The Sentence that Kills Children

I do not consider myself to be a good writer. I do not even consider myself to be a decent writer. In fact, whenever I publish or hand in any written work I do so with an almost crippling sense of shame at how hopelessly inadequate my command of my native language remains despite eighteen years of total immersion in it. I do, however, have some grasp of what distinguishes utterly terrible writing from the inoffensively mediocre. Being that I can't write my way out of a subordinate clause without a nauseating degree of self-referential irony, I tend to hold back my nitpicks or outright condemnations of another's sub-substandard writing. Sometimes, though, there comes before my eyes such a travesty, such a shameful bastardization of all that marks English as a language worthy of human utterance, that I can not abide its existence. I'd compare it to being a bystander during the Holocaust, but that would be outrageous. I guess it's more like standing passive and inert while a child drowns in front of you. That's not so bad, right? I'm thinking the Jews wouldn't object to that level of insensitivity. Am I good? Judges? I'm getting the green light from Mordecai, my Hebrew-speaking roommate who is also the mounted head of a ram from Guatemala. Funny story about that, actually. Try getting that through customs. Ah, shit, this always happens. Where the hell was I? Jews? I need a drink.

Right. Ahem. Sorry about that. I was talking about writing.

So here is an excerpt from an article being used as an example of a good "conversational essay," in a freshman writing course at Columbia University. As you read this, try not to think of a child drowning. Try not to imagine her cherubic face sinking beneath the algae-encrusted surface of a stagnant pond as her arms slow their desperate thrashing and her bright blue eyes dilate in fear as she catches her last glimpse of this fleeting life, absolutely and permanently alone. Don't think about that at all.

"With its bright colors, rays of sun showering upon faces of influential leaders of different races, and inspiring slogans coined to stir the public to bridge the gap between races and socioeconomic divisions, a mural in the Soundview neighborhood of' the South Bronx on 174th St. entitled 'We Are Here to Awaken from the Illusions of Our Separateness" (Figs. 1-4) exemplifies a trend to create captivating and educational murals throughout New York City that deal with major socioeconomic and racial issues."

The horror. The...horror...

I'd like to point out up front that this is actually the first sentence of the essay. I'd also like to take a moment to ask the reader to consider whether or not he would ever willingly continue reading an essay that began like this, and if so, I'd like to humbly request that he shoot himself in the face.

I think I've thinned the herd enough. So let's begin.

First, take a moment to try to appreciate just how friggin' long this sentence is. Count the words. Go ahead. I dare you. No, but seriously, don't. It will hurt you. It's 80 words long.

Eighty words. Let's try to put that in perspective.

• The Lord's Prayer is 70 words long.
• Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") is 114 words.
• The Gettysburg Address is 271 words.
• The Declaration of Independence is 1322 words.

The following passage, the entirety of Chapter III from Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, is 75 words.

"We were in a garden at Mons. Young Buckley came in with his patrol from across the river. The first German I saw climbed up over the garden wall. We waited till he got one leg over and then potted him. He had so much equipment on and looked awfully surprised and fell down into the garden. Then three more came over further down the wall. We shot them. They all came just like that."

Before you object and say that using Hemingway as a comparison is unfair because the cornerstones of his style were short sentences and omission, among other things, take a minute to A.) suck my dick, and B.) kill yourself. Then read this following opening sentence from a little known work by Thomas "Two-Dolla-Billz" Jefferson:

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

How long is this sentence, written in the 18th century era of diction so baroque it would have compelled Hemingway to punch a Spanish child in the face? Seventy-one words. Seventy-one words were all it took for Our Founding Fathers to state their thesis that America ought to be a country. But this other bitch can't even squirt out a point about some corny, inconsequential mural without weaving a 80-word brainfuck so serpentine it would make Milton ejaculate with envy. And yes, Milton could do that, because he was blind.

So allow me to break down this mammoth motherfucker into more manageable morsels. This sentence has:

• Two uses of the word "races," less than 15 words apart.
• Another use of the word "racial."
  
• Two uses of the word "socioeconomic."
• Two present active participles.
  
• Two perfect passive participles.
• Five uses of the word "of."
• Five uses of the word "the."
• One totally unnecessary and ill-placed address.
  
