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SYNOPSIS: Source is outside a delivery room and has been a father for 83 seconds. When suddenly The Baby-Stealing Ogre(tm) teleports into the room and purloins S.'s infant in exchange for Replenishment Driving Credits in Rumored Psychotropic Universe. Stop. S. follows the T.B.-S.O.(tm) to R.P.U. and seeks out an Obliquely Impartial Magisterium for the return of his newborn child. S. is then convicted of Low Treason 4 Crimes Not Yet Committed and sentenced to Muteness & Other Unspeakable Degradations at the hands of Tormenter the Resident Enforcer/Prophet. S. is overwhelmed with self-pity and T.R.E./P.'s M.&O.U.D., and so he performs autocastration, which performance takes about 83 seconds from start to finish. John Stossel guest stars. 
I WANT MY BABY BACK Source is elated, a father. But he abounds in joy and not thankfulness and is fated to lose his child. We're talking Providence here, people. Though Source enjoys 83 seconds of paternity. After which seconds The Baby-Stealing Ogre(tm) teleports into the delivery room and purloins Source's infant and disappears suddenly. And attendant maternal wailing follows, as does eyewitness shock and curious unbelief and so forth and the nurse on-site is at a loss for words; neither is the delivering doctor then able to proffer an explanation that takes into account, or better, reconciles, the event of the disappearance of this baby and of an ogre appearing it seemed out of nowhere and stealing said baby with the methodological atheism he was instructed from the vantage point of in medical school, to his satisfaction. Source says, "Shit, I will rescue my child," and he consoles and kisses his childless wife and flees the hospital in "I"-absorbed tears and teleports himself to Rumored Psychotropic Universe. This place is somethin' else. This universe Source is visiting is bizarre to such an incredible extent that it is nearly outside the ability of Source's imagination to conceive, and Source is, he force-reminds himself, not on any drugs besides of course the caffeine from the yucky wax-tasting hospital-brewed coffee he downed while his wife suffered through the intense pains of labor, and maybe adrenaline. An example of the bizarre stuff I mentioned: Source watches orange goblins that fly laterally and upside-down quickly. Their mouths are frozen pained expressions and they're all strong, like, as though they're horrified from the massive amounts of serious time they've put in at the gym. The goblins are very orange, and below them the grass is angry. It is green and shouts curses at the goblins who fly by: "Hey goblins, !*&# you!" How or why the grass is shouting is anyone's guess. But Source finds a gravel path and walks a short distance before seeing The Baby-Stealing Ogre(tm) who stole his child. Crunch, crunch, squish. Source approaches; they dialogue: Source: Hey! The Baby-Stealing Ogre(tm): Hey yourself? S: Yeah, but where's my baby? T.B.-S.O.(tm): 'Cuz I traded him for Replenishment Driving Credits. How else will I get to work on time? S: I've come to rescue my son. Give him to me. T.B.-S.O.(tm): You're a poor listener. I traded your boy for R.P.C.s and he's gone now. So cry me a river if you want him back so freakin' bad. Since I don't got 'im. S: Yeah and I need him back, where do I get him back please? T.B.-S.O.(tm): Not my problem. S: Forever must I be disqualified from happiness? T.B.-S.O.(tm): Not my problem. Later. What the again-sobbing Source had earlier failed to espy between airborne goblins and angry grass and his infant's purloiner was the pack of tiny rodents lounging squarely in his way that he had tread underfoot and destroyed. Crunch, crunch, squish. Oopsie. The rodents though cute while alive are now basically dead, their taupe and cherry innards dyeing the gravel path they litter like a paintball arena in miniature, and Source is leaning over and sees the small mess he's made through the "V" of his parted stubby fingers he uses to wipe his tears away. Source cries harder, suddenly emotional at the fragility of life and of course his kid was stolen earlier. Then he trips and lands in a little puddle of innards. More weeping. An uncosmetic mélange of tears and tiny rodent guts screws up the look on his face and it's all gross. He wipes his face with his hand again, smearing. This is really gross. So now Source is bawling his eyes out and he's got rodent life smeared on his chin and nose and forehead and caked in his hair, and in this scene he's crying for the record from depths of grief Source thinks is biblical. And this whole scene is some surreal combination of absurdity and pathos. Like soap opera meets a rejection of bourgeois optimism meets Smash TV. Meets pants. An orange goblin flies by. This one's ripped beyond all comprehension. Like how long must one lift to get an upper body like that? He's big, muscle-bound, buff if patently unstatuesque, built like Batman's Bane, hulking arms like a dirigible on steroids and a stomach of hammered wrought iron and a chest of two weather balloons but cut. Taunting blades of grass taunt mercilessly. Source looks awful. He stands; resumes search for son. But go figure: at no point does Source seriously consider thankfulness or contrition as a valid response to any of this. Which failure to so respond figures analogically to darker features of the human condition of which we ourselves partake and are made up of. Which analogy again examples a backdoor anthropological pessimism that pervades the honest bulk of my interweb prose precisely because of tendential [read: default] sans grace human behavior, which behavior figures prominently into [read: macro-looms over] our whole existence here and fucks it (can't you see?) to no end and which I'm convinced is real—and that's being generous, nice, considering. Source sees a sign made of wood shaped into an arrow that points at a forebodingly dense green forest straight ahead of where he's standing all messy. The sign reads, "Obliquely Impartial Magisterium