Looking for Lance Ash?
They Can’t Touch Me Now
Toadsgoboad
died long before now; I’m just retiring the name. The ending of my comic strip “Doodlenose” and
the completion of my novel, “At Home With the Gas Giants,” eliminated the need
for Toadsgoboad as a character in my works.
Everything that could be done had been.
My upcoming plans for my painting career as well as the feelings I have
after doing thirteen albums of music under the name Toadsgoboad also lend
themselves to the retirement of the name.
However, it will revert to its original use as a magic word, a word with
which to effect change and conjure visions.
Father Sniff and His Origins Green
Father Sniff,
who had once been known as Bolt Uprite, the communist preacher, had emphasized
his doctrine of balance and fairness so much over the years that he had begun
to split his mind into two equal halves, with each hand doing its share of the
high profile tasks. He had become, in
the truest sense of the word, ambidextrous.
Some time
after the coup that brought the religious leaders to power, Father Sniff was
condemned as an outright blasphemer. His
trial, which was televised, showed him clearly writing two contradictory texts
simultaneously, each of his hands taking up opposing sides on the subject of
marijuana legalization.
As he stepped
out of the courtroom at the head of a mob of converts, he announced to the
awaiting cameras that he would reward his right hand that afternoon with
masturbatory detail, though manipulating the mouse with his left was tricky.
Black Armband
Potato Salad
I Would Love Some Potato Salad
To the extent
that a person attempting to do creative work concerns himself with doing that
work within an established form (or format,
if you prefer), that person is a conservative.
This may seem a harsh and unfair judgment to pass on someone who may
otherwise be attempting the most radical expression, but remember, we are only
claiming that one’s unthinking adoption of and unreasonable devotion to
traditional structures (the novel; the symphony; the rectangular, stretched
canvas; usw.) is an example of the inherent intermingling of conservatism and
its natural counterpart that is present in everyone, artist or not.
The bearded
rhinoceros taking up two (or even three) seats near the back of the auditorium
wondered whether I, in my capacity as lecturer, was hedging my bets in not
naming conservatism’s “natural counterpart” as liberalism outright. Yet he said nothing during the question-and-answer
session that followed my speech, preferring to wait until most of the audience
was shuffling towards the exits to join a subset now congregating about me as I
put my papers back in an old cardboard box preparatory to my own exit-directed
shuffle.
“Professor,”
the rhinoceros asked, using his beard and his bulk to establish preeminence
among the sycophancy, “If one does not work within traditional, or
established forms does that make one a liberal?”
“To the
extent that one appreciates the resulting work one is a liberal,” I
replied, “But as for the artist himself, he is no more a liberal for
having utilized non-traditional forms that are you a walking aphrodisiac just
because you have that horn on your nose.”
I smiled at a pretty young girl looking at me as I put the last of my papers
and comforting trinkets away.
The
rhinoceros covered his horn with his hand, as if suddenly aware of a zit.
“Would you
like some potato salad, Professor?” the young girl asked.
“Don’t call
me Professor,” I begged.
Complete the Form as the Lumbago Enters Maturity
Fat Girl’s Folly is Endemic Among the Tribe’s Comedians
“Gentlemen,
the disease is hereditary. Outside of
instituting almost universal mandatory breeding standards and… outright euthanasia,
I don’t see how we can control it.” Dr.
Murkum spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. He had seen an actor on a TV show do the
same a couple of weeks before and been practicing it since. It had come in handy, he now felt.
Hilde started
to respond, but Judge Insanders interrupted.
“Why do you say ‘almost universal’ standards?” he demanded. He was a tall, plank-like figure, painted
like a refrigerator’s idea of what a policeman looks like, only definitely
suited up for jungle adventure. He had
sashes and loops and straps all over him.
At least, that’s what we said when we studied the recording later.
“Well,” Dr.
Murkum drawled, dragging his downward sweeping gaze over the polished length of
the conference table. “The rice are
always going to find a way to beat the rules.”
“I’m tired of
hearing about the ‘rules’,” Pat Cherry
sneered, his moustache a Tunguska of silver birch, each denuded trunk of which
flaked an uncountable, unnamable library of illustrated pages in its papery
bark. If only we could get in there and
capture a fifth of that trove before it is consumed by mites!, I thought as the
various aspects of the recording were explored.
“It would be a cartoonist’s universe,” I commented.
“Someone
would have to edit it,” Heath pointed out, uselessly, as it happened. The concrete value of some degree of conservatism
was impressed upon me as we left the observation chamber and found ourselves
facing the legacy of the disease.
“Thank god
for property taxes,” Heath sighed. The
barrier had come down; we were as safe as that cellar full of coal we wish to
do away with.