• One main singular subject, "a mural," 35 words deep in the sentence.
  
• One main verb, "exemplifies."
  
• No strong verbs.
  
• Nothing good at all.

A social studies teacher would call this sentence a "thesis," but only, I hope, through a clenched jaw and with tears of agony welling up in her eyes. An English teacher would call this sentence many things, most of them profane, but among them, "top-heavy."

What's a top-heavy sentence? It's a bland, fairly simple sentence that a lazy and/or foolish writer has decided to obscure by piling an unreasonable amount of adverbial phrases and other modifiers in front of it. Imagine a scrawny guy with knobby knees and a small penis who wears a mohawk to distract people from his shortcomings. Now turn him into a sentence. He's top-heavy, and he also, strangely enough, resembles a drowning child.

There are a few reasons someone might want to make a top-heavy sentence. None of them could possibly apply to thesis-writing. And besides, no amateur writer does this deliberately. They do it because they don't know shit.

Now let's really dig into these stupid literary mohawks.

"With its bright colors..."

So what the hell do bright colors have to do with anything? Let's put it somewhere else and see how it reads: "A mural with its bright colors exemplifies a trend to create captivating and educational murals..." Bright colors are arguably captivating, but is this person really using bright colors as evidence for a key point of her thesis? You know--since normally murals use dreary colors, so nobody will look at them. How astute of her to point out the bright colors. She's a sublime aesthete. A goddamn idiot-savant. Gag me.

"...rays of sun showering upon faces of influential leaders of different races..."

Isn't that pretty. I love rays of sun. I love them almost as much as rays of sunlight, which is a cliche which actually makes some sort of sense. And I love them almost as much as I love boring theses that try to wax poetic to cover up their complete irrelevance. I also love the use of "showering" to describe light, since we all know light falls just like rain and isn't a trite way to describe "rays of sun" at all. Though, the second half of the sentence is what really bothers me. Her use of influential is totally unnecessary. What leader isn't influential? She could have cut this sentence down to a trim 79 words, just like that. Worst of all, the ambiguity of "of" leaves the reader wondering if she means the leaders come from different racial backgrounds, or whether different races have their own leaders--like the King of the Blacks, or Emperor Whitey, or something. Nice attention to detail, Ms. Bright Colors.

"...and inspiring slogans coined to stir the public to bridge the gap between races and socioeconomic divisions..."

This one came as a relief. After slogging through those last two bewildering items on this list, I was appreciative that the writer thought to remind me that "inspiring" things are meant to "stir" people. I thought it had something to do with food or something, because I don't know much about them wordstuffs without her done telling me synonyms straightaway. It was also sweet of her to include that passive participle without any agent. Honestly, I don't really want to know who "coined" these slogans. I expect it's totally irrelevant. And I certainly know precisely what she means by the "gap between races." And the idea of "gaps between...divisions" just plain tickles me. I imagine it resembles the space between her ears.

I might be more willing to excuse this writer's offenses if I suspected she never read anything good. I mean, then, who could blame her for writing crap? If the extent of her literary experience was R.L. Stine and Barbara Kingsolver, then I'd understand and just shrug her off as a amiably goofy rookie. Unfortunately, I can't believe this. I can tell she's actually had some instruction in the art of essay writing, as well as at least an introduction to the quarks of rhetoric. How do I know this?

ASCENDING TRICOLON.

Ascending Tricolon is one of the most common rhetorical devices, and perhaps the easiest to use effectively. It really does the work for you. All you need to do is have a list of three things, hence the "tri-colon," and as you list them, make them either longer, more complicated, or more important in some way. Ascending tricolon mimics the structure of a good five-paragraph essay, in which the three-paragraph body begins with the weakest argument and builds to the strongest. Lots of people use this tool without even knowing what it's called, or maybe realizing they're doing it, in conversation as well as writing. It's a fairly commonsense way to phrase a list, and it generally works well in jokes. Paradoxically, the best way to tell that someone is conscious that they're doing it is if it's really, really poorly done. If it is clearly forced or just reeks of pretension. For instance, when someone really only has two things to list, but makes up a third to fill it out. This happens all the time in Time Magazine. It has also clearly happened in this train-wreck of a sentence we have in question. I mean, really: bright colors? Jesus H. Christ.

