by Josh Delman
I'm a crazy college student who likes to write things. I eat peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. I've really been appreciating bananas recently. I'm going to start telling people that when they ask me "what's new?"
If you're interested, there's an RSS feed. For your auditory pleasure: my Last.fm. Some jd87 highlights: Live at Westgate, Haikus, Pt. 1.
This site might be a blog, it might be a a repository for fiction, or it might be something else altogether. Please enjoy.
2009: January / February / March / April / May / June / July / August / September
© 2009 and beyond
Contact me.
June 2009
A Free-Association Car Ride FICTION #
I can see now, from staring intently at the lines on the road, that we are increasing speed. Yellow dashes zoom by and when we reach a speed like this, they start to blur into one continuous line. I am sitting behind the driver’s seat of a 1994 Volvo station wagon, which my parents say is presently the safest car on the market. They have read these things in thick, heavy magazines with crisp pages that tear easily. Apparently, the thicker the magazine, the more trustworthy it is. They had some other magazines that told them to buy other cars. But they realized, from trusting the thick magazines, that these other cars do not have side curtain airbags and ABS (anti-lock brakes, from the German Antiblockiersystem – and I’ve read in a semi-thick magazine that the Germans, despite some ugly history, are quite excellent engineers.) My little brother is sitting in the backseat as well, but he’s asleep. His head is titled gently down and he is loosely gripping a juicebox in his left hand. The straw, which juts straight out of the box and then bends at a nearly perfect right angle, still has a ~one cm long bit of juice suspended at the mouth-end of the straw, not dripping onto my brother’s lap, but through some kind of physics I don’t understand, is just staying there. He, my brother, is nine. I am five years older than him. I have been on this planet for five years more than him. I have just learned that we are on the third planet from the sun.
Now I understand why there is a show called “Third Rock From the Sun.” I file these piece of knowledge away, somewhere, and something in my head shifts. My cloudy understanding of reality becomes a little less shrouded.
“Oliver, give me the chips,” my dad says. I look around for the bag, I look around for the bag.
“Steven, you’ve been eating chips the whole way,” says my mom. I think that I’m not supposed to like one of my parents more than the other, but right now I definitely like my dad more. He seems more fun right now or something. “Just give him a couple chips, Oliver.”
I reach into the bag and grab a couple chips. I’ve realized that it’s very hard to reach into a bag of chips without hearing that scrunching noise that plastic bags make. My dad, presumably cued by the scrunching, removes his right hand from the steering wheel and extends it backwards towards me, palm up, as if he were balancing a big pizza. I place the chips on his hand. He wraps his hairy fingers around them and puts them all into his mouth at once, crunching them loudly. He cocks his head towards my mom, chewing with his mouth open. She laughs.
“Keep your eyes on the road, honey,” she says.
“Owwww!”
I don’t know what’s just happened, but in the brief moment before my dad starts explaining why he just said ‘owwww’ and actually saying ‘owwww,’ I reason that he has either a) chewed one of the chips in an awkward way, such that one of sharp corners of the chip (they are Doritos) has lodged into his hard palate, or b) he did not chew one of the chips well enough, and swallowing it hurt because, again with those sharp corners, one of the sharp corners of the chip rubbed against the inside of his esophagus. Because of the way he was chewing them, you know, with his mouth open, I think that it’s probably choice A.
“What’s wrong?” my mom asks.
“I swallowed a big chip,” he says. Choice B!
“That’s what you get for chewing with your mouth open,” my mom says.
“Honey, can you pull over soon?”
“Now?” he says. “But we’re making such good time. I can’t stop now.”
“Well, I don’t understand why it matters when we stop,” she says. “If we’re making good time, I mean,” she says, then pauses. Her mouth his still open and her chest is – she’s holding her breath, waiting for the thought to come to her waiting for the rest of the sentence to take form and there’s something inside of her on the tip of her tongue and she just can’t get it out, and –
“Honey, Oliver, what I do I mean?”
“You mean that it doesn’t matter when we stop if we’re making good time because at some point we’ll have to stop anyway, we’ll have to stop anyway and the amount of time it takes us to stop would be the same if we stop now or if we stop later.”
“Would you listen to the mouth on that kid,” my dad says. “I’m raising a genius!”
This makes me feel good. When my dad calls me a genius, I mean. I’m not really sure what it means to be one, but I’ve heard that Albert Einstein was one. So was Isaac Newton, they say. I don’t like Fig Newtons, but my dad does. Yes, yes, yes! I’ve definitely read that Newton was a genius, definitely definitely read that, in a big thick textbook that they gave to us in class. Know is a funny word. It looks funny and it sounds like no. The more I say the word know, the more inclined I am to say no when someone asks me if I know what “know” means.
