As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Bushmaster is the colloquial term for subspecies of pit vipers indigenous to the American south. Lachesis muta. Candy had built a contraption in their garage that allowed the gun to be essentially stood on end with the barrel pointing up and the butt secured to the bump stock on the ground in a position that allowed one to stand over the barrel and lean forward to discharge the weapon by placing the soft part between the thumb and index fingers onto the trigger. The contraption had a holster like thing on the ground where the gun butt fitted with bump stock rested and she had welded to it—as part of the stand of sorts, that positioned the rifle up from the ground at a 60 degree angle—a metal rod with a 2 inch diameter pipe welded onto the end, into which the Bushmaster’s barrel was inserted, allowing movement along but not off the 60 degree axis during discharge. Bushtit, apart from being another glorious—yet unclaimed—nom de guerre in the adult film industry, is a songbird native to the American southwest that builds elaborate, asymmetrical nests that if stumbled upon appear tumorous and unsettling. Psaltriparus minimus.

Like you’re the guy waiting in the surgery recovery room for his mistress, Frank is saying to Jason. You’re there waiting for your mistress to come out of emergency surgery for something and realizing that you may be the only one in the room contemplating the upsides of a bad outcome. Did she leave a diary that could be used to out you in such a scenario? Routine surgeries often had major complications unrecognized by the general population. Leave the cyst in thank you very much if I have a 1% chance of dying from the operation. Who fucking cares about a cyst. My cousin had to be resuscitated when things went awry in a gall bladder removal. It also helps, a lot, that most people have absolutely no concept of statistics. He felt the need to distinguish between thick headed caveman types that had affairs and horsed around just because they couldn’t not horse around, versus him, who was sought after for his high intellect and charm and humor, which women chose to access through his drawers.

Jason could not relate to this. He found himself mourning the loss of people that never existed, the children he never had with women he once knew that he left because of some book he’d read, some song he’d heard or some social slight he’d suffered. That any single specific person exists is only in defiance of impossibility. No one has the right to be here, statistically speaking. If the truth cannot be known, then everything is a lie. Was it J.R.O. who drove home the day they had figured out nuclear fission and wondered to himself why man wasted time and effort continuing to build bridges and buildings and mow lawns and pay taxes and go to school? Once the bomb existed, didn’t it make more sense to just huddle in a circle with your wife and children and just hold them until it ended? Jason found himself thinking about the benefits of nuclear apocalypse vis-à-vis not having to read another 20 essays comparing/contrasting 1984 and Brave New World first quarter, Ordinary People and Catcher in second and Macbeth or Hamlet and take your pick in the third. Fucking SFO, someone is saying. I mean what the fuck. Yeah, but I mean two hours. That’s just plain ridiculous. I don’t know where its coming from. It’s always the same with fucking SFO. There’s no reason we should be delayed two hours, tee time is 7 am. Get up early and catch breakfast. The plane took off and he drifted off.

We walked along an empty highway through some underpasses and met halfway through. He was reciting something Jason had read before and immediately recognized and he started to anticipate the next lines. It was not his work but something saccharine, prescriptive, self-helpy and uplifting in a wearisome way. Like the last pages when HDT was wrapping up and went full didactic. Castles in the sky. Like something from an after school special but with better grammar, a few better word choices and flawless elocution. His appearance was changing from the dust jacket images first to shorter ‘90’s skater hair dyed blond and then to Justin Timberlake high fade gelled comb over with peroxide faint goatee. On inspection even his eyelashes were blond, almost white and his eyes blue. I read that one too, Jason said to him, after he finished and somehow his finishing intimated a different present where he was still alive. Identification. I identify. But then they were chasing us and he ran alone into a two-story condo that Jason somehow knew connected to her condo. They’re coming he said and I need to get through and was granted passage—was understood—identified with. She sat alone downstairs and was applying red lipstick. She was without joy but clearly not sad. The two cats came up to him, both with transparent skin on their faces that made possible clear observation of the arteries and veins, red and bright blue like in class, feeding the eyes. They had large hard transparent blisters next to one eye that seemed fragile and foretold pain and trouble although felt to the touch like amber. She stared ahead and didn’t speak after he told her why he was there and down the stairs a light green plastic cup tumbled as though accidentally kicked and a man he didn’t know, who could be an imposter of his future self, came down the stairs. I wasn’t here for that, he told him, by means of clearing the air. He is getting up to leave but he didn’t answer and instead shared with her some unspoken understanding that registered in the way their postures shifted when in the same room. She didn’t turn to look at him as he left out the door. He heard him recognized as he entered the neighboring space—they knew each other, of course…don’t they all know each other—and the door shut behind him.

Rather than producing a single shot, Candy’s 105 pounds propped in this manner against the trigger managed to discharge, Frank surmised from the marks in the ceiling, 12 shots in probably 1.5 seconds through what no longer had any business being referred to as his wife’s head at that point. When he was the first person to happen upon the scene. That she did this in the garage where it was certain he would be the first to find her and the fact that she did it without warning and while intentionally masking any outward psychic decline and with a method so grotesque and complex made inescapable to Frank the message she clearly meant to send him: There.

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As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

She pulled up in a convertible ‘67 Mustang, black with bright orange racing stripes and he got a flashback to the smell of her body odor at their first encounter, which was now imagined or real and mingling with the leather of her seats and her jacket and he imagined finding the source of that smell, anticipated, as he was entering the car, how Detroit had forged the door and the seat, the floor and the engine to receive the passenger with fixed resistance and transmit to him every small explosion radiating from under the hood. Every irregularity in the road.

What was her mother’s saying about preparing for a man? The obsessive perfection of one’s body. The emphasis on presentation. She always had her nails done (short, clear) and got waxed once a week, so for her preparing meant getting someone to cover her pager. He had skinny jeans and black leather chucks and a T-shirt. The car had an aftermarket Hirst shifter that she adroitly abused between each set of stop lights. He was talking almost nonstop—the senior point guard—and had the easy earnestness, the eager wit, the self-unaware smell of goddamn happiness, of someone whose heart has never been broken. She decided, as soon as he got in the car, to sleep with him. That night. They cut through the cool, briny night air and climbed off PCH towards Santa Monica. She also wore black jeans and some kind of tank top under the leather jacket and was driving barefoot to operate the clutch, producing black heels from the back seat when they arrived. The car had the original radio which was tuned to KROQ. She left the top down when they parked, using a key to lock her phone in the glove compartment, some telepathy regarding attention over dinner. He ordered a beer and she ordered a beer. It was the year where reporting what people were searching for on Google began passing for journalism.

He’s banging on about the party from the other night and the heat running longer into the Fall and the fire season starting sooner and basically running all year and the Santa Anna’s this year and think about what the self-driving cars will mean for traffic. She’s listening and smiling and slightly amused despite herself.

He is talking too much, Jason thinks to himself. He is not going to say another goddamn thing until after they order.

He orders a steak which seems, for reasons she can’t place, out of character.

She orders fish and eats with both hands and although she’s right-handed, holds the fork in her left hand and never puts her knife down. What did HH call it? The sophisticated European manner or some such thing. The outdoor dining area was pleasantly crowded with the West side free range hipsters. In his self-enforced silence, conversations from the neighboring tables narrate their dinner.

Yes on the rent control one.

It’s called topping from the bottom.

They are trick questions.

Raise taxes on you.