This girl has a level of education and rhetorical comprehension necessary to use ascending tricolon, but all the common sense of a squirrel trying to cross the street. She steps into this sentence, then freezes and thinks about the meaning of acorns or some shit, and apparently gets squished by a metaphorical bus, since it strikes her as a good idea to put in the address of the mural for no friggin' reason at all. I figure her brain was liquefied in the middle of writing this rubbish and all the information she actually had inside it just spilled out onto the page. Her ascending tricolon builds into a perfect anticlimax, almost twenty-five words of apposition, which is the syntactical equivalent of a sinkhole filled with the rotting corpses of unicorns.

Forget Hemingway punching this bitch in the face. We're talking a Cicero beatdown right here.

And then we finally get to the predicate, and she basically spits in our face. What she actually says, once you strip away all the fat, is "...a mural...exemplifies a trend to create...murals." You're kidding. That's what you're telling us? That's what took you EIGHTY WORDS? A mural is evidence of murals? I. HATE. YOU.


I can't go on any further. Eli, I'm tagging you in.

---------------
Well Tim, you pretty much covered all bases there. But let me stress again the needless repetition in this catastrophe of a sentence. We are told early on that the mural has "inspiring slogans coined to stir the public to bridge the gap between races and socioeconomic divisions". Awesome, now we know what the mural is all about. Yet, apparently the horrendous phrasing is not enough for the statement to stick in our minds. The author must again tell us at the end of the sentence that the mural "exemplifies a trend to create captivating and educational murals throughout New York City that deal with major socioeconomic and racial issues."

You're kidding. You're kidding! We already know the fucking mural is in New York. You even told us the address. We already know the whole crap about racial and socioeconomic issues, you told us about 50 words earlier. We even already know the mural is educational. What the FUCK did you tell us in those last 21 words? That it's a trend? Well I've got news for you, bud: By this point in time, I could care less if these murals were a fucking revolution. If you can't express your thoughts any better, they're not worth hearing.

In closing, I'd like to touch back on something Tim mentioned earlier. The only way to learn to write well is to read. Now, whether or not most college students read is a topic for another debate. However, by this point in the semester every Columbia student has read Homer's Iliad, Homer's Odyssey The Homeric Hymns and Herodotus' Histories. These books are the foundation of all literature. They may not be the best examples of how to write for the modern author, but if you are unable to take any sense of written language from them then there is no hope for your academic career. Please, do us all a favor and never write again.

So it's time for a little confessional:

I've been holding something in for a really long time, and I don't just mean puberty, which I'm still waiting to break out when I find the right back-alley whore. Till then my balls are going to stay safe within the confines of my hairless lower thorax. Where they belong.

I get distracted easily. For instance, take the previous paragraph, if I may be so bold as to call the above brain-vomit a deliberate packet of coherent thought. It started out straightforward enough, and then devolved into a veritable scatological smörgåsbords wherein even the lowliest intelligence might not find sufficient refuge even from the anti-syntactic growls of a neo-realist lecture. What the hell am I talking about? That may or may not be my point.

I titled this piece before I started writing it. That's entirely coincidental. I had something to say originally, but, like most things in life, it disappeared before it could come to fruition. Again this brings me back to puberty. Tangentially perhaps. Irrelevantly certainly. And to all those English fellows who told me I couldn't write a sentence with only adverbs, I say this: "Well, well, well."

I'm going to be honest. I've been doing crack with a near-religious diligence since I arrived on campus just three weeks ago. I smoke it all the time. It makes me feel wonderful. But you know what else makes me feel wonderful? Actually, nothing. All I've got now is crack. You may think I'm joking, but I want you to think really hard about the following three things: 1.) If I weren't, how would you even know? 2.) Do you really think I'd want you to know? 3.) Wouldn't it be a load off my conscience to confess my faults and sins publicly to an audience that doesn't believe them? Also think about how much effort the French put into building the Eiffel Tower--and for what? You don't need to think about that last part, but frankly, I think it's the most interesting.

