by Jonathan Ward

What strange questions she asked me on a first date! Her serious tone made me a bit queasy and I’m afraid she noticed my nervousness.

"If you were sitting in a stalled car with a woman that you were completely enamored of when just at the heightened moment in which you were about to kiss, you saw out of the corner of your eye a motorcyclist being thrown fifty feet on to the sidewalk and through a storefront window, would you react immediately? What would you do if you were suddenly stricken with the inability to add, would you pursue learning it again? If all of a sudden you were back in school and your physics teacher called on you and instead of answering you fainted and began wetting yourself, would you go to school the next day or wait a while? Do you call women’s breasts ‘boobs’ or ‘tits’? Quelle heur et’il?"

I quietly thought about it for a moment. Then I answered:

"Yes, yes, the next day, no and 8:37."

I am weird, it’s true. My speech patterns often drastically change and fluctuate between mildly bored to absolutely committed within a matter of a few minutes. My movements can be disconcerting, awkward; hence, I attract a different breed of clientele. I often ignore things she says then try to cover them up afterwards leading me into another Daedalus-constructed labyrinth of social stumbling blocks to conquer. My actions piss me off. Yet again, my actions can make me proud when I’m not embarrassed. I flat out refuse to be like anyone else and it was because of that I suddenly decided to lead Kathleen out of the restaurant, carefully taking into account everything that had happened between us thus far, and bid her adieu.

"We haven’t paid! We haven’t paid, you left your coat in there and I can’t imagine what the management thinks!"

"And that’s precisely the reason we’re parting ways, silly girl! We’re leaving and we’re never going to see each other again! Life’s to be experimented, tested, played with and loved and you either think too much or you don’t think enough! I’m off!"

Horns. A flighty yet powerful theme that says everything we need to know about the main character of this piece, except it’s in music. Like the theme to Bob Newhart was carefree and rigidly orchestrated at the same time, so should this. We have a character that is prepared. Vibes, perhaps. Horns, definitely - timpani and, yes, a large brass ensemble. It should begin with a bang, break down in the middle, I hear a brief arpeggio and then BOOM, the end.

The waters parted for me today and I experienced, at last, an epiphany. While I was sitting cross-legged listening to a record I was suddenly overcome with a grand, flushed feeling in my face. Being filled with such emotion charged me with some sort of attack notion. I was pack-frenzied and foaming at the mouth with escape plans. I needed to help erase my memory for me. The crowd who knew me at the dog-run pointed me in one direction: Provo. We see shots of Provo as a fuming blue stationwagon heads toward the skyline.

Because of its lack of antimony, the land was not arable again this year, and the peasants began to weep. Breaking down openly in the fields, they grabbed hold of their loved ones screaming in agony, knowing that the upcoming year would be, according to Family Circle, the most disastrous yet. Babies wailed, dogs howled and scampered, the horses prematurely littered. We need a reasonable God, they prayed. We need one that will pay attention to our meager needs! But it was futile: since the Surrealists had set up home base near the fields, most of the peasants had gone from vaguely agnostic to becoming hardened, depressed Marxists, smiling only if someone happened to shatter an arm or dislocate a hip. Supper was nigh. Cue dancers.

Linda, Marion, Sheryl, Vondra, Siobhan and Cat took the stage with all the adept virtuosity of a Long Island handball team. Juice filled up on the pimples on their asses under the hot, dance-floor lights. If you look closely, whispered one judge to another, you can see cortisone cream on a foot. The second judge raised an eyebrow.

"What’s your dance number called?" The judge asked when they had finished.

"Teflon," one answered.

"You’re hired."

"TEFLON!" They screamed.

"No! You’re hired!" The judges screamed back.

Reports were in early this morning about a robbery occurring at a warehouse on the West Side, with an estimated $400,000 worth of antiques stolen. According to the owner of the warehouse, a man named Bud Nice, vandals must have been either highly organized or must have worked for several hours stealing the items.

"They move fast, these guys, very fast," he said. "Among the antiques stolen were several original Modigliani canvasses, antique cameras, three luges, and a lot of very interesting things."

Mr. Nice then commenced to reveal his calves, which were covered with varicose veins.

"Damn things make me look like a road map."

Squealing, he grabbed his bottle of Dad’s Root Beer and threw it against a young child’s skull who was nearby playing basketball. With his wild hair, his face now glowing like a beet, Bud Nice left our lives that day. And that’s when we decided to do a documentary on him. And that’s when he decided to do a documentary on us. And that’s when we decided that maybe it wasn’t cool to make documentaries anymore, and instead just paint and make bead necklaces an’ stuff. We love Pearl Jam! We love Pearl Jam! Supplement ourselves with sexual ornamentation like adhesive foreskins and pierced clitorises. Watch us all get a tattoo. Listen to me free-style with rhymes that are so smooth they’re like frosting you can spread with a paper knife. Mom watches us and she smiles like the crawling Rasputin. The paper knife gets licked by the ten year old children and they jump on their Raleigh bikes and pedal down the street at the speed of light, arriving back at precisely the same spot after traveling across the world, within nanoseconds, making Mom look up from the laundry pile and grin.

"Aw, you guys."

And she delicately sawed her sister in thrice.

Reports were in early this morning about a robbery occurring at a warehouse on the West Side, with an estimated $400,000 worth of antiques stolen. At the site, religious leaders joined hands and wept, after which they canceled their days appointments to be of help to anyone who was feeling grief. Mr. Bud Nice, the owner of the warehouse, canceled his appointments as well.

"It’s not the appointments that matter right now," he said. "It’s you people who have been wronged. It’s you people that have been wronged. It is also you people who have been wronged."

Mr. Nice sat down next to the fireplace, sighing, watching the dying embers glow in the tropical breeze. As I shyly watched his expression, four native children approached him. You could say they were poverty-stricken - "needy" as they used to say in my hometown. Nice’s eyes didn’t even raise, yet he fished in his pockets and gave them gifts that I had come up with in my conscience while I was watching. At the precise moment I conjured them, Bud Nice took out a Pyraminx, a head of cabbage and an Atari 400 computer system. All of our eyes locked and we floated together on transcendental plane, free of guilt and worldly burdens, watching a universe unfurl around us until this deity placed us down, down back on the ground. I looked around. We appeared, at first glance, to be in Uruguay - gaucho country. However, after I shook my head to focus and dropped three amphetamines, I chuckled to myself. It was Grand Rapids after all.