For those about to Croak, a Taste of My Book

I've been following the news lately. There ain't much else to do in Hell: you've got nothing but time, and it ain't like you could use it being awful productive or something. So I follow the news. About Syria, mostly, in the past couple of years. Yeah. You could say I've become, I don't know, addicted to it. The carnage in Syria. It is a bug in me. Pray you won’t catch it. Then again, you could consider it as a hobby. A recreation, like collecting glass. That's right, glass, with an L and sss... No D, none.

Maybe I can talk to you about that, my glass collection of sorts. I don’t think Patti would mind... I need a cigarette, though, first. Anybody can lend me one? Don't worry, you won't catch AIDS from a corpse.

All right. Once upon a time there was a giraffe.

He grabs his cane from the wrong end, holds it erect.

                     

This giraffe was a freak.

He lets the cane slide through his hand, until the tip of it touches the floor.

                            

He was the 100-proof, highly processed product of Giacometti’s nightmares or something. The tiniest head bouncing at the end of the longest neck you’d ever seen, even at the giraffe scene. The other giraffes found this amusing. The giraffe himself, our giraffe, didn’t find it amusing at all. Not one bit – he found the situation tragic. And he crowned himself the King of giraffes, since he had the longest neck of them all, was more of a giraffe than the others would ever be. They laughed at him. Our Giraffe the Freak said the others should bow their necks to him. He was the King, after all. The other giraffes laughed some more. They didn’t bow their heads, or their necks. So our Giraffe the Freak decided to kill them all.

He swings his cane like a club a couple of times.

                     

Giraffe the Freak had a friend, a rhino whose face was like a baboon’s ass the color of an oyster. He couldn’t see anything save his own horn. That’s what he watched all day long, his horn, until his head started spinning, and he darted off to attack something, anything, chasing his own shadow most of the time. The rhino had no neck at all. This didn’t bother his pal Giraffe, since Baboo wasn’t a giraffe, but a rhino. And they were in love. They felt for each other, like they’d known each other for ever, and deep down knew what the other was going through. The rhino was terrified. He knew he was a freak of nature. He knew that someday the other rhinos might make a remark of him having a baboon’s ass for a face and no neck at all, and he didn’t have to wonder about what would happen next. All he had to do was look at the Giraffe. And all of a sudden Baboo wanted to kill the giraffes too. As a lesson to the rhinos, if nothing else. So Baboo and his rhino friends, who were still his friends for now, went on a rampage in the Giraffe Land.

He throws the cane away.

                     

Enough of the animals. Let’s talk about the opposition.

But before we go into that, I think we should throw a little party. In honor of my returning, if nothing else. A party for me.

O children! ‘Tis the Day of the Dead.

Let me get something to eat.

Exit Mapplethorpe.

Buy NOW.


Kindle Ed.