You have to work on your back and core.

Fiscal impact.

Yes or no on the judges and I don’t even know them.

I fucking hate semicolons.

Person and not for the party.

He has experience.

Birthday in the same month as mine.

Fucking transgender punctuation.

Focusing on glut-dominant squats.

The funny thing.

The economy sucks.

Flip the house.

I think you mean gynadromorph.

Dude fuck.

They won’t get it.

I only do machines.

Very long time coming.

It’s not really something that she decides.

They were both—and they both knew they were both—past the stage where dates were allocated to precoital exploration, where unspoken thresholds are passed in some sort of order for reasons of decorum or bashfulness or politeness or gumptionlessness. What is the origin of that transition, which eliminates the possibility of prolonged anticipation? Impatience? Practicality? Adulthood? Fear? They drove back down to PCH heading north. She pulled a U turn and parked next to the beach near the Getty Villa and they got out and scampered down to the sand.

The first night, at the party, she had calculated exactly when to deploy the non-professional smile, the smile without the stiff arm that says it’s not impossible. For a split second, towards the end of the conversation. The smile that none of her coworkers had ever seen, save one, the smile that doesn’t tell a man stay the fuck back.

They say a cigar shaped asteroid was probably some alien type of probe. Looking for intelligent life, she said.

It got within a million miles of earth, which is pretty damn close apparently and radioed home: nothing to see here. Come back when they have developed AI.

Our only chance is if the super AI computer is selfish.

What, like, stares at itself in the mirror instead of wiping out the human race?

Not selfish, wrong word. Like if it evolves ego.

Perfect. An egomaniacal super intelligent computer controlling everything. We’re headed into the matrix.

Hear me out, hear me out.

Which didn’t make any sense, by the way. Using humans for energy. Humans consume energy like every other living thing.

Hear me out. Not the matrix, but the computers decide not to wipe out humans because they have evolved ego, the computers have, along with super intelligence. And the one thing you need if you are super intelligent and have a huge ego is someone to appreciate that ego.

So we become the computers’ pets.

Basically yeah. The dog has benefited immensely as a species, gained substantial reproductive advantages, from domestication.

No more roaming the forest for food.

Little disease. Treatment for disease. No natural predators.

In most countries. And lots of new experiences. Without man the dog would never chase a ball or stick its head out the window of a moving car.

The pinnacles of canine existence.

Up there, I would imagine.

You know they say cats domesticated humans. Taught humans to provide them a ready source of rodents by building cities. So, what do humans have to look forward to after the robots take over. What’s the head-out-of-the-window chase-the-tennis ball equivalent?

I have no idea. That’s the point. Interstellar travel? Time travel? Longer lives free of disease.

AI doctors. I can retire.

They might not let you keep your car. The super AI computer is one billion times…

Ten to the ninth.

One billion times smarter than the smartest person who ever lived and will ever live. A billion times smarter than Hawking or Einstein.

A billion times the ego.

Maybe. But maybe it’s one to one with intelligence and so it’s matched? Maybe there is a ceiling on ego?

A billion times Jagger, Jordan or Elon.

Maybe. But here’s the thing, is, if the computer has an ego, it needs someone to appreciate its intelligence and only man can get close to appreciating it.

Why did God create man…

Exactly. So the computer has to keep man around and conscious and aware so he, man, can appreciate all the really cool shit the computer can do.

Time travel and space travel and driverless cars.

But here’s the real question. Here’s the kicker.

The computer gets tired of his pets and wants something different.

He wants more. Or she.

He doesn’t want to spend the whole day throwing the tennis ball, Jessica said, excited now, smiling.

That would get old after a while. So what does he do?

Invents a bunch of androids slightly less intelligent and therefore subservient to them but slightly more intelligent than the most intelligent human.

Maybe.

The computer makes a computer.

Maybe. Or he figures out that in order to find a sufficiently sophisticated interlocutor…

A girlfriend. He needs a woman!

A girlfriend perhaps. To find a sufficiently intelligent girlfriend he can’t make it, he needs to look for it elsewhere in the universe. Ego. He needs to know what’s beyond. To find her and take her for a drive.

Take him for a drive…

She takes him for a drive. Eventually. But before then he sets about exploring the universe and he sends humans as information vectors.

Sounds very sexy.

And they reproduce on the ship, many many generations.

Maybe he sends dogs along for the humans to play with.

And tennis balls. And rackets. And then they eventually make contact.

And the other ship coming from the other direction has dogs and people and tennis balls too.

Exactly! And what has he learned?

That it’s just caprice. A tale told by an idiot?

Maybe. Or that he was asking the wrong question in the first place.

He shouldn’t need to find someone else to be happy?

That survival is enough?

There is no answer. Come to think of it, couldn’t he just clone himself if he wanted to get laid?

Or the real question is: why not just power down?

Ego.

She put a hand on his chest and then a second later on his side and pulled herself to him, he had one hand on her neck and the other on the steering wheel which he moved down to the shifter and then to her leg and then between her legs, at her knees. Wrapping some of her hair in his fingers he moved his mouth briefly to her ear and then her neck and then back to look her in the eyes. Down in the sand they walked north along the shore to refuge behind rocks the size of buildings, placed there by a geologic event, a once in 100,000 year tsunami or glacier before the Anthropocene, where miraculously no teenagers had beat them to a hideaway, hidden from the road and entombed in battling reverberations from the waves and the traffic, the lights of the city running south along the impenetrable ocean, his hand on her hip brought hers back to his chest and their lips together, and then between her legs again, this time with intent, she worked on his belt with one and then two hands as he lifted off her shirt and went mad, the smell again, he had found the source, struggling for purchase in the sand, one hand on her head a careful firm handful of hair, turning her face to the side and kissing her neck, she worked it out, high school point guard like a taut door spring, she squeezed her legs against his hand on her from behind, took hold of him again, his hands on her shoulders, he entered her then and again later that night in her condo, struggling for purchase against the dawn.

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As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Well the impeachment is basically over now, he is saying, they lost, and the middle east momentarily uneventful, and so the media is giving nonstop stream of conjecture and speculation on the worse case scenarios for the spread of this Wuhan virus, raising the collective expectation of millions of deaths and causing Amazon and Walmart and Costco to run out of hand sanitizer and, bizarrely, toilet paper and bottled water as though we were expecting an earthquake and disruption of public services instead of a communicable disease, Bryant Wilson is saying.

Can you expect a communicable disease? Imagine what it must have been like during the Spanish flu 100 years ago, when you didn’t know the thing was coming until all of a sudden the whole town was sick? But then you also wouldn’t have to listen to minute-by-minute updates from CNN and Drudge, either. At least if there’s a quarantine and we can’t leave our homes to shop for food I can still wipe my ass. I’m reminded of the build up to one of the hurricanes in 2016-2017, maybe it was Maria or another Hispanic name, that was so built up that everyone was disappointed when the thing didn’t kill like 10,000 people or at least render a couple million homeless. Can I just say I hate the phrase slap happy? I hate the whole concept, it makes me borderline physically ill. Alright I have to go. Meet me in my office in 30 min.

