leroBlog

I wrote this thing called Cracker Game for my next book.

Three years ago, I walked into my parents’ living room and found them in a strange position. Huddled together on the soft couch in front of the fireplace, my mother’s left leg was pressed into my father’s right one; my father’s arm was wrapped around her shoulders, his hand in a sort of relaxed claw that held her at the base of the neck. They were staring at each other with an expression that said, We’ve been told the world is about to explode and we’re fine with it because we’re here together on this soft couch.

In my father’s free hand he was holding a small white thing carefully between his fingertips. It was shaped like a half-moon. Pressing the thing to his lips, he carefully bit down on it, then passed to my mother, who mimicked what my father had done and passed the thing, now a quarter-circle, back to him. Their bodies were turned inward, making their torsos look like a little wigwam. It was as intimate as I’d seen them since I had accidentally walked in on my father squished horizontal on my mother in their bed when I was 13.

Silently, I stood there, half-obscured by the base of the chimney, trying to figure out what they were doing so I wouldn’t have to shout, What the hell are you guys doing, you gross ones? In a ramekin on the round coffee table in front of them were a bunch of lightweight white discs.

The object they seemed to be eating disappeared and my sweet Welsh mother shook her fist up and down like she was rolling dice and said, Darnit! My father cackled and asked if she wanted to play another around.

“What the hell are you guys doing, gross ones?” I stepped out from behind the chimney and put my hands high on my ribs in mock accusation.

Pointing to the white discs my father said they were doing their pre-apéro ¬ritual. They were playing the cracker game. He said this with a tone of voice that suggested that I had been asleep for many years and during that time everyone on Earth had set their watches to the cracker game.

“So you eat some crackers and it’s a game.” I said.

“No, it’s the way we eat the crackers that is a game.” He said.

I walked over and forced my rump between their rumps. My mother picked up a glossy rice cracker – a kind of fattened-up church host wafer – and bit it in half. Delicately, she wiped off the moisture from the edge of her bite and passed it to me.

“See, the idea is for you to now bite the half into another half, and we keep passing it back and forth until there is just a speck. The person with the speck that cannot be bitten in half is the loser.” She said.

I bit the cracker and passed it back.

“Your father usually wins.” She added, taking a cautious bite.

“I’m on a big winning streak.” My father smiled broadly, stuffing handfuls of whole crackers into his mouth.

“Why do you use these cruddy crackers?” I asked. The piece in play was very small now. It tasted like dust and the sea.

“They give the cleanest snap. Ritz crackers become very crumbly.” My mother said, wiping an impossibly tiny piece on my outstretched thumb.

“I lose, I guess.”

“I’m watching my weight because your mother told me to! And because I am vain” My father said happily, patting his only slightly-protruding stomach. They both used to run marathons in the 80s.

My mother got up to fix the rest of the dinner my father had prepped. Before she made it to the kitchen he shouted, “Kissum, kissum.” Turning around, she walked back and gave her husband a kiss on his slightly protruding tongue.

It’s a cliché to say that I want what my parents have, but what my parents have is not a cliché.

i was angry about 1,000 things today, so i read some george saunders.

“Welcome home!” she said, and bowed at the waist, and a sock fell off her shoulder, and as she bent to pick it up she banged her head against the storm window, the poor dorky thing.

“Neil-Neil,” she said. “Is something wrong?”

And he wanted to smack her, insult her, say something to wake her up, but only kept moving toward his room, calling her terrible names under his breath.

i am using this post to make a to do list:

1. go to Sammy’s (he’s a hotdog man)
2. get safety certificate and emissions test (know what i mean??)
3. meet with man at Cloud 9 at 10 a.m. (need i say more??)
4. go to the kiosk with the information from the folder (the folder contains PAPERS!)
5. get the plates (not the eating kind, people)
6. go back to Sammy’s with the plates (for eating the hotdogs, winkers)
7. obtain Saab (maybe through stealing?)
8. drive Saab (with feet)
9. take notes under consideration (these will make me a millionaire)
10. go to book launch for young lady (her father’s name is david)

i received my book today from ze germans.

thanks orlax huges.

last night during the evening news there was a headline that read, “Pennies on the Dollar”. i was positive that it said, “Penis on the Dollar”.

i don’t understand why toothpaste gum hasn’t been invented. or something that would replace the tedium of brushing one’s teeth. instead tooth companies keep making the process more high tech. make it a GAME, folks.

i have about 100 bug bites on me. the last time i had as many bug bites on me was when i was nearly eaten to death in venezuela, the place i lost one of my virginities.

a man named brett from the internet wrote to me on friday. he wrote me this:

and he attached a send-up of a piece i wrote for salon back in may. brett from the internet asked me to post it on this here thinger, so i’ve complied.