I write all my posts drunk. Every single one. I've never written sober on this blahg. You're probably thinking, "Well, gee, that doesn't make sense, since some of these are posted in the morning or early afternoon!" But you're forgetting one terribly important detail: I'm drunk all the time. I really wonder what you'd think of me if you met me when I was sober. You might think I was an ax-murderer. Probably because without alcohol I'm terrifically shy and introverted, quiet and seemingly malicious. Also I tend to carry around an ax. Why? Dragons.

I bet you didn't know that dragons can speak every human language. Simultaneously. I bet you didn't even know they were real. Did you? But have you ever seen a dragon? Have you ever had one approach you and openly admit they don't exist? Then I'd have to ask you: what makes you so sure, Mr. Skeptic? Yeah. You don't know shit. Also dragons can fly, whether or not they have wings. Explain that, Mr. Science. When will you admit that you're whole philosophy of objective analysis has just been an elaborate ruse? Probably right before the dragons eat you.

Where am I going with all this, anyway? Answer: straight down to hell. Hope you'll join me.

Neoconservatism is the new black

Here at Harvard I have a really cool schedule, consisting of nine hours of class a week, and meetings only three days a week. It's so cool that if I wake up early enough to eat a warm breakfast (it's happened twice so far), I might even show up. When I do I mostly learn about dead white guys. I'm not too concerned with dead white guys, unless they can teach me how to make money, get laid, or live forever, which they clearly can't, since they're dead. So most of the time I skip class and get notes from friendly British girl upstairs who habitually says adorable things like "quite," "spirits," "wanker," and "fuck a sheep" and apparently came to America for nefarious reasons having to do with cultural imperialism. I like her a lot, but not, you know, in that way. What I mean is I don't want to fuck a sheep. But then, she's growing on me, so we'll see.

The point I'm trying to make is that since I have so much free time, I mostly go around starting friendly debates with people, usually about AIDS, rape, or whether or not Jesus Christ smoked marijuana (he did). To do this I employ the Socratic method, something I'm told is very popular in Harvard classrooms. Here's an example:

TJ: Hey, I'm TJ. I live in Mathews and I like Computer Science.
Me: Is it definitely rape if she only says stop once?
TJ: Um...why--well, yes, I guess. But--
Me: Well how are you supposed to know if stop is referring to intercourse or something else, like say you're sucking her nips?
TJ: Did...did you really just say nips? Out loud?
Me: And what if she doesn't speak any English and you don't understand Armenian?
TJ: You...you didn't even tell me your name.
Me: My heart has been broken too many times, TJ. I need a man's strong embrace.
TJ: I was just trying to be friendly...
Me: But what is friendship, anyway?

The important thing is not whether you're right or wrong, only that you establish a meaningful dialogue. Once you've done that, class becomes unnecessary. Class is just like a dialogue, only it's between a flock of sheep and a wood-chipper. Does that analogy hold up under any scrutiny? Doesn't matter. Like everything else I write, I'm not handing this in.

Occasionally people approach me asking for directions, and every time I try to put on a different fake accent. I do this because people asking for directions are generally from out-of-town, don't know a Boston accent from a well-articulated fart, and could reasonably believe that, as a Harvard student, you're from anywhere in the whole world. I get creative with them, too; the other day I decided to pronounce all my Vs as Ws, all my Hs as Ys, and to hiccup at every schwa. Today I decided to thump my chest whenever I use an infinitive or imperative. Looking back, I guess I'm not very good at this game. That isn't an accent so much as a social more.

I met a really lovely girl the other day, only to realize she was actually from Boston College. So I guess she wasn't lovely after all. They do a lot of coke over there.

Since today is Friday, and I don't have any classes, I decided to go down to the Charles and jump off the footbridge, which, incidentally, is what everyone is doing these days. It turned out to be a bad idea. For some reason there are actually metal spikes under the bridge. I know this because a girl came out with one of them sticking through her calf. They put her in a whistling truck and some people were crying. Cambridge can be really weird sometimes.

