Hi. Welcome to Ayeball, where you can do a little reading and (as a result) feel better about yourself. Or worse. Don’t forget to check out my resume, request a script sample, or send me an email at minskydan@gmail.com.
NEWEST STORY: Dan’s Modern Aesop’s Fables Adaptations Part VII: The Fox and the Mask
PREVIOUSLY IN THE MODERN FABLES SERIES: Dan’s Modern Aesop’s Fables Adaptations Part VI: The Fox and the Crab
CURRENT EDITOR’S CHOICE: Fond Memories of the Past, nobody splits themselves in half anymore. Sad.
TOP STORIES:
• Marble’s Death: A True Story – What starts as mere constipation does not end well for poor Marble, and the world goes ’round…
• Trust Me: Get Off The Grid – The inspired disappearance of a very scientific man (this has nothing at all to do with that awful Billy Bob Thornton movie).
• Another Spell Gone Wrong – A real unpleasant day in the life of the modern wizard.
• Minkus The Liar – Minkus should be a barely believable central character…
• Turtle, Simon, Space Station – A strange tale from the Canadian Arctic, with a turtle and a space station thrown into the mix – for perspective.
• The Cleaner – A struggling, abyss-bound young man accepts a truly unorthodox contract of work.
• The Cat That Eats Like People – Basically, a National Geographic article waiting to happen.
• The Earl of Darby’s Parakeet, don’t wake the Earl!
• How I Began My Long-Standing Affair With A Married Woman (I Never Thought I Was The Type) – Lust, Adultery, Champagne, Marijuana and Structural Damage, this fictional confession and how-to tale has it all.
• Coconut Day - A terrific holiday causes problems for a passing Jewish man. Also, Coconut Day!
• The Entrepreneur, Or: Dolphin, Dolphin, Shark! – Sometimes (or, often), no matter how hard you try and how big you dream, you just fall the fuck short.
• Fond Memories of the Past - nobody splits themselves in half anymore. Sad.
• Royal Wedding Night, yes, they are still watching royal weddings in the future…
• The Playwright’s Progress - A candid look into the typical but always exciting life of a contemporary playwright. Contains nudity and a smash-up.
• Jack Jack’s Dream – Espousing the wickedness of alarm clocks and, I suppose, youthful ambition too.
• Thursday and Friday – A surreal, evocative, nearly unrelated trilogy – in two parts.
Thanks for reading,
Daniel Minsky
minskydan@gmail.com /www.facebook.com/ayeballdan
Okay – imagine right now, a space station rotating slowly over the bright edge of the earth. Now loneliness. Now imagine a turtle making its way down the beach, at last getting lifted up by the surf and spun around slightly, then set back down. Now a whale, swimming. Now picture me, sitting here at my desk and typing this story out. I am dressed in clothing. I have a computer. This is happening, right now. Now picture the turtle disappearing into the depths of the ocean, using flat arms and legs to wing on. And consider the space station, in free fall, beaming messages to its command centre – a place which has a well-lit cafeteria where doctors eat lunch and buy milk and hear popular music. Now back to me. Now the turtle…The search for meaning is a tough one. It’s not really so much a search as it is something to complain about. In a way, it’s an anti-search; the more work we put into it, the further we are from our goal. Searching for a treasure of sorts, a lost object, a new home, reasonable insurance rate, these are searches one can abide. Imagine, for a moment, the search for the sea-route to the Orient. All those dreams and acts of indifference…now imagine me, once again, sitting here at my desk. My lamp is on. I’m alive right now. For now. What I’m trying to say is……perhaps a small story will help clarify the matter.When I lived in a village in the Canadian Arctic, I came to know a guy named Simon. He was an Inuit guy that had an excellent command of the English language. Uncharacteristic of the often strained race relations of the region, he was dating one of the white-woman-school-teachers that came to work there.In the scope of the typical, Simon was somewhat reasonable. He was raised as a hunter but unlike the others, he’d managed to understand something of, and also somewhat embrace, the ‘level-headed’ behaviour of the southerners. Most of his people have a hard time with this; or, they do not bother to make the effort. And mostly, they are correct to find difficulty (or disinterest) in it. Those of us who ride the great forward wave of western culture are often a cold and misguided bunch. We set strange and hypocritical examples. The natives of North America (and other unpopular fellows, somewhere down from the crest) have been trying to tell us this for a while – but do not worry; their voice is nearly gone and we are safe in our certain irreversabilities…Simon’s bridging of the two worlds interested me – that is, he did white guy well. He seemed to have his proverbial shit together and this, I can tell you, is a rarity among the children of the Eskimo. The recent years had been hard on them and to put it plain, nothing short of soft genocide.Now look back to me at my desk…Well, one day, Simon’s white, blond, teacher friend changed her mind about their arrangement. I guess the novelty of having an Inuit boyfriend wore off (in any case, she’d never really managed to convince anyone that her John Dunbar routine was genuine). Well, Solid-Simon rejoined his people that night; he threw his mother’s stereo, television and sofa through her living room window.Many of us curious townsfolk gathered to see the broken glass and living room parts sitting out in the snow. Nobody called the police. It wasn’t that out of the ordinary, you see.I caught up with Simon later that night, at about one am. He was banging on my front door and yell-crying all over the porch.“Hey man,” I said calmly, opening the door in my bathrobe.
