Who can live huddled together under un-dovetailed illusion and unarticulated expectation? So. Fuck it. I sold the gold for scrap and decided to reassemble an M67 fragmentation grenade.

  It will be an elaborate puzzle. I’ll find all the pieces, unbend the mangled distortions, and put disruption back into that handheld metal orb.

  Who knows how far the pieces will have gone? The M67 fragmentation grenade has a five-meter kill zone—mainly for people but animals, too—a fifteen-meter casualty radius, and a forty-five-meter blast perimeter. Pieces can be propelled up to 250 meters. But that’s not the only distance those small round-torn-twist pieces can travel. I bet I’ll have to go collecting all over the world. After explosions, after wars, men go home, you know. The pieces move away from detonation in pockets, in caskets, in flesh.

  I suppose I could go right to war—where most fragmentation grenades explode. Or maybe the war will come to me. That’d probably be easiest. Either way, I’ll definitely need to be there. Time is always a factor of accuracy. Think about paleontology. It’s a miracle when they can assemble an entire skeleton because so much time has gone by, so many things could have happened to make assembly impossible. So. No. I don’t want any geologic eras passing. Definitely not. I want to be there when it happens so I can just catch all the pieces of a particular fragmentation grenade.

  Time is one thing, but distance is quite another problem. War draws men from the farthest reaches of the globe. It never matters how far they have to go. If there is a war, they will be there. They will make a plane, make a boat, take a tank, and go. So to reassemble this particular grenade, if I don’t catch every single piece right away, if other people end up with some—like what happens with candy at a parade, disseminated, you know—then I might have to go really far, understand the motion of front lines, and maybe learn some languages. Or something.

  Beyond that I’ll probably have to dig some stuff up. I’ll have to exhume graves to get some of the snarled steel pieces. And that will be a problem, because out of respect I probably won’t be able to dig in people’s graves. It’s likely to become a logistical nightmare, considering how many graves are full of pieces of grenades which would not be part of the particular grenade I’m going to reassemble. I try to block it out though I know we did try to build an us-place. Culling. Sorting. I’m unbending countless pieces of innumerable grenades, too infinite, often finding that, in the end, the piece doesn’t fit anywhere in this one particular M67 fragmentation grenade.

  It’s a pity. Even if I can’t be there right when the thing blows up, for obvious reasons related to my later interests in effective curatorship, I can surely go right to where the grenade exploded. If I’m in that five-meter kill zone, in the fifteen-meter casualty radius, in the forty-five-meter blast perimeter that’s all included within the 250-meter-wide circular area where the furthest pieces can fly, I should be able to pick up all the pieces that didn’t kill anyone or anything, which will be lying around. I’ll bet many will be right there in the kill zone. I’m almost sure gravity plays in right from the start.

  The diamond won’t sell on consignment. No one can afford clarity with this recession.

  So if I can’t go to war, if I can’t get there right away, then it may have been a long time since the grenade blew up. Except for exhuming graves, I might only have to dig a little bit. I am not really sure how deep I’ll need to dig to find every one of the pieces or what to do about how they might have gone off in the tracks of shoes over the years. And. That can get even more confusing because they’ve already gone off, so, it’s like the thing goes off, then the pieces are lying there, then people inadvertently walk over them, something gets lodged in a shoe and disappears.

  That’s what I mean. You know?

  I don’t know. I think theoretically I should be able to reassemble a particular M67 fragmentation grenade. But I guess it will be pretty hard to know exactly where a particular grenade exploded, even with the GPS these days. That’s a definite issue.

  Well, at least I’ll be able to call up all the living people who have pieces of this grenade in them or who had pieces of this grenade in them at one time. Plenty of people were probably in that fifteen-meter casualty radius. I’ll probably start with pieces from them. I should be able to narrow it down from a list from the VA or something. And I’m sure other countries have organizations similar to the VA, so I can just call them all up, or email them or whatever, ask them for a list of people with grenade pieces in them, in case this one particular M67 fragmentation grenade affected people from more than one country.

  97 — Rebel

  Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

  I sat with my mom in the hospital. We waited for my brother’s ankle to get reset. An itinerant biker was there, too. The old-fashioned kind: leather skin, blurry tattoos, raspy voice, and the kind of smile that could bite the head off a starling. He told me he was dying of cancer. Right there next to me. Right in the waiting room. Can you believe it? He said he needed to hold someone's hand. So I talked with him and held his hand. But. Me holding this gross socially-marginalized guy’s hand skeeved my mother out. She took up a half-made prayer shawl, inhaled aggressively, and started counting crochet stitches through trifocals.