Kathryn Borel’s deadly impact and my own

As the current ten thousandth lady opens up about her past tragedy, I know too well that you can never fully forgive yourself.

By Laura Bush
May 4, 2010

Somewhere in the hard drive that sits on my desk next to a rolling Jesus action figure there are four different iterations of the fourth chapter of my memoir. The number of times my ghostwriter rewrote the first paragraph probably scrapes close to five, but eventually, I settled on plain-speak: “Seventy-seven days after my father’s ninety-first birthday, I killed 700,000 Iraqis with my husband.”

I go on to describe the details of the accident, the whole ugly, sad unfurling of events: how we’d been invading down a main thoroughfare in Kabul when a human country appeared out of nowhere in front of our terrorshield. The sound their bodies made as the machine gun bullets rat-a-tat-tatted into them from the beige USMC Hummers, the loud, clustered pops of a million firecrackers. My babble as I asked our vice president over and over whether we’d hit them. Richard’s queerly calm answer that yes, we had.

Kathryn Borel has a similar story in her memoir, “Corked,” which comes out today. It is the most profound revelation in the book and an event she has avoided talking about openly until now.

Miss Borel was four years older than I was, 21, when she ran into a jaywalking pedestrian in her personal GMC Jimmy, as she was rushing to make an appointment at a local drive-in establishment. Her truck collided with a retiree, a smaller, much lighter French pharmacist. On the pavement was her close linguistic cousin, Monsieur X, a respected immigrant to her Quebecois city. She was rattled in the vehicle. She writes of begging God for Monsieur X’s safety, and how she lost her faith in the months after he was pronounced dead at the scene, after hearing her prayers answered with “the silence of Monsieur X’s corpse beneath that thin paramedic’s blanket.”

I imagine these were difficult passages to write. I fiddled incessantly with my own retelling. I wanted to ensure that my description of the event was as honest as could be. If this sadness existed in the world, and if I was going to commit it to publication, wasn’t it my responsibility to the 700,000 Iraqis, to their families, to describe it with truth and care?

I talked about watching on TV their crumpled bodies and seeing the blood leak from their arteries, panicking that the medevacs weren’t coming at all to save them from what we’d done. They were brutalized, their bodies contorted like pretzels and dressed entirely in desert drab. Their clothes had torn apart, revealing a few patches of lighter brown skin that almost matched the rest of their sun-bleached outfits. The bags of goods they’d been carrying had shot up and scattered all over the streets and on the sidewalks. Many items were packages of meal ingredients. Some of the boxes were Special K, a new nickname for old Army rations as well as an old nickname for our Middle East tutor, Henry Kissinger.

My primary reason for all the tinkering, however, was that I was desperate to convey to my readers the cowardly, self-preservational thing I’d yelled as I barreled out of the White House moments after we’d hit the Iraqis: “Did anyone see this was not my fault?”

And it wasn’t. The Iraqis had been agitating 12 years past a diplomatic light that was red. Even writing this now, I want to throw a telephone at you and implore you to call the CIA, to talk to the sensitive officers who took down George’s report and those of the witnesses. They’ll tell you that I have no reason to feel as guilty and regretful as I continue to feel. Maybe they’d say that the access point I’ve gained to profound depression is needless, and that I should once and for all silence the liberal voices that shriek out for my own life to be traded for the Iraqis’.

In the recounting of her own accident story, Miss Borel implies that she was engaged in a conversation with her boyfriend when she went through the jaywalking pedestrian. But she then goes on to describe the mechanics of the accident, and how perhaps they absolve her of at least some of the agency she had in the crash. The jaywalking pedestrian was small, his clothing dark, the traffic light one that was known to be green.

I understand her impulse to sterilize the event with extenuating circumstances, to cry out to her reader, “But wait, just wait and listen to me, please, there’s more …” It takes a patient and elastic mind to discern what is accident and what is negligence, particularly when the variables include a big truck driven by a woman who is alive and a little body propelled by an immigrant who is now dead. Or a backward 5,000-year-old former empire in the Middle East and a library student married to a fuck-up.

