Random Crap

"You remind me," I say, "of a kid who used to beat me up in high school."

"I have a small, unpleasant wound, on my back," he says. "It looks like a mouth. I have had lips surgically grafted to the wound, to make it look like a mouth. Plastic surgery. But it's not a mouth, it's a wound. I have to cut it open again every morning, otherwise it starts to heal. I use a metal hook, to cut it open. I boil the hook in the morning, for half an hour, to sterilize it. So, when I cut myself, the hook is extremely hot."

"That's stupid," I say. "You're stupid for doing that. Only someone incredibly stupid would go to such great lengths for no reason at all. It's not art, it's not a statement about anything. You're just a fucking idiot."

"That's what it's a statement about. My own stupidity."

"You could save a lot of time by just announcing to everyone you meet, 'I am stupid.' Say it instead of hello. You'd save a lot of time in the morning. You wouldn't have to boil your hook. You wouldn't have to bend your arm in a painful fashion to cut open your healing wound."

"When you were talking just now," he says, "I wasn't thinking about what I'm going to say next. People do that, apparently. Instead of listening. They think about what they're going to say. And some part of them says, 'Hurry up, asshole, and finish talking. I have something I want to say.' People do that. But that's not what I was doing. What I was doing was thinking, 'What is he going to say to me in response to what I am about to say?' You see, I take it to the next step. Like in chess. Don't think about just your move. And don't just think about your opponents next move. Think six moves ahead. I do that with conversation. I guess you could say I am a conversation master."

"Why a wound on your back?" I ask. "Is it some kind of male vagina? Is that it? Do you want to be a woman, but you're afraid to castrate yourself? Do you want to be a hermaphrodite? And why on your back? Why put the wound mouth there? Because you want to be sodomized? Because you're a fucking faggot? Is that it?"

"I think some day my mouth, on my back, will grow teeth. That is my hope, anyway."

"Are you a faggot?"

"No," he says. "Unfortunately not. I think the cachet of homosexuality would improve my life tremendously. But, sadly, I'm straight."

"Did you just use the word 'cachet' in a sentence?"

"I did," he admits.

"That makes me want to carve a new mouth in your throat. Where is this hook of yours? Where do you keep it when you're not boiling it, or cutting yourself?"

"Sometimes, when it's raining, I stare out the window, and I think about the flood, where Noah built the ark and all that. And I think how great it would be to be underwater, like a fish, so that when it rains it doesn't mean anything. Or maybe in a submarine."

"You remind me," I say, "of someone I used to beat up in high school."

"People say that to me a lot," he says. "I have that kind of face."