“Your words
betray your fear,” the Wise One turned from an off-screen distraction and
looked into our eyes. “As pitiable as
the transient’s dragon,” she remarked, laughing and leaking joy.
You Are Never Going to Get My Phone Number, So Stop Asking
The Serf’s Hologram Remitted
Traditional
cords of jute held the squirrel-sized bundles of Nazi memorabilia and brown
saxophones. To one side of the
ceremonial basket in which these bundles stood like one-legged soldiers were
the protesters, a phalanx of bearded youths and their lank-haired women, all of
them dressed in heavy coats and jeans of decidedly socialist manufacture. These protesters had been momentarily
silenced by the arrival of the christchild, who stood on an elaborately
decorated box of gold box set on a litter borne by seven functionaries in
all-concealing garments. The
christchild, though still too young to stand alone, did so anyway, and waved at
the people assembled here on the floor of Mr. Mexican’s mighty dome. One could hear the indistinct murmur of
conversation from one of the adjoining rooms.
“What are
they saying?” Grosvenor Bobsqueak, a
temporal stand-in for any of a number of my intermediate manifestations, asked
Schaeffer Detour. The two men were
sitting in the makeshift press box glued with hopeful permanence high on the
interior of the dome, although neither was a member of any recognized
permutation of the press.
Schaeffer put
his ear to Mr. Mexican’s folding table and listened.
“Two voices,
maybe three,” he determined. “Although
that last could be a television. Yes,
definitely television. Probably tuned to
a commentary on last year’s ceremony.”
Grosvenor
kept his thoughts to himself concerning this determination. He doodled in his notebook and the doodle
looked like this:
Masterton could
play the piano. He was self-taught and
knew nothing about reading music, but had composed over a hundred short
pieces. He ended his shift by checking
on the disused studio down in the basement.
LIFE IS TOO SHORT
First of all, you must understand that I don't know what I'm doing. Not only do I not have any plan in mind, but I also don't know by what exact method I am going to achieve what I'm supposed to be achieving. Anyway, the idea is this: The Procurement Man has officially, and now practically, entered Phase Three. Phase two, for those of you keeping track, is a novel being held in abeyance until I feel the time is right to unleash it on the world. What Phase Three means is that text and artwork are now presented together as some kind of hopeless disaster. EVERYTHING is now the Procurement Man. It's an online magazine, it's a novel, it's all a big mess, but here we go...
Crab Crust So That Hard Knots Stay Integrated
The
tabletop was dusted with Donnie’s skin spores, tiny black granules that, if
properly moistened with a mixture of liquid manure and orange juice, could
mature into tiny clones of Donnie.
Masterton, head of security for Nobbling Intertesticular Bruncheon,
swept the little black dots into his outstretched, upturned hat, careful not to
drool as he did so. He shook his hat a
couple of times, watching the accumulated effluvia inside jump about like the
intolerable hopes of a college drop-out.
“Have
you seen Donnie?” Rita, putting her head
in the door, asked.
“No,”
Masterton answered without taking his eyes off the dancing possibilities. “But he’s been here. He left his crumbs.” He showed Rita the interior of his
high-crowned hat.
Rita
frowned in disgust, but said nothing.
Her makeup, although applied with a mason’s eye for adhesion and
structural soundness, did nothing to cover up the acne scars that were her war
medals from high school. In the intervening
years she had seen Nobbling grow into a commercial empire threatening even the
moon’s mercantilist maunderings. Her
father had directed the firm’s reformation division. She now drove an expensive car of a make
supposedly no longer in production, one whose continued existence was kept a
luxurious, exclusive secret from the pill-shaky and short-of-breath rabble.
“Why
are they short of breath?” Stevenson asked.
She was fresh from administering IQ tests to all of the cousins and
nearly allowed herself to flop into the booth.
“Because…” I considered. “Because when one thinks of the days gone by,
the opportunities lost, the irretrievable
past, one tends to gasp for breath.”
I looked at the erstwhile schoolteacher.
“Haven’t you found that to be the case?”
“No,
actually, I haven’t. Jesus sustains me
through moments of distress. However,”
She wriggled her bony rump into a more comfortable position. “Aren’t such moments equally the preserve of
the rich as well as the… for lack of a better term, poor?”
“No,”
I insisted, leaning forward with my hands on the edge of the table preparatory
to pushing off into space, “Because they have Jesus to sustain them, should
their money prove insufficient.” I spit
the words at the old horse-faced mocker, something I really shouldn’t have
done, for later, on the planet of free goats, ugly little Donnies sprung from
my hands like Downs Syndrome victims studying for the ministry.
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