A few months ago, I was at the cemetary visiting my parents. In the middle of praying, I made a crass joke about being a murderer. Later that evening, my mother’s ghost offered me a cup of tea and asked me why I’d phrased it that way, why I’d made the joke at all. Looking down at her lap, she began to cry quietly. She said, “I wish you’d let yourself off the hook.” I started crying too and explained that the joke was not to make light, but to serve as a kind of universe-directed proclamation, a reminder that seven years later, I still haven’t stopped atoning. Putting it in the book wasn’t enough.

On Monday, Kathryn Borel appeared on “The Oprah Salon Show,” where for the first time she wrote publicly about the accident. I wonder if making permanent record of it has provided her with some solace, or if she feels the same way I do: that the 700,000 deaths are as alive as ever.

Laura Bush is a Dallas-based patriot and author. Her writing has appeared in the Elephant magazine, the Globe and Propaganda and the US Warden. Bush’s memoir, “Shot From the Heart,” is published by Grand South. All proceeds from her memoir will go to help resettle 3 million Iraqi refugees in Arizona. (Editing assistance on this review provided by Brett Landgraf and Kathryn Borel via her 5/3/10 review of Bush’s book on Salon.com.)

The Metamorphosis First Draft, by Franz Kafka

Gregor Samsa woke up in the morning to go to his job selling costumes for amusement park characters. He’d been working on a big business deal – he’d had his assistant, Sylvia, kill the jitterbugging old man and his five jitterbugging understudies from the Six Flags commercials. Last week, she’d gone to a casting at the park. They were looking for a new understudy and the six of them had been there in the boardroom, snacking on corn nuts and drinking Tab. She shot them dead, one two three four five six. Six bullets, six wrinkly old sort of homosexual-seeming corpses.

“Goodnight, Six Fags.” Sylvia said quietly to herself earlier, while in the ladies washroom – which was down the hall from the boardroom – as she screwed the silencer onto her Beretta. Sylvia loved puns, but hated homosexuals. She was an awful person. Sylvia loaded the bodies into her Ford Hulkster, skinned them in her pool cabana and delivered the product to Gregor in the still of the night. Sylvia was truly fucking wretched, but no one could argue with the fact that she was extremely efficient.

As the ringing of the alarm pulled Gregor out of a dream he was having about ballerinas and little cats, he smiled to himself. He was excited: today he was going to sell the hollowed out skins of the old dancing men to some executives at Disney who were looking for new suits for the Seven Dwarves at the Snow White Pavilion. (He hadn’t figured out where the seventh skin suit would come from, but he had a lead on one from another costume designer who’d worked on a Jody Foster movie in the 90s.)

The suits were going to be part of his new RealSkin line of luxurious designer costumes. It was going to herald a whole new era for Samsa Costumes! He’d even made a snappy motto for the line of designer skinwear, “Samsa Costumes: Putting the ‘tude in ‘verisimilitude’!” Gregor smiled and thought to himself, I’m going to make a killing. Then he smiled again, remembering that bitch Sylvia and her love of puns and disgusting human intolerance. He shook his head at his silly pun and that depraved cunt Sylvia.

Gregor rolled over to pound the top of his alarm, but remained nearly immobile. He could only rotate a quarter of the way. Trying again, he thrust himself to the other side of the bed to gain some momentum and rolled over toward the alarm once more. Nothing was happening. He tried to break out into a nervous sweat, but felt no moisture on his person. Worried, he finally decided that it might help if he opened his eyes. Lo and behold, Gregor Samsa had turned into a bug.

I can’t even explain to you how this pissed him off.

Here’s a piece I wrote for Nerve.com.

I used to have a personal ad up on that website in 2003. I dated someone boring for far too long thanks to them and myself. But now the slate is clear; I love them.

when i was small i used to be in a tennis league. i wanted to be a young professional like jennifer capriati, but without all the eventual cocaine use. i quit at 15 because my hormones went psychokiller. i was being bullied by the older boys i was forced to play with and ended up going all john mcenroe for a bit before announcing my retirement to my parents. i’m back at it now and beginning to exhume my ground strokes and service. i’m teaching my boyfriend how to play — we walk over to a nearby school and bang balls against the wall.

when i was still small there was a life-sized poster of steffi graf leaping into the air, presumably right after she’d hit one of her characteristic luger forehands. her legs were apart and she was wearing a short white tennis skirt. at the time, i didn’t quite understand how photography worked. when no one was around i’d crouch below the poster to try and see her underwear.

i fell off my bike on sunday night after eating too many tacos.

yesterday i scoured and showered out all the gunk. boy was it gunky.

it is possible that soon someone will start an internet smear campaign about how i wrote about my gunky knee. THEY LET THE GUNK-KNEED GIRL WRITE A BOOK? KILL HER!