I love to play pranks on people. One of the Freshman dorms is called Wigglesworth. The T runs right under it, so every five minutes you can feel a faint rumbling in the rooms and you can hear a earthquake-like roar in the basement common room. None of my pranks have anything to do with this. I just thought it was interesting. I did meet a girl from there at a party, though. She was Japanese so I assumed she liked Pokemon. I asked her if she wanted to see my Diglet. She said she wasn't interested unless it was a Dugtrio. I said with a little more training I'm sure it would evolve. Then she laughed, hissed, slapped me in the face, and flew away. With my heart. For the rest of that weekend I played Pokemon Red nonstop. That's not code for masturbating. I found out later that the girl was actually a bat. I guess I was pretty drunk.

Ahmadinejad is Mah Homeboy

A lot of people have been asking about my experiences with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to campus yesterday. I decided that rather then tell the story over and over again I should just tell it once on this blahg. So, I apologize for the break from out typical tone of petty irony and arrogance. I also apologize for the length of this post. Anyone looking for dumb humor can probably skip it. And here we go:

The Controversy
Columbia University invited the insane dictator of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to come give a talk as part of its "World Leaders Forum." Ahmadinejad has become infamous for his oppression of gays and women as well as his views that the Holocaust did not exist and that Israel should be annihilated.

The sides were not split down a simple partisan line on this issue. Rather, they were shattered into many factions: Angry Jewish protesters, angry military personnel, angry feminists, angry homosexuals, angry proponents of free speech and angry liberal conspiracy theorists. Basically the argument boiled down to this: By allowing him a platform to speak are we legitimizing his views?

The Event
While the actual speech filled up within minutes of its announcement, a large overflow broadcast was conducts on the south lawn. This is what I ended up attending and it was rather packed. Here's a picture courtesy of Bwog:


The Interesting Part
So, rather than sit around and watch the various campus protests, my dear friends Gelseigh and James joined me in exiting the campus gates to mingle with outside protesters. These people would have loved to be on campus, but Columbia, thankfully, decided to require a valid student ID to gain access to the quad.

Now our main goal was to pick out the people with the craziest signs and engage in debate with them. We all split up.

The first man I spoke to was carrying a sign which portrayed a large swastika with Ahmadinejad's head on top. The debate, in severe paraphrase, went something like this:
Me: Don't you think it's a little ridiculous and offensive to compare this man to Hitler?
Him: Well let me first tell you that I'm a Holocaust survivor and I watched my sister die next to me in a concentration camp.
Me: (stunned silence)
Him: This man wants to do just what Hitler did. He wants another Holocaust.
Me: I don't deny that, but don't you think that it's important to allow him to speak before that can happen? As a means of spreading awareness maybe?
Him: Why should he have a right to speak here? You're legitimizing his ideas by allowing him to speak here.

(insert 10 minutes of elevated debate. The rest of it is carried out in screams from the man)

Me: How are we supposed to know how to respond to this guy if we don't allow anyone to engage him directly?
Him: He's had his time to speak. Bringing him here is sponsoring a hate rally. You don't know what you're talking about.
Me: It's not a hate rally, it's a forum to question him.
Him: You don't know anything. I wish you were there in the camps with me. I wish you had seen my sister die.
Me: (silence) ... I'm sorry you feel that way. (I walk away).

At this point a reporter came up to me and told me I held up very well and that the guy was totally out of line. I answered a few questions and went back into the crowd to calm down a little then find someone else to argue with.

When you started talking to people in the crowd itself about 6 reporters would show up with notebooks and mics and cameras as soon as it started. Needless to say, it's a little tough to debate with all this crap shoved in your face, but it was an experience.

The next group I approached was of two women with an "Ashamed to be Alumni" sign. James started arguing with one of them and I the other one started in on me. This was nice, because as soon as you started arguing about 5 other people tended to jump in and shout you down.

The premise of this debate was a little less heated. They believed that we would be brainwashed by the man. We disagreed and said that the main pillar of higher education was learning to question what was said to us. It moved on to a discussion of whether we had the ability as college students to question him, to which we answered that we out of anyone probably had the best ability to question him.

