Let's talk about honesty, grrrr, rrrfff, rrrfff

The Column: 05.06.24

Whenever I open an egg carton, I think of the chicken at work in the factory, creating this elliptical work of art onto a conveyor belt, to be stolen away, and then the hormones in the chicken feed kick in and the process of creation repeats itself, sort of like me and limericks: I write a good one and it stimulates the next limerick and pretty soon I have a hundred of them, which I could collect in a book but won’t because very few people appreciate limericks — women do not, because so many cruel limericks have been written about women, and when men read a limerick they think, “I could’ve done better than that,” being the compulsive competitors they are, and meanwhile here I am with this work of art in my hand.

Minneapolis is great. Have you seen it?
The streets go from Aldrich to Zenith.
It’s the birthplace of Prince,
Than whom no one since
Has been any hipper, I mean it.
The city is good for the sickly.
The streets are numerical, strictly,
And alphabetical
All so that medical
Teams can get to you quickly. 

I handed this to a friend — I’m in St. Paul, as I write this — and he said, “Nice,” and handed it back. It’s a useless work of art, not like the egg, which, in addition to being a source of life, is also good in cakes, omelets, Egg McMuffins, nog, and so forth. But at least that limerick is factual and provides information about the street system of Minneapolis and it honors Prince. Not like —

A lady who lives in Vancouver
Drank two quarts of varnish remover
And did not get ill
And vomit, but still,
It didn’t do much to improve her. 

There is no such lady and the reader knows this immediately, even before getting to the varnish remover. It’s fiction, which I’ve devoted a good deal of my life to, though I come from a family of farmers, engineers, teachers, caregivers, people who sought to be useful citizens and not merely decorative. Why did I make up things instead of learning to fix things?

The fact is that when I was a kid in Minnesota, struggling my way through six-foot snowdrifts to school, long before lightweight down coats were invented — I was an 82-pound fourth-grader wearing 42 pounds of heavy woolens and corduroy, and one day I was caught by a pack of coyotes who carried me away to their den where I remained for several years and learned their language of growling, snuffling, snorting. I, being prehensile, was sent into the henhouse to snatch chickens, while the others distracted the farmer’s dog, and I bit the chickens’ throats and bled them dry and carried the bodies back to the den where we ate them raw.

I was rescued by hunters and returned to my parents who had recovered from their grief and didn’t know what to do with me. I relearned English and I regained a semblance of good manners, though even now, years later, I sometimes urinate on the bathroom floor to mark my space against intruders, which upsets my wife and so does my habit of woofing in my sleep and sometimes I’ve smelled feathers in my sleep and attacked my pillow and chewed a hole in it, so we switched to foam rubber.

I’m in a therapy group, Hominids Undergoing Manifest Animalist Natures, and we have formed a very tight pack, meeting in a nearby park, and sometimes I get into conversations with dogs, some of whom believe their jailers are in touch with life on other planets and that an invasion by Martians, Venusites, and Jupiterians is imminent, and they live with relentless dread. Dogs are not nearly so bright as coyotes though the two languages are similar. Coyotes sing, they like to look at the stars, they tell stories; dogs are hostages to the approval of humans and without the pat on the head, the snuggle, the treats, the “Good dog,” they are bereft. I am more like coyotes. I stay centered by writing limericks and praising the Lord, no matter what other people think. I look up at the stars and I sing:

I sing to the stars and Infinity,
And God who made everything in it, He
Created the frame
And is not to blame
For my sins of gross masculinity.
I trust that after I die
I will fly to His arms in the sky,
And if it’s not so,
I’ll never know.
I could worry about it, but why? 

Brisk Verse: a real delight.

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