The Brownian reorganization to maximize interpersonal space when someone leaves the elevator. For years the university had practiced a model where new buildings were constructed in expectation of future investigators being hired, writing and receiving grants for extramural funding, mostly from the federal government, and occupying that space to do their work. A grant written to the federal government has a budget to do the work but also an additional fee, so-called indirect cost, that goes to the host institution to keep the lights on and empty the trash bins and pay for the secretaries and the support staff who serve in a supportive role to the work described in the application, as well as contributing to their health care plans and retirement plans and sick days and vacation days. These new buildings were thus mortgages against future indirect costs of to-be-written grants written by to-be-hired investigators.

Wilson’s office and modest lab space was in one such building, a newer building on campus that made gratuitous use of glass and metal, according to the 21st century religion that making spaces open and full of natural light and amenable to random interaction and laden with constant noise and distractions would somehow promote, rather than stifle, creativity and focus and productivity. Jessica met him here and after he made her sit in his office for 10 minutes while he scrolled through the day’s emails—let me just see if there’s anything I need to volley real quick—he looked up, walked through the lab for a quick perfunctory hello to his post-doc whereas his grad student, defending later that month, was nowhere in sight. They walked outside across the courtyard to the old dental school building, the basement of which housed the vivarium. Mice are nocturnal, so ideally all animal behavioral experiments and certainly invasive surgeries, should be done at night, which is a problem because the majority of humans doing the experiments are diurnal—probably one of the most glaring of many unspoken foundational problems with all biomedical research and why no discovery from a mouse has ever led directly to a drug that worked in humans. The surgery suite and the echocardiography room were deserted, as they expected. He had logged on to reserve the machine in his student’s name when she called him the day before.

Standard practice for first term vacuum aspiration abortion involves local vaginal/cervical anesthesia and insertion into the uterus of a suction-enabled hard plastic straw like device, kind of like the tube the dentist puts in your mouth to suck up all the water and spit and tartar and blood during a sonication cleaning, which is used to mechanically disrupt the fetus and subsequently remove it by mechanical pump suction. A speculum is deployed to gain access to the birth canal. If a mechanical pump is unavailable, manual methods are suitable—think of a long, curved turkey baster but with a mincer function upgrade. She was thinking of tartare. Experienced practitioners can complete the process in a half an hour without the aid of imaging tools, but this was a procedure neither of them had witnessed first-hand in residencies at major academic medical centers. Hence the idea of using the echo machine to guide the insertion of the curette he managed to procure. She was going to have to do it in two stages, first the mechanical disruption, kind of like scraping an oyster out of its shell with a pair of forceps in the dark through a rubber tube, and second the manual aspiration with a plastic syringe they got from his lab and outfitted with silicon tubing which she planned to advance past her cervix with the help of the curette, which meant she forewent anesthesia because she was confident enough with her own anatomy and was certain the two-way tactile cues would be important to guide placement. He said he already had a speculum he could bring from home. She did not pursue the details behind this disclosure. He didn’t pretend to look away while she removed her scrubs and underwear and sitting on the floor applied some KY (also procured by him) to the thing and inserted it.

They’re saying 90% of the country shut down completely for a month, Bryant is saying. People were told to stay home from work. Only medical staff allowed into the hospitals. This is coming our way they’re saying. The economy’s gonna take a huge hit with all these supply lines. Foxcon just getting back online now, everyone’s gonna pay a little more for that next iPhone. My buddy in Xi’an, sending me all this patriotic shit on WeChat, he’s paranoid they’re watching for people to badmouth the regime. She slid it home and prised it open two clicks. He noiselessly puffed his cheeks and made a face like someone had just put too much mustard on his sandwich.

It’s a video of a procession of vehicles, he says, a bunch of goose-stepping guys in white hazmat suits and one of them is spraying the outside of the vehicles with what one imagines must be some kind of disinfectant. Now it cuts to another scene of a bunch of blue suit clad people standing at attention in a large ‘60’s communist block looking courtyard, filmed ostensibly by some low flying overhead drone, I’m guessing something high level consumer grade based on the quality of the editing, at something that looks like the side of a major highway of some kind, all saluting as the group leader addresses them from a megaphone and this music plays over the speaking, which is in Chinese with Chinese subtitles, this painfully earnest, canned patriotic sounding fare of cascading flutes and lutes and xylophones and whatever that is piped into hotel lobbies and conference centers all over the country. A smaller group in front is holding a red banner with yellow script that the communists use to announce things all over the country. My friend, he fucking kills me, this guy who had no love, let me tell you, no love whatsoever for the communist party or the government as recently as last week and is about as westernized as you can be, he texts me, I can read it for you, I want to share with you this record moving moment, he says, showing volunteer medical doctors returning hometown from Wuhan after completing the mission. I love these people with greatest respects! Ok, the questionable grammar aside, this is clear propaganda. I mean it’s laughable. He was quiet for a second and then looking down at her, I would go two more. Not looking up at him, she opened it two more clicks.

There’s no way quarantine is going to fly here, he goes on. We just have to anticipate several million people getting it, a couple thousand end up in hospital and die. They don’t need to freak everyone out. Walking around with gloves on in the hallways and at the grocery store. Only Asians are wearing the masks. Are you ready? He placed some of the monopropylene glycol on her abdomen and positioned the probe, usually used for measuring the chambers of the rodent heart, on her belly and moved it around until the mass was in focus and the machine started to emit the rhythmic, scratchy, alien, liquid sounds, motion turned into sound turned into image and then back to sound, amplified. Sonographic imaging, by definition, involves sound, the waves of which can travel through solid matter and liquid—the body’s mostly water—and be converted into images based on the ultrasonic waves reflected back to the piezo1 electric transducer and converted in the computer into a reproduction of anatomical features and movement thereof. When you think of the heartbeat that accompanies ultrasound in the movies and medical dramas, the EKG: this is something totally different. What we’re talking about here is sound produced by the matter and detected by the device. The point is, there’s no need for an audible sound, the actual sound waves can only be heard by dolphins and cockroaches and so she told him to turn the volume on the console down to zero.

There was a small prick of pain that told her she was in the right spot and then when she advanced it further, there was no resistance, meaning she had breached the cavity. They say anesthesiologists learn how to perform epidurals by practicing on bananas. It was then she looked up at the echo screen to proceed. He started talking again, one hand holding the probe on her belly and the other scrolling something on his phone. Slurry. She ignored him, sweating a little but focused, methodical. Mastication. There was a smell of iron like a bloody nose and she was worried for a second she had cut herself but then she looked down and it was. He handed her a towel and some iodine but she looked down at herself for 30 seconds and decided she didn’t need it, reaching instead for the 70% ethanol spray bottle and then a black plastic bag and some bleach and more towels for the floor. Disintegration. He wiped off the probe, stowed it, shut off the echo machine and discarded his glove, again picking up his phone.

The man doesn’t have it. He referred to his wife as his sister in the super Tuesday acceptance speech, Bryant is saying. He forgot the first lines of the Declaration of Independence. He’s confused. I just don’t think they are thinking straight. She had a fleeting moment where she thought she might faint and he sensed it, looking up from his phone at her, but she placed a hand on the back of the chair and it passed. She saw his eyes linger for a moment on her shorn crotch, slightly wet from the alcohol, and the KY and the remnants of. They betrayed no emotion. His eyes. Whisking an egg, she was thinking.