Due North," and Source all messy is walking. Still childless, Source enters the forebodingly dense green forest. He wades through underbrush that is thick; here the grass is taller. Oh! Green grass is shouting. It's loud. Loud, almost too loud, no, now unsettlingly, ear-splittingly loud, immediately painfully loud. Loud shouting! Although steroidally beefy goblins are elsewhere, although Source is present and solitary and physically a joke; the green grass is pissed. (Source without his earplugs.) Beyond pissed—oh, this is insanity. And Source is irenic instantly. Uh huh, yes, since the grass is shouting at him now. Not taunts, threats. Irenic Source pleads he hopes not nervously with the green grass. Whose mutual shouting is now the most painful promise of hurt and insult and hospitalization that can be imagined, and this whole universe is nearly outside of Source's ability to imagine, right? Source's nervousness is manifest and unambiguously self-serving. Since he's essentially in a friend-making mode: of any number of things Source needs right now, Source thinks, totally scared up the wazoo, what he needs most at this instant is friends, specifically these P.O.'ed grass guys as his friends, he thinks. Fatally, this impulse, this "friendship impulse," our sad sorry Source can't bring himself to see, is not just pacifistic but pacifistically destructive. Meaning more precisely in this case that it's Source's irenicism that's fatal. For what is the question of the hour? He asks: CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG? I guarantee you, dear reader, that we cannot—that the grass is on Source like a mad starving wolf on dying rodentia. And Source is captured and tangled up roughly in tall green grass, and sent up north to an Obliquely Impartial Magisterium—S.'s intended destination—not at all in the way he wanted. A hospital bed. Our temporary mother lies there, speaking at police officers regarding an event the fuzz haven't at all understood or made the least bit of sense out of, which even a skeptic doctor's testimony can't seem to corroborate the event to the fuzz's satisfaction, and at a deeper level of discourse nursing under the bulkhead of subconsciousness our temporary mother knows and admits to herself that an infant once purloined does not often return to its mother, often, not soon nor ever, she knows this—she's lost her husband Source as well. Although gabbing at cops about an event whose more basic import escapes me also daily the temporary mother from her subcognitive zone concludes in face of the inscrutable to my satisfaction that these worlds we know and call home are ass-backwards in idolatry, and it's a fucking miserable place to call home, theft and thanklessness, she says, and to try and live here, to start a family and be happy. Source: I want my baby back, please. Obliquely Impartial Magisterium: We don't quite have a sentence for the crime you've committed here today. Though rest assured you're headed to jail or something like it. Because our penal system here in R.P.U. is second to some and we're very proud of our record. It's elided justice. S: No. I don't commit the crime; my child was taken from me. It was this guy who did it— O.I.M.: You're making it worse. Only some people don't know when to shut up. We've decided we'll lock you up for Low Treason 4 Crimes Not Yet Committed. That just sounds right. And for that, what you get is M.&O.U.D. which sucks dude. S: Come on now please? O.I.M.: Here we are, off you go now; our bailiff is gigantic. What happens next won't surprise you, if you've been reading closely. Source's tongue is eliminated. Cut off. And from this point onward Source is always alone except when living in the tail of T.R.E./P.'s bullwhip, which flogging occurs at intervals more regular than you'd expect; and essayed wit and wordplay aside Source essentially becomes the misery of suffering without the ability to scream. The screams remain. Please don't confuse me; the screams, actually they own his consciousness—they're always there. Source is married to the screams, he is the screams; what he soon pines for anxiously is the madness he self-avers can dull the screams, those perpetual anxieties he is/has wed. No such luck; sanity plus T.R.E./P.'s degradations abide, now and forever, con fuoco. Con brioso. Source supposes, inappropriately to fact, that he's begun to lose touch with reality. He hasn't, and what he also hasn't lost touch with is that sorrilessness that got and sustained him in this mess in the first place; he never will. Source chops his balls off. With a knife when no one's looking. Yes, autocastration, like the eccentric military stratagem of a hapless general officer with fast diminishing numbers of men, will often just seem like a good idea at the time; Source reasons, besides, that at least this way he can't possibly have more kids and lose them. In addition and despite Source's non-descent into the mental unreal he retains at the tip of his "tongue" the slimmest glimmer of your child with whom you enjoyed 83 seconds of paternity. Whom you conceived and bore, loved and lost, whom you made and squandered, whom you used as an attempted tool for self-deification. Since your world is mad, or you wish that it were. For you are the screams you can't audibly express; you are in a different sense from that employed above near-thoroughly unreal. Yet you remember your son, his face, his eyes and mouth and tears, his post-natal wail; you remember what for 83 seconds you shared with him, paternity, how you tried your hand at creation for a minute and change, donning celestial attire, arching your back, and webbing your fingers in a righteous preparatory gesture, setting your heart on life, apparently, to make life, sustain and keep it, oh!, how truly beautiful it was, life; and though you're there hitherto suffering a leftover existence at the fall of a bullwhip without mercy or release in sight it kills you. Exeunt. NO: We're still on stage. |
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