“Aaahhhh!” he responded. He was clutching his fists together and screaming up toward the stars. A poison-green coloured aurora hung over the town. The tight sinew in Simon’s neck stretched the skin. We had once, together, seen similar tension in the skinned leg-backs of a caribou we’d hunted. Dead matter and living matter appeared entirely similar, moments apart.
“Simon, it’s alright, man – look, I – ”
“Fuckin’ shit man! Ahhhh,” he said.
There were faces in the windows of the neighbouring houses, casually watching the scene. “Come in,” I said quickly. “Let me get dressed, we’ll go for a walk.”
I got well bundled up (as quickly as possible) while Simon curled up at the bottom of my front closet, crushing my shoes and boots into one big mess. He was drooling, convulsing, and trying to rip his nose open without the use his hands (this is a game they sometimes play).
I helped him up, and took him back outside. We walked to the outskirts of town, going as far as possible before the snow became too deep to walk through. We then began a wide circle around the village; he cried constantly as we strolled slowly through the brittle starlight. It was one hour of sobbing as I alternated patting his back with my mitt, lighting cigarettes, and saying, “I know, man, I know, I know…”
After a time, he began to speak a little, crying less. Things seemed to be looking up. “I’m going to kill myself tonight,” he said. The region has the highest suicide rate on the planet; I knew this to be more of a plan than a threat, and plans, when one is hopeless, are quite good. We talked a little – in that way you talk when walking the ridge with someone; nothing can be explained or soothed. Not ever. Not really. There is just acceptance and confusion – meaning and madness – found and lost – and all the bullshit that forever passes in between. I was getting cold.
Heading back into town, we suddenly came upon the church. It was Simon’s suggestion to see if we could go inside (although he didn’t so much say anything as he did silently march up to the wooden doors and start yanking on them ’til they opened).
Only a little light came through the dark windows. There was a nearby street lamp glowing orange. Simon went up to the front altar and dropped to his knees, sobbing again. I sat down among the dark pews and began warming my hands. I never took him for a religious person although there was an awful lot of that in the community. He prayed for a while, I guess, then resumed crying, then even some yelling – he did a lot of looking up at the wooden Jesus. I watched, impatient, and waited; simply staying with him. Soon, the door opened and Sam came in, knocking off his boots and lighting a flashlight. Sam was an excellent Inuit hunter who maintained the church building, when he wasn’t out on the land.
I nodded to Sam who nodded to me and he made his way up to Simon; he helped his second cousin up off the ground and into the closest pew. He sat next to him and in a deep, soft voice, just above a whisper, began to speak in Inuktituk. He seemed to be asking simple questions. Simon answered through tears and clenched teeth, spitting out short words and phrases with feeling. Sam would respond every so often with a short, deep, “Mmmmhhh…”, which meant he understood.
Around 3:30, I left the two of them like that, in the church, and headed home.
The next day there was no sign of Simon. No one I spoke to had seen him. None were too worried. ‘This happens all the time.’
But the day after that, at about noon, the whole town saw Simon running down the main street without his parka, his hat, or his gloves on. He was jumping and leaping into the air, clapping his hands and making loud ‘whooping’ noises with his mouth. Everyone he saw received a personalized smile, a fist-pump and one of those rather unique ‘whoo-hoos’ he had in good supply. He was so excited that he slipped, several times, on the snow and ice, as if he’d forgotten how to walk on his own home turf.
When a passing truck slowed down and lowered its window to see what the matter was, Simon turned to it and screamed out as loud as he could (while clapping his hands over his head like a monkey), “I’ve got the holy spirit! Wooooh! Jeee-sus! Whoop whoop whooo!” Then he added, “Every thing is just so beautiful – the grace of God – just look at it! Look around!” The truck drove off in a hurry.
I was happy for him, I guess; and maybe even a little envious. Think: to be so thrilled that you don’t care who knows it, I mean – that’s what we all shoot for, isn’t it?
The cops showed up a few minutes later and arrested Simon for being drunk and disorderly (they’d heard about the living room incident as well). Simon was perfectly sober – he hadn’t had a drop.
Later, a few of us would joke about it; asking if the RCMP could really arrest people for having found the holy spirit. But the less funny truth of the matter is, it’s truly hard on a guy to be searching for meaning, as we tend to now and again, despite all the warnings to stay clear of difficulties like that; and sometimes, you can even get arrested for finding just some small part of it – or plan to kill yourself, maybe, if you find another.
So then what about me? Or the turtle, or the space station, or Simon, in the end, out in the loneliness of the wide world? What do I mean?
Can you comprehend well all the billions and billions of things that go into putting something like a space station together? Or a turtle? From Eskimo to astrophysicist, for instance, happy to sad; lost and found, and back again.