The mouse can be sacrificed by cervical dislocation under inhaled anesthesia, i.e. separating the skull from the spine by placing your index finger and thumb behind the occipital bone and using your other hand to pull the tail. There’s a slight wet pop, like cracking a toe joint, and then paralysis. It is a controlled movement that makes death near instantaneous when properly performed and is thus classified as humane euthanasia. For mice. One time as an undergrad Jessica pulled too fast and too hard and the mouse tried to bite her and then she pulled again and the tail came off in her hand. Still alive. The body, not the tail.

Warren is out, he’s saying. Drudge led with, this is a quote, Bloomberg spends half a billion and wins American Samoa. My uncle actually stumped for him. First time for a Democrat since high school. Texted me a pic. The towels went in the bag. She felt down there with two hands. Four clicks back and then out. Checking his pager. Biohazard. Sometimes they go limp other times they are still twitching but either way, basically dead. Not dead but paralyzed. Killed then by thoracotomy and exsanguination. The mice, that is. Cells can be alive in culture for years, decades in the -200 F nitrogen dewar.

May cancel the Final Four games. Still play them but no one in the audience. LeBron says they won’t play with no fans. Mike Pence did the terrorist fist bump that got Michelle and Barack in trouble. More of an arm bump. Not from the hood so he’s still ok in his circles. Trump setting him up to be the fall guy, Pence that is. A really heavy flow, like for a day. Stock market crash, Vegas in trouble, no one gambling. Maxipad. Even the hookers are out of work. Not really. End of days. Like stockpiling iodine after Fukushima. Diechi. Why did some broadcasters drop the Diechi? Japanese names in general much easier to pronounce than Chinese and Korean. Forget Vietnamese. More phonetic. Chicken thighs, boneless chicken thighs. Like a boneless chicken thigh with some fibrous tissue but no bone. An octogenarian running the country for the next few years, no way around it now. Depends on your definition of alive.

Jessica walked into the building the next morning and a bird was trapped in the hallway. It bounced again and again off the windows attempting to exit and it was almost enough to make her turn around and leave and never come back. The cover of the Oprah magazine in the women’s changing room had the following leads: The Books I Can’t Wait to Read this Summer; What Your Therapist Really Thinks About You (A Shrink Tells All!); My Favorite Drinks for My Favorite Guests; Could You Leave Everything You Know and Everyone You Know (Women Who Did); Does Your Vajayjay Need a Vaycaycay? How to Keep Her Healthy and Happy Straight Through Labor Day. Zina Portnova poisoned more than 100 Nazis during WWII. She was captured in 1943, killed the Nazi interrogating her and another two while trying to escape. She was executed at the age of 18 in 1944. What have you done so far?

If you don’t think about the virus, you can’t get it. Jessica’s neighbor’s son told her this and she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or correct him, whether this was dangerously wrong or the only levelheaded thing she has heard about the thing all day. It’s Super Tuesday 2.0—she can’t remember there being a second version in elections past, but…hey—and it looks like Joe Biden could win Michigan and run away with things. You have to try to not watch him on TV, walking around a car factory in Dearborn this morning, looking confused, amused, happy to be there, like a grandfather being shown around a college campus or walking around the grandson’s new house wondering when it’s time to sit down for dinner and then open Christmas presents. She has a bad feeling watching Biden like this, like he’s going to be elected and then things are going to come off the rails, fast. Maybe he hands off to a VEEP. Kamala? Booker? He looks like your grandfather would look if he tried to take his iPhone to the Apple store to sort out a problem with contacts syncing from the desktop, or automatic backup to iCloud or why his grandkids complain when he texts them to their email and how he can stop doing that. Out of his element, fundamentally. Could she bring herself to vote for Biden? Certainly no one could be feverish for—or really against, for that matter—him, or his policies, which are vanilla and fluid and opaque and poorly articulated. He’s a decent man but someone of whom neither love nor hatred seem possible.

Is being a socialist that bad? Could she pull the trigger for Bernie? So, it’s re-elect the man. Would Sanders or Uncle Joe really be any better than Trump who has actually been really good for the economy and other objective measures of life in the empire, although the virus may still get him. If you ignore everything he says and just pay attention to what he does which is what everyone who doesn’t collect a salary based on their Twitter feed is doing at this point. No one born after 2000—that there were actually people born after the year 2000 passing themselves off as adults was still hard for her to contemplate—drinks Diet Coke. What is the age at which you say fuck it and just walk around the gym locker room with no flip flops? Sitting your bare ass, no towel, on the bench in the sauna. Your snatch on the bench. Quit using those tissue doily things for the toilet seat. They showed images of hospitals in Italy, she saw that morning at grand rounds, and there was a warning in advance, viewer discretion, and they show the photos and people are just lined up, like a war zone, and they are just a couple weeks ahead of us. I mean just seeing that gets my anxiety going through the roof, the HR lady is saying.

And Costco is still out of toilet paper. She got an email today telling her the 1995 movie Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo and Morgan Freeman (Donald Sutherland got second billing and she remembered Cuba Gooding Jr. being in the movie although he didn’t make it into the trailer) about a kidnapped monkey unleashing a virus in the USA that kills all infected and how in the trailer Sutherland is in front of a map of the USA and he’s showing the spread cover the whole country in 48 hours. This morning, the news had a laughably similar map, colored red for the states reporting infection cases and how the trailer is dark and portrays a drama, global crisis, mobilized military, Hoffman (!) and Freeman taking decisive action, whereas she remembered the movie being 90’s camp with Gooding having to fly the helicopter in the fog and he’s only read about it and some closing scene where Russo and Hoffman with a remark about antibodies as a double entendre for the monkey virus and their relationship, freshly rekindled, by the global extinction event. All I know, the HR lady is saying, is 100% of the people walking around with surgical masks before this coronavirus business were Asian and now that the virus is here in America 100% of the people walking around with surgical masks are Asian.

Jason is wondering whether his flight back will be cancelled even though he’s checked in and sitting on the runway. The idea is that despite all the left wing politicians and bleeding heart activists, he still thought of abortions as something teenagers got, usually in minority communities because, he assumed, due to parenting issues and or lack of birth control, or in upper middle class white suburbia due to bad parenting and failure to tell him to put a hat on it, as an out of town extended weekend never to be mentioned or hinted at or even nonverbally acknowledged for the rest of your life around family or friends. This was not something well educated people over the age of 30 did. There was just no reason, unless there was a chromosomal situation or something. Some guy next to him is in a flannel and rugby shorts, loafers with mismatched athletic socks looking like he rowed crew for BU and cuts his own hair and summers in Hyannis Port and is feverishly bouncing his knee as he scrolls his Instagram feed.

That at the end of the day, 99% of the American population—notwithstanding all the enlightenment literature and frontier spirit of free enterprise—is staunchly deterministic, even though they would never consciously admit this, believing they have no control over their lives and certainly no control over the country and just wanting someone who makes them feel good when he talks. Or at least a little less bad. That no one will just come out and say that whatever you think about Trump, grab ‘em by the pussy is undeniably bold. The attendant is reminding everyone of allowable inflight behaviors. Jason was amazed at the astronomical volume of intestinal gas he could produce and if you really thought about it, it made no sense how it got there, another thing that convinced him to never again try and understand the inner workings of the human body. He understood bacteria had something to do with it, but how could something create something that takes up more space than itself?