  Dear Rebel,

  I know you did your best to answer this fucking guy in his anxiety and fear, to look him right in the eye, to be present and listen. Fine. Yeah. He probably shouldn’t have to face his mortal fear alone. But your mother was right. Five minutes of hand-holding isn't nothing. You should have asked him for a hundred bucks.

  53 — Worth/Worthless

  The leftover people, including me, are really noncommittal. Not sticky enough for entire lifetimes. We prefer isolation over intimacy. Don’t take it personally. We have other good qualities. We're just more like graphite than diamond: same chemical makeup, different structure. Not everlasting. Not harder than anything. Not incredibly valuable. Not sparkling despite included clarity. Not perfect for cutting glass. Not ever picking up the beam of a halogen light at a steak dinner and tossing it in hundreds of directions like a little left-handed disco. But. Still. As we shift and slide in our silty, slippery puffs, no one can deny we’re all very good for lubricating locks.

  41 — Artist/Entrepreneur

  Just listen to it—that material silence—tucking you in. You’re on a magic carpet under a tight sheet. Falling off updrafts causes your stomach to lurch. Air drops current and the material drifts down.

  Let it drape, and with it let the wrinkles of your mind billow out from the confinement of a hot iron’s steam. Here, in conscious thought resurrected from places beyond awareness, there is some mass grave of rotting dreams unclaimed. I can do nothing limitless, but I can do so many limited things. Punitive distorted ruptures will find you out if you struggle, squirm, and scream. Voodoo, crucifixion, and magicians’ knives thrown along your perimeter seem quite ordinary—quite civilized. Don’t flinch while a pretend body on an impossible flying machine gets tipped back on no waterboard but becomes stretched against the vertical panel of an idealized have-to-be self-perception and then push pins—these social graces, these acceptable mutilations and attacks—drive in here and there.

  Wait! Stop! No! Don’t allow it. Hurry. Knock that self-making-self-same-self down! Have the horizontal again and cover the decision to wait it out. Lie still under the imperative of your own have-to-breathe, even must-do, lifting under that undulating plane of bedtime percale, and extinguish any last-hope frenzy from a day of misunderstanding the unknown that surrounds you more totally than what is comprehensible. Hear prayer shouts, “Go up!” but quiet lie, and keep to it—smile your pleasant endurance if you dare such lone things.

/>   4 — Ideas, People, Things

  Michael said, "People only talk about things, ideas, and other people."

  In my family we talk about nothing.

  After being so thrown by Mom’s misgivings, I set about the business of putting a little order in things at her place. I folded a blanket, an afghan, arranged the potted plants, and pulled the seat cushion out of an old wingback chair, one that Mom inherited when Grandma died.

  A simple paper napkin, with a Bounty design, was doubled over and wedged way down in that crease where the upholstery’s crafted bottom meets an unfaded portion of the well-made arm. My grandmother must have slipped the napkin down into the edge of the chair, for later, I suppose, with a sort of churlish anxiety suppressed into the smoothing down of cheap paper nothings. The napkin edges were perfectly matched, likely with all the reasons one tends never to say a word, about anything that matters, like people.

  Mom’s screams had dissipated in the preceding minutes. My reaction was almost gone. Who knows how many years that napkin had been in that chair? But however long it had been between there, I could almost see my grandmother's fingernails—ridged, not dainty but always properly trimmed—folding the napkin carefully. She must have done it after elevenses at ten, after those ritualistic marmalade English muffin pleasantries but before her mind’s placement into the continual-drift of gray-skied coffee-cup-saucered late mornings.

  In the re-equilibrated silence of my finders/keepers afternoon I curated my grandmother’s inadvertent action, put the folded napkin right back where I’d found it, unnoticed and forgotten there under the seat cushion.

  2 — An Admissions Essay

  I am really interested in attending your university. Well. Not really. But. I have a passable—check that—I have a socially acceptable amount of interest in doing what it takes to get by. Of course I care just enough to write this the day before the deadline. Well. Okay. Fine. Two hours before the deadline.