“What?” my mom says. She rotates her body at her hip, turning towards me.
“What did you just say?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I thought you said something,” she says, turning forward again.
I’m not sure where we are, but it looks very pretty outside. I do know for sure, I’m absolutely sure that, we are definitely heading west; the sun is setting in front of us. After all, I can see the sun – they’ll be no denying that. It’s hanging low in the sky, filling the sky with fire, its pure energy creating wavy lines in the air.
“I’m bored,” I say.
“Do a crossword puzzle,” my mom says.
“Or a brain teaser,” my dad says.
“Read that book.”
“We’ve got a couple magazines up here.”
“Did you bring your Walkman, Oliver?”
“Try going to sleep.”
None of the options seem appealing. More often than not, these “activities” are just distractions. Looking out the window, however, affords me temporary moments of enlightenment. I see something and make the connection in my head, and then I am aware. I am aware now, for example, that those grayish, red-splattered furry spots on the road are not moles, like the ones on my Uncle Morty’s neck (now you tell me! – why does the hair growing out of a mole get so thick and dark?) – they are dead raccoons. I am aware that my second grade teacher, Mrs. Potato Head, once called me “mouth” because I talked too much in class. In fact, one day in that class, I was reading my textbook and drawing in the margins. Using a pencil, I formed a Necker cube, a classic doodle in which two squares are drawn one over the other with one square up and to the right (or up and to the left, or down and to the left, or down to the right) so that connecting their corners made something that was like a 2D projection of a cube. But it didn't look right. The problem was that one of the squares was more like a lopsided rectangle, and the annoying non-cubishness of this cube was bothering me so I flipped my pencil around and rubbed with the (what colors are erasers anyway? I want to call it Pepto-Bismol, but I feel like erasers are so common, even more common than Pepto-Bismol, so that if the color of erasers really was identical with that of Pepto-Bismol we would have to start calling the color of Pepto-Bismol "eraser") eraser, deep into the paper, and I leaned in real close to the paper so that the tip of my nose was about an inch above the page and slightly to the left of the cube and I erased and erased, and the smell of the little pink eraser bits were smokey and spicy, and I believe that they were the direct cause of my sudden craving for bacon. I blew away some of the bits and realized that I had started erasing a little past the cube to some of the printed words in the textbook. And the words were faded, so I erased more. And I erased a whole paragraph right out of my textbook. I had erased history. What if there was a nuclear explosion or some kind of crazy flesh-eating virus epidemic and everyone had to hole up in rusty underground bunkers? And they, the survivors, stay in these bunkers for years and years to the point where they develop a new rusty underground bunker language and rusty underground bunker culture and rituals, and even the most classically religious of them forget the first commandment and start worshipping giant rusted iron statues? And anyway, the whole point of this is to say, what if they had eventually gotten out and come upon my textbook and it was the only book of record they could find and entire paragraphs would be missing! If I had started erasing some European history they might not ever know about the Defenestration of Prague! Knowledge erased – it might as well have never happened. And I could imagine two of these underground bunker people, their skin now almost bleached white due to the lack a need for melanin and a strange genetic mutation somewhere down the germ line, examining carefully the pages of my textbook. They'd be wearing bright neon clothes made out of nylon and spandex. If they were smart, one of them would say, look, a historical artifact from another era of human existence on this fragile planet. And they would have a good laugh. "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" Yes yes, if there's one thing you can count on these future-humanoids having, it's hearty laughs. It's the only thing that could keep them sane in their little rusty bunker rooms.
I am still sitting in the back of the car. I look right, at my brother again. The sun has retreated and it is dark out. What is it with dusk? You realize it’s getting darker, and then before you know it, you are exposed. Above your head is a vast sweep of black, and it is speckled with white shimmering bits. ♦
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TV commercial volume #
Bill would turn down volume on TV ads:
Currently, TV ads can't be louder than the loudest peak in a show, said David Perry, the chairman of the broadcast production committee of the American Association of Advertising Agencies in New York. Ads often seem louder to viewers, he added, because a program's volume peak rarely comes just before an ad.There's hardly an argument to stop this from happening. Loud commercials are one of the most annoying parts of the TV experience - especially if you're one of those people who have a compulsion to judge a commercial's effectiveness and/or annoyingness.
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