He’s scrolling, the signal always weak, inexplicably, once you are on board the plane for departure. Peak MEME was probably early 2019. They were clever, well made, topical and layered. Mid-to-late 2019 self-referential MEMEs peaked and then the beginning of a slide into derivative themes, esoteric references without broadly recognizable pop cultural resonance. Filler. And then recycling, reproduction, pseudo bad, faux bad, intentionally bad editing. Alice sent him, unironically, the one of the Indian dude looking irritated in 2020. Way past expiration. Sent him a starter pack MEME for the gym with a girl in yoga pants and a bottle of Fiji water and long nails and painted on eyebrows and high wattage knockers and the phrase the guys in this gym are such creeps in early 2020. As though it was hot off the press.

Go back and try to find some of these old ones. What would you search for? Someone must have been cataloging these things. There’s someone doing everything. If you shut the library during a virus outbreak, where are all the students going to go to find the right mental space to take naps and scroll social media? In college, when you had to go to the computer lab, before everyone had laptops, and hand your 3x5 floppy to the unshaven, BMI~40, lab monitor who was wearing a flannel—to be fair, you probably were too—over a Skinny Puppy shirt, ensconced in a thick, humid, yeasty smell of epidermis and denim, and he would put it in his machine, extravagantly punch a few keys, declare your disk clean, ejecting and returning it to you and assigning you to an empty computer, hopefully not one of the ones with the janky mouse or a hoary-looking mouse pad or the older keyboard with missing keys and weird recoil and the blackish blue mucosal halos on the frequently used tab, delete, shift the worst of all. Don’t talk to me. Sit down and punch any key or move the mouse to wake up the monitor, the guy sits down next to him, punches the spacebar, and the screen erupts into a close up profile of a woman being, the only appropriate term can be skewered, by two guys, her on a table with her head back and throat distended and legs up in the air. The classic yoga pose. It’s only a second or two on a loop and it plays maybe twice or three times, Jason only catches a glimpse but there’s a lot of sweat and some serious anatomy, and the guy yells oh god, the guy sitting at the computer next to him yells this, and hits the spacebar again at which point the DP scene vanishes and he gets up and says I can’t stand when that happens and Jason’s wondering how often this happens to people. Now you just take your laptop to the library or coffee shop and double team the hotspot with the laptop and phone at the same time. The WIFI hotspot. What happened to all these old computers? How about the files on all those old disks? He still has some in his garage, never transferred to the cloud.

This much can be said: being alive is most likely more interesting than the alternative. There’s more happening as far as we know. Sleeping in their seats waiting for departure, shoes off and headphones on. One sneeze would clear this whole place out.

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⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

It’s 7:00 am on a September morning and the sun is bright white between clouds over the bumper to bumper on the 101 and on one side of him is a woman with black hair and tits like a Jeff Koones sculpture in a black convertible Audi A5 with dealer plates and the top down listening to some extremely loud and 120bpm EDM straight from a Vegas pool party and on the other side is a woman with her hair in some kind of ethnic looking wrap of sorts driving a MiniCooper, also black, with an Arizona license plate reading SHE BAD. He passes a late 90’s short cab Toyota Tacoma with lawn mowers in the back and weed whackers hanging off the side and a Nueva Vida 90.3 sticker on the tailgate and three Mexicans in the front seat, two of whom are asleep.

Jason’s cell phone vibrated and Mom appeared on the heads-up display. He let it go to voicemail. The memory could still induce transient panic attacks, even now after the old man had been gone a decade. When he was a child, his mother ridiculed him for dirtying the rim of the toilet and floor beside it when urinating standing up and admonished him to sit down even when going number one. It was in his early teens when in the kitchen his mother strode, where he and his father were fixing sandwiches for lunch, and stated that she was tired of cleaning urine off her bathroom floor and maybe someone else would like to do it. Proud that he had been doing as he was told, he stated that it wasn’t him, because he sat down to pee. The look his father gave him at that moment and the realization then, and subsequently dissected and analyzed through hours of contemplation on public toilets taking shits in the intervening years, that his father held back the scorn he felt for his son, refrained from some type of ridicule, from implying effeminacy, from calling him the giant pussy that he obviously was for sitting down to piss like a woman…gave him tachycardia.

His sister called him 5 mins later and he picked up.

Yeah, it’s fine, she was calling because she couldn’t find the remote. So, what’s going on? Yeah, you’re up already I know. I’ll tell you sometimes I swear we don’t have it nearly as bad. I just hung up with my girlfriend. Her daughter, Lizzie, my god. She asked Anthony to watch the baby while she’s here for her mother’s birthday party and she explained the whole thing and he said I’ll letcha know. She thinks he’s gonna do it but if he doesn’t do it. She was caught drinking again. Brady. But um, they’re not letting her go. The foster system. She’s not allowed to leave Brady alone with that baby, so she has to bring him with her, home, so I don’t know what’s gonna happen because I hope Anthony watches him because well Lizzie says if Anthony doesn’t watch him she’ll just have to bring him to her grandma’s and I thought oh God that’s gonna be like world war three if that happens but I mean I didn’t say that to her I’m just saying whatever. To me this is like a blessing that this child services knows about this now because there’s gonna be a record of it. This is how Anthony talks to her. This is what he said when she told him I guess he sent her a text when she told him and he texted what the f. About how this happened and everything. And then when she talked to him on the phone he said well I’m not sure I want to do this whole parenting thing again. And Lizzie, she wanted to laugh. He has never taken them to the doctor he has never taken them to sports he has never picked them up from daycare. She had the custody he saw them on the weekends. I mean he left Lizzie when Brady was three weeks old. Well they split up. He didn’t want the responsibility of those girls. He left her. I mean he’s a big partier. You know it is hereditary when people have alcohol problems, I mean Brady’s father drinks, her grandfather drinks, he just passed away, he died last year they had all, all the brothers, they all got it, her grandmother, Anthony’s mother is fine, she’s the nicest lady. And Brady looks just like Anthony you can see she takes more after Anthony then Lizzie. Of course no one knows this. I haven’t said a word to anyone. She doesn’t know why they let her go, with all those felonies and the drinking. But her car is impounded and Lizzie said I’m not gonna get her car out. It costs money if she wants to get her car out, she did get it out. She’s got a lot on her plate over there. Lizzie gets up early so she can beat some of that traffic and so she told Brady that you can’t not be here with that baby, I have to go to work, she’s staying out all night with these hook ups leaving the kid in the bed with Lizzie. I mean it’s just such a sad situation, I mean the girl does need help. She really needs help. You know she went through all this nastiness and that’s who she is and you know Lizzie says that’s just who she is and it’s a shame. Because I mean the little boy is sweet as pie, I mean I’ve seen him a couple times you know Lizzie facetimes with me, I’ve seen pictures but you know Lizzie doesn’t want him going into the foster system because you don’t know what kind of family is gonna get him.

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As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

It was a Friday and Jason got out of school at 3 and made small talk in the parking lot and reluctantly made his way to the gym, to the larger than usual Friday crowd, but a crowd, the Friday gym crowd, that’s the best day of the week for this crowd because you don’t want to be there but once you’re there, it’s all gravy, it’s all fucking cherry on top of the week, because you didn’t take the easy cheat day and now you feel better than those bastards that went straight to the bar and so maybe you even push a little harder since you’re here but if not no problem at least you’re here. Guys are a little easier with the nods to other guys and there’s in general less chest puffing peacock type behavior and more sweaty, if still testosterone-infused, bonhomie.