Then some angry man jumped in and called me naive and an idiot. I told him I wasn't going to debate anything with him if he was going to attack me personally. He responded that what he meant was actually an idea of Stalin's of the "useful idiot". I told him that I was not a useful idiot and that I didn't think it was appropriate for him to use Stalinist rhetoric against me. He told me I had no idea what I was talking about, that diplomacy is useless and that the only answer is war. I responded that war sure helped us on the road to peace in Vietnam and both Iraq wars. He responded that he was in the Gulf war and that if they had taken out Saddam it would've created peace. I responded that our foreign policy should definitely become one of assassinating any foreign leader we don't like. He called me an idiot again and walked away.

The Speech

It was time to leave the madness and go back in the gates to watch the speech. PrezBo opened up by essentially owning the fuck out of Ahmadinejad. It was a little disappointing to see him cave so much to the public pressure of the people that had just been hurling unfounded insults at me all morning. He did need to make it clear that we were not in support of this guy's politics though, so maybe it was good.

Ahmadinejad then proceeded to ramble for about 40 minutes about science and religion. He made absolutely no sense for the majority of it. Gawker managed to grab this quote from somewhere:
"In the teachings of the prophets, one reality shall always be attached to science: the reality of purity of spirit and good behavior. Knowledge and wisdom are pure and clear reality. Science is a light."

Yep.

Well, the question-and-answer was a bit more interesting. He managed to dodge every single question pretty masterfully.
"Do you believe in the destruction of Israel"
"*Long rant about Palestine's right to exist*"
etc.

The highlight of the speech was definitely when a question was asked about homosexuality. At first he ignored it. The question was then repeated. He answered:
" In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country ... In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have this."

Conclusion
Well, all-in-all it was an intense day. The speech was mostly passive and harmless, but the discussions it inspired were more valuable than all the weeks of classes I've been to at this school. This is what a university is supposed to be and I'm glad our President had the sense to invite the man to come speak. I was shouted down numerous times, told that I should've died in the Holocaust and told that I couldn't possibly know anything about politics or the world in general. But I feel like if I managed to get something out of the experience in spite of all that, then the university has done its job. Hats off to our administration...for once.

Here's some pictures from inside the gates:

So Basically I'm Batman

I've always flattered myself my thinking I'm psychically sound enough to not be hit too hard by homesickness. I spent all eighteen years of my life in the same town, with very few excursions elsewhere lasting longer than a few days. I figured once I left the sentimentality of it would quickly fade and I'd realize that Amherst doesn't really offer anything that Cambridge, among other places, doesn't offer in excess.

When I first got here I went down the list of the things that were most precious to me back home. I found street musicians, a kickass burrito place, drugged-out slackers with dreams of revolution, several pretty places to run, trees to climb (albeit illegally), and plenty of dark-haired, doe-eyed virgins with low alcohol tolerance who dream of writing their coming-of-age novels and moving to a third world country to help orphans. I think somewhere in the mix I even found some people who could become very good friends.

But you know what I didn't find?

Love.

But you know what I didn't find, and I actually wish I had?

Antonio's.

Cambridge needs a friggin' Antonio's. They've got a Pinnochio's, incidentally, and it's actually the original from which the shady Amherst chapter was spawned. The drunk kids around here call it 'Noc's, and the fruity kids call it Pinnoc's, probably because that sounds more like penis.

I like to keep an open mind when it comes to pizzerias, so last week I got rip-roaring drunk and wandered down the dark streets of Cambridge in hopes of locating a distant choir of screams that could only mean deliciousness. As I walked I contemplated what rip-roaring drunk actually meant. I decided it was sort of like Enlightenment, in that some Zen asshole just made it up because he wanted an excuse not to get a real job. Of course, when I was thinking this, I was rip-roaring drunk. So I still really don't know what it means.

Deep in the throes of this internal debate I somehow managed to almost get run over by a moped. The driver was an elderly woman with a ponytail, wearing a pink helmet and a leather jacket. She swore profusely at me and I made fun of her for being blind. Shortly after the two of us went on our merry ways I heard a massive crash behind me. I turned to find the old hag sprawled out face down on the sidewalk. Her moped had managed to lodge itself in the metal grating of a closed tobacco shop. I ran over to her and tried to pry her off the ground. She shook me off. "I can do it myself, you fucking fuckers!" she said sagely. And then, with a eloquent cough that seemed to fill a thousand blissful years, she cooed, "Actually, young man, I don't think I can walk."