He’s inadvertently eavesdropping on two conversations simultaneously and somebody says I don’t mind if it’s just a little bit, just a little bit like on the upper lip, and he’s not sure whether it’s the conversation about lipstick or Botox or herpes or whether they’ve merged. The conversations. Whenever someone said to my father see you tomorrow or see you later he would always reply not if I see you first in what I recognized only years later to be, for him at least, not a standard issue Dad joke but rather a verbal tic he couldn’t let pass and had to do with the use of seeing as a verb being a unitary event. Something that happens at a fixed point in time. A directed action, an arrow connecting two nodes in a directed network. If someone sees you, you cannot, by this definition, see them. The seeing’s happened. It’s done and gone.

Jason is on the Hammer Strength lat pulldown and a Persian guy at the neighboring lat pulldown machine asks him to take a video of him doing lat pulldowns. Which he does. In the sauna there’s a discussion about a house in Canoga Park someone is flipping and then someone is going on about his divorce and how the lawyers are getting all the money he made for his kids and someone is going on about a cleanse of some kind and there’s a chemical smell in the sauna and someone says why does it smell like fish and someone says because someone has sprayed some shit on the heating coils hoping to get the room smelling like eucalyptus but instead just causing it to smell like a recently lacquered Adirondack chair. You have to do 18. Some guy is saying to 2-3 people that may or may not be listening. 16 is the minimum. I’ll tell you what I do. I eat my first meal all liquid at 2pm. I’ll tell you what’s in there. Fresh celery. Fresh carrots. Fresh spinach. Fresh ginger. Fresh cucumbers.

And a canned ham.

A canned ham?

Just fuckin’ with you.

Kiowa. Metamucil. No sugar. No fruit. You cannot eat the fruit.

Protein?

No protein. I want to see everything that goes in there where it came from. I don’t know where that protein came from. Why these other people…let me tell you, these crash diets, why these people, these crash diets they lose it and cannot keep it off. It is not sustainable man. I said if I’m going to do this, if I’m going to do this again I’m going to do it sustainable. If you want to eat the pizza and pasta, you have to eat the fiber first. You have to have a salad first. And I’m going to tell you why. It’s not because it fills your stomach my brother, and then you’re not hungry. No. That’s what everyone thinks. It coats your stomach and all the way through and so you cannot take it in. The pizza and the pasta and beer they just go right through. Coats. Like a lining. I’m telling you I’ve done this three times in my life. First time is during college I was backpacking around Europe and I wanted to look good. Second time is after law school. Third time is after the divorce because you know I want to get back out there. And now I have three kids, two that are 5 and a half and one is 4. And let me tell you I am in the best shape of my life. If I can do it, you can do it.

After a shower Jason is on the way out to his car when he receives a text.

<two more procedures, eat w/o me>

Each procedure ballparks at two hours and his phone tells him the message was sent at 6:23, so he heads home to fire up the grill for a steak and why not drop an edible to go with his scotch. He is halfway through the steak when it kicks in and another text comes through, this one from his neighbor.

<Hey Ed and Cindy lost their recycling bin, I recall you have extra. Can they use until replace>

He finishes the steak and pulls on a t-shirt and flip flops and walks the trash can over, they’ve got young kids, meet him at the door, sure thing no problem, yeah it took them only a few days to replace mine when it went out, well maybe yeah it must be I hit them right on the cycle.

Jason walks next door and finds Mark in his backyard. Mark’s wife is a structural engineer and she’s talking about how construction is like confection. Building buildings is like thinking about heating and cooking. Everyone coming to work at the same time is like simulating an earthquake. There’s only so many days a year you can do this. The buildings have ratings. Yeah I stole your, no I’m kidding. Yeah maybe one cold one if you’re going to twist my arm. No I didn’t see it. I understand. I’m listening. He’s saying, it’s just unfucking believable. What the Buddha said to the hot dog vendor. Make me one with everything. I mean the message is anyone who’s brown we don’t care about you. You don’t matter. You look at what Sessions has been doing and now this guy. Another white guy. This guy will basically fuck up the judicial system in this country for what, 25 more years? And undo everything that really matters, the judicial legislative achievement from a lifetime. It’s a colossal disaster. There can’t be any upside to this, I’m sorry, you’re not gonna convince me that we are not headed for the apocalypse. I’m sorry. Pretty much every day there’s a new insult to common decency and a new assault on the constitution. Excuse me ok. I may be a dark-skinned woman but let me tell you I am not looking for a handout. I came here I could barely speak any English and I worked for everything I have. But don’t tell me what he is doing is totally bad for this country. Many of these people coming here from countries in the Middle East, I don’t know that they are coming here because they want to work for something, I don’t think they are coming here because they want to live like we live. They are coming here because they know in this country people are not going to bother you, they are not going to tell you how to live, they are going to let you practice your religion to dress how you want to dress. And I am not saying there is no discrimination but it’s not like that ok. There are always stupid people. But you are not going to be put in prison for what you believe. And I don’t think that people are coming here to assimilate. I think that they are coming for a handout because they know they can take advantage of this country. I am going to be honest with you: I don’t want to see their women walking around dressed like that ok. I don’t want to see them, I don’t want my daughter growing up seeing these women covering their bodies and faces and walking their kids to school with my kids in the stroller. That is not right. I come from a culture where the man’s opinion is always right and the woman’s is not valued. I don’t want that in this country for my children. That is not why I came to this country, so I can tell you when I’m listening to the guy talk about affirmative action is racist and blacks have never had it better in any other country in the history of the world you know I can’t say I disagree with him.

Mark is saying that if you really pay attention, Jeff Daniels actually has most of the funniest scenes in Dumb and Dumber and that somehow this is very sad and makes him feel like the world is unfair.

<where are you>

He makes semi-deranged eye contact with his neighbor’s wife after this soliloquy, the alcohol and THC making her face suddenly disheveled, her eyes wild and liquid, her hair seeming to move on its own. How is it she treats me like such a prince and then turns around and treats him like a prince right in front of everyone when he is so obviously a colossal douche bag, Mark is saying. Jason is seriously lightheaded, he needs to go home. He texts her back:

<Marks>

Do you have to actually say hashtag me too era? Or it’s just me too. I mean come on. It’s not like they had any effect on Trump. I mean look at him, with the grabbing them by the, I mean come on.

He makes Slick Willy look like Fred Rogers. Double or nothing he’s reelected, who wants some action on these odds?

Hold on don’t, I’m trying to make a point, the guy’s not going to be reelected. There is, literally everything he’s done has been a complete disaster. What a nightmare.

The next day Jessica has a gathering for a colleague receiving some award or retiring or both and uncharacteristically, because he is not teaching that day perhaps, she has invited Jason to join her. Waking late morning with only a hazy recollection of the prior night’s visit to Mark’s, he decides to go to campus early and get some reading or writing done. He’s sitting in the university library and there’s sun coming in through the 25 foot east-facing windows that plays across the backs of the thatched chairs throwing shadows and light on periodicals. Sustainability, Enigma, SciFi Fantasy and Zine. There are cobwebs of Raiders proportion on the windows which have no screens and are open—unusual, and unwise, this strikes him, inviting a bird to become trapped in the room’s cathedral spaces. This will be the year he redoes all the lesson plans, says fuck it and throws out the lesson plans and just presents the books to the kids and they respond. They want it. They’ve been waiting for this, for him, for someone to push them, inspire them, o’captain my captain them. He will glide over all the grading, it will inspire him again and he walk around the room amongst them nudging encouraging challenging but mostly marveling at their hunger, their creativity, their blossoming passion, he will help them open up, he will help them develop, he will help them be tough on themselves and he will stand back and watch them advance boldly.

Ok maybe next year. What 10am sun on Tuesdays really does is bring on a flood of every vacuous statement you’ve ever made, not even in your whole life, just in the past week. All the times you’ve said boy it’s hot out here and the 405 was a nightmare or it’s good to see you or I love you. Try sitting in a room with expensive stereophonic headphones with only these statements playing again and again and it’s all your voice and it’s not the same recording every time but it’s the actual fucking times that you said these things, some asshole recorded every single time and made like some mix tape out of it, except there’s no fucking music, it’s just your voice. I can’t believe the summer went so fast and we should get together soon and how’s it going and living the dream over and over and over. Because it’s in the library with the 10am sun coming in from an expressionless white sky when you can really contemplate what a library is, all the ramblings of so many other people with things to say that really have not amounted to anything other than entertainment. Fleeting. That have not changed anyone’s behaviors or beliefs. Have not made anyone a better person. The totality of modern civilization, that is. All of science and medicine, literature and philosophy, politics and social science is just masked entertainment to distract us from the fact that like all other living things we seek principally to live and reproduce. If not the latter, why the former?

He went to meet her for the reception, which turned out to be for the graduating class of fellows later that evening. The entryway to the hospital led to an overlook to the lower level where the reception was taking place. Jessica walked through the crowd in her scrubs and white coat, looking down at her phone and the people parted as she passed through, not in courtesy but as though she were buffered by some not entirely benevolent envelope of energy. Kept away by something other. She came to rest on the outskirts of the crowd and around her this radial force field maintained like the black robed mage walking among the peasants. But when Jason approached her, the spell was broken, she smiled and they were talking and people bumped into her while they passed.

How John Billiard got to this point was: six and a half years of graduate school on top of four years of undergrad and living like a pauper for all this time in a studio apartment. Because it takes 18 months to generate each of the knockout alleles (this was in the days before CRISPR, so old school homologous recombination had to be employed), and to cross breed them once generated, and the protein he’s studying has 5 isoforms in the brain so that’s 10 alleles and his committee told him he needed a clean system, adenoviral knockdown was not going to get him into a top tier journal and if he wanted to go the academic route it needed to be a first author CNS1 paper, plus one other double digit impact factor paper. So it had to be the knockouts and the breeding, an hour sometimes two every single day in the mouse facility with hundreds of cages and thousands of mice and the genotyping because the undergrad volunteers invariably fucked it up or just stopped coming without notice and then he gets all 10 alleles, 2 for every gene so they’re all homozygous and all the mice are ready and he does all the phenotyping all the in vivo work behavioral tests, including zero maze (for anxiety), open field (motor impairment, skeletal muscle weakness, neophobia2), neurophysiological screening (tests vary between labs but most are based on the methods of Irwin3 and include but are not limited to body posture, piloerection, palperbral closing or exopthalamus [a.k.a bug eyes], grooming behavior, tail or pelvis elevation, whisker reflex, tremors/convulsions [can be scored digitally or with a 0-4 scale], grip strength, pole climbing, wire hang, and standard vitals like temperature, weight, heart rate, BP, skin tone [vascularity of footpads], respiratory rate and lacrimation), plus isolated cell patch clamping. And no phenotype. Nothing. Jack fucking shit. And he goes back to his committee and they’re all like yeah yeah it’s a lot of work and a powerful model that can be used by others but it’s going to be hard to break into a top tier journal with all negative results.

And so he goes back to the bench and does more histology and some injury models (stroke, barbiturates, blunt trauma) and then around this time a new post-doc joins the lab and has experience with transcriptomics and proteomics and his advisor says hey why don’t you give your mice to the new post-doc and let him have a go. And what choice does he have, he gives the guy the mice and this guy runs off and does 3 months of jack off work on the things and now they have a bunch of pretty heat maps of gene expression and hairball looking interaction graphs of the proteins and it’s time to write up the paper and his advisor says he has to share first authorship with the new post-doc who can’t fucking remember which pronoun to use when he addresses someone and who did 3 measly months of work and who sits smugly by himself and laughs too much when he doesn’t know what to say and is deferential to everyone.

He, John, presents this new data to his committee and they love it, they’re just lapping it up and they say it’s the best work he’s ever done and see what all this persistence has gotten you and it’s definitely CNS or at least maybe one of the sister journals, except he didn’t do the work they’re loving and his advisor is just sitting there all self-righteous and says that when this new post-doc came on board, the smug bastard who packs his last night’s leftovers for lunch and stinks up the break room when he microwaves them, really took things in a new direction and jump started the project, the fucker just can’t say enough wonderful things about this smug, stuttering, smiling, dickless cunt. So this is how we get to this point where he’s shown up to his final pre-defense committee meeting with a piece after staying away from the lab to write up his thesis as he was asked to by his craven advisor after having shouted down this smug interloping faggot of a post-doc, only to come back and find that the paper was written up and sent out with the bastard’s name first and his second.

As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

The thing about looking back at Clinton’s impeachment and all the sordid—he guesses they’re now still thought of commonly as sordid—scandals from the Clinton White House in the mid-‘90’s is Jason didn’t care then. He wasn’t dialed in. He had reflexively supported the Democrats in the few political arguments he had out loud with other human beings and in all the silent testimonials he produced for the psyche’s hard drive. But now Jason had strong opinions and go-to arguments he’d read online and deploy readily to argue whichever is the minority side in a given exchange which his friends who do the same—argue both sides of issues—tell him is a sign of intelligence. That’s not the only reason Jason does this, but it’s one reason. And something tells him that since he didn’t care enough to be informed then, that he cannot in good conscience now, no matter how well read and verbally and intellectually dexterous he may be, cannot now pass judgment on what happened in 1996.

That said, apparently the first months of their relationship—and it was a relationship, if not relations, whatever he asserted—were characterized by several instances of oral sex with the 42nd president on the receiving end and apparently he didn’t, she stopped before he could, as they used to say in Craigslist ads, go to completion. There was no finish. This is relevant because only after Ms. Lewinski started obtaining free shrink visits from Linda Tripp did their liaisons (Bill and Monica’s) go the full nine, as it were, when Monica was wearing the precious blue dress, raising the specter of entrapment and while certainly by no means exonerating the president of being a bad dude who was taking advantage of a star struck young girl and also a lying piece of shit, it certainly put what was a consensual relationship gone awry in a totally different and not totally less bad light, as far as Clinton was concerned1. But the thing that resonated with me about this fact was that Clinton wanted his presidential knob polished as a sort of security blanket, a childhood bed that he could curl up in (his mother was dying at the time) and draw his teddy bear close and just fucking be loved in some unconditional and non-transactional and physical way—the only truly honest way to give or receive love. Physical, that is. And the guy did it while talking on the phone, apparently multiple times. This was not some bastard womanizer, some horn dog lunatic chasing tail in a high school parking lot: he was in desperate, searing need of pure love and adoration.