I laughed at her ruse and challenged her to an arm wrestle. She turned me down, clearly fearful of my undeniable man-essence. I didn't really want to arm-wrestle her, anyway. I figured since she was so old she was probably going to die soon, anyway, so I might as well make her feel as if she isn't totally inferior in her last moments. Like in all those baseball movies where the kid meets his favorite player and tosses his historic home-run ball back to him, so he can have it as his own keepsake, and then the big star says, "Wow, champ, that's a heckuva arm ya got there!" Or some shit like that. And the kid really appreciates that because his father was a deadbeat or a Nazi and never gave him any positive reinforcement, and the kid probably also has cancer or something. I don't know if there's ever been a movie like that, but if so, it totally sucked ass.

So while she was lying there, dying like the champ that she wasn't, I figured I'd go find some pizza for the two of us. But I realized if I went all the way to the nearest pizza place, which could be millions of miles away, and then all the way back, the pizza would be cold and covered in my drool, and my drool would be equally cold. Plus, I really didn't want to walk all the way back here before turning in for the night. So naturally I lifted up this old woman and threw her over my shoulder like a large straw dummy meticulously fashioned after an old woman. At first she was all like, "Hey, what are you doing? Where are you bringing me?" But she knew. She was just playing the Old-Person-with-Alzheimer's Card and pretending to forget everything. I decided to one-up her by telling her we were going to the Kingdom of Heaven and that I was the Angel of Death. She got really quiet after that, and pretty soon I forgot I was carrying her.

After a half dozen blocks I was getting really tired, party because I'm out of shape, but mostly because I was carrying an old woman and didn't realize it. So I decided to stop in at one of the 362 CVS stores in Cambridge and buy some smokes. I get in there and this short black guy behind the counter is just sort of shaking his head like he's listening to some crazy music that nobody else can hear.

He looked up and his eyes went all bugged-out on me and I figured he must be reacting to the fumes of drugs he ignited and inhaled before I came in. He started mumbling, something to the effect of, "Excuse me, sir, but I thought I might inform you that you are carrying the limp and unconscious body of an elderly female, and given that this is a convenience store and not the emergency room of a hospital, I would posit further that your presence here is inappropriate to the point of being profane."

I asked him why he did not have any American Spirits behind the counter. He shrugged his shoulders and said that Camels were all right.

"All right?" I screamed. "You think Camels are all right?"

The next thing I knew I was foaming at the mouth, and it tasted like Sour Cream and Onion. I knew something bad was about to happen, so I beckoned to the man behind the counter. He seemed confused, and intimated to me that he did not want to come any closer to me, and besides if he did he would be unable, on account of the persistently solid counter affixed to the floor between us.

Something inside me died in that moment, and I once I came to the clear truth of it all: all of us - me, the CVS man, the old woman, me, Bruce Springsteen, Sour Cream and Onion, me, Batman, and even I myself were all simply swirling around in an amoral universe like motes of dust in a dusty dustbowl. Nothing I did mattered. Soon I would die and it would all be oblivion, and then I would be dead for the rest of my life.

The woman on my shoulders announced her presence with a gentle purr, which evolved into projectile vomit, bile intermingled with blood. Suddenly I knew what I had to do.

"Do you know why we bury our dead, laddie?" I intoned to the drugged Mister in the blue CVS shit.

He looked at me as if he had been dealing with the customer behind me for the past several minutes.

With an explosion of force the likes of which I had never before experienced outside of James Cameron films, I hurled the old woman at the drug-man. She spun around several times, a ballerina on a horizontal axis, before striking him directly all over his body. The two of them fell against the wall of cigarettes in a highly poetical heap. Tobacco products lay scattered across them like body glitter on a body, a body that was the floor.

Immediately several people started cheering hysterically, lost for all sensible words. The screamed for help, frustrated that they could not find a camera in order to preserve this image of justice forever. I strode over to them and placed a hand on each of their shoulders in turn.

"Do not worry, my peerless children. I am that is. A destroyer of worlds. Tobacco products are carcinogenic, and cancer is the light of lights."

And with that I disappeared into the night, leaving all to wonder what had happened to what they once called their lives.