Jason was invited to the party because he volunteered as a soccer coach that Fall and the father of one of the kids—his name was Ed—was throwing a giant end of the season bash. Their home’s off Burbank, one of the deep lots, about 8,000 square feet, with an eight-foot concrete wall out front and a metal sliding gate across the drive. He never does this, Ed’s telling him, this is his first and only residential installation. Those are my kids, Maverick and Ace, he painted on the wall. It’s not on the wall. We can remove the boards if I ever want to sell the place. It’s a false wall. But it’s a 30-year home. I treated the boards with a catalytic primer and he came here for three weeks to paint it. They’re adopted, different parents, my sons, but you know they say nature and nurture, the kids look like me. Picture of me when I was 8 next to Mav, you couldn’t tell.

Two gay dudes living together next to you in a suburban house in the Valley and you can’t even remark on it, someone is saying. Mowing their fucking lawn like nothing, sitting in the driveway drinking prosecco, offering you some. Like it’s nothing. Right out there. I’m just saying.

Ed’s wife walks through at this point and Jason is involuntarily re-evaluating her body—in light of this information about the origin of their children—as having not been subjected to childbirth. A J.A.P. (but just then Ed is mentioning his kids’ godparents?!) married a goy and adopted two white kids? Later on, she says to Jason, we’re still figuring this out, meaning getting their kids to school and to after school activities, in the year since they were adopted, related with some nonplussed wonder akin to getting used to the automated driver assist on her new Mercedes.

My parents started a commercial development, real estate development company in Manhattan, Ed is saying. When I was a kid I worked in the trash room, a courier in the mail room, road with some of the contractors. I did it. Went to school, started in architectural design, went to work for a small firm and my father says we got an opening but you’ve gotta earn it. That was 15 years ago. I worked there for a decade and we did some great builds and then I retired. Got married and figured I might as well move to LA. They walk to the backyard, he shows Jason his tortoise. My spirit animal, he’s saying. Rabbits run and hop and they live 5 years. Dogs bark and run and they live to be 10. Turtles move slow and they live to be 100. Good thing your spirit animal isn’t a great white shark, Jason say, inanely, for something to say. Ed smiles.

So, Marco, he like remembers you. Jason is stuck now peripheral to a circle with some women he doesn’t know. He like, he’s all like, where’s Julio and all like I remember Julio picking me up. No not like literally, but to pick him up. He’s in like Montessori. No Montessori, it’s like this, it’s this special kind of preschool you know where they like teach you all these things, you know? He’s doing like math, I mean not math math but like numbers, he’s working with and like reading, he’s not reading but he can recognize words and he’ll be like that’s that.

My son was running around with a light saber and my husband was chasing him and then later he jumped on me.

Your husband?

God no. I wish. No, my son.

Ed materializes back from the ether, in Jason’s ear as though picking up mid-sentence. This one over here it’s called Robot Village. This one hung in the United terminal at LAX. My mother and father were out here to visit and she’s good friends with, one of her really good friends is in the business you know and his wife is an attorney, corporate litigation and my parents are at his, they’re at his house and then they go out for dinner in Brentwood. They’re just in for the weekend. And come to find out, the wife, the Hollywood guys and his wife, they know the artist. So my mom calls me up, puts us in touch and we go over to his studio and this is just in there in amongst a bunch of pieces in his storage area. We got it for, it wasn’t some Basquiat, I’m not going to put up a 2-million-dollar painting with kids running around, we got it for 15 grand. What a great find. And these other ones were like smaller sketches of other robots that he just did and never used and so he decided to screen them onto the painting. See, there’s a hooker robot. Don’t tell the kids. And a car wash robot. A robot librarian.

I put in all the greenscaping. I put in the chain link fence too. So that neighbor over there he’s got like 6 or 8 RVs parked out back, so that’s blocked out. This neighbor over here, we call that side the dump, the Walmart, and—leaning conspiratorially toward Jason—I want to buy that and put in a dirt bike track for the boys.

One of the other kids’ fathers walks up then. He has perfect hair and tanned feet and tattoos on his feet and ankles and is smiling like Wonka is showing him around the factory and he says just then you know what, I think I will take you up on one of those beers.

That table, I had it custom welded, it’s a custom piece. I like to have this whole area open for the kids to explore and create. And did you see that artwork, that’s Ace’s, on the wall there. He points to some type of anthropomorphic blob that looks exactly like something drawn by a 6-year-old. He brought that home from school the other day and I was just blown away. And you know I think it’s from being exposed in the home to the artwork and the colors and the space. His wife is staying busy all this time putting out juice boxes and rearranging plates for pizza and running in and out of the kitchen to fiddle with things on the counter and her dress is tight and things are moving.

As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

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On her shirt was written ENERGY LOVE LIGHT and Jessica is trying to read it as a sentence and searching for some missed alliteration. She has Uggs and yellow, pink and red yoga pants and smirks at Jessica picking up her drink. He sends a gif of a girl humping a balance ball and she sends a meme of Tom Hanks in Castaway that looks like a dude whacking off and some other guy sends a meme of a robot with huge breasts that says ‘big tiddies’ and he sends a meme of a girl doing a hula hoop and the other guy sends a meme of the guy with the girl looking over his shoulder at the other girl that’s just walked by only with text over their heads talking something about fast food and she sends a gif of a chihuahua humping a Trump doll and he sends a meme of Hillary wiping a server like you mean with a cloth? The barista walks up to the counter and says, you can’t make this up, I have a mobile order of cake pops for Chad.

It was the year that the wide-eyed stares turned from envy and admiration and deference to suspicion and annoyance and just plain contempt. It turns out that the longing to be accepted and viewed as equal, once these things are nearly achieved, turns overnight not into self-satisfied air of accomplishment and a plateau of sanguine ease but instead to an immediate sense of entitlement and superiority. The Chinese word for ‘tea’ sounds like cha as in I’m dancing the cha-cha, but if you pronounce it like that you aren’t saying it exactly right. The conference was in a five-star tourist hotel in the Shatin region of Hong Kong that is connected to the mainland and Jessica’s first unpleasant surprise upon landing was that the shopping and people watching were on the other side of town in the Kowloon or Tsim Sha Tsui where one would catch a ferry to the island. For six days it rained and the temperature never dipped below 90, even at midnight. Nearby the hotel were several grade schools, Hong Kong University and several dozen churches of various Christian denominations. Crew teams plowed the river shortly after dawn as she looked down from her 25th floor window, unable to sleep past two in the morning and thus already being awake for four hours when the sun rose. The overcast week gave the city a washed-out monotony—gone was any mystery of ancient culture or untouched civilization. This was Western culture, decoded, reverse engineered and thoroughly exhausted. Karaoke to Taylor Swift and Outkast. Everyone speaking English, even the cab drivers. Ferraris and Teslas double parked next to a hipster bar serving cold pig ear, four different seasonal ciders, air conditioned and clean, with the Germans reading and the Americans writing in journals and some local college aged kids drinking and arm wrestling while the girls scroll WeChat. The Chinese word for beer sounds like pee jew, but if you pronounce it like that. you’re not saying it exactly right.

The strength of this organization is the strict reliance on scientific objectivity, democratic governance, tolerance of debate and a willingness to share unpublished results, with the understanding that this is a closed, safe environment where the ideas you present will be respected and you will be given credit. There are no pictures allowed during the conference. We have a zero-tolerance policy on harassment. Those violating the policy may be subject to dismissal from the meeting, a bar from future meetings, requirement for public and/or private apologies, or referral to local law enforcement. Or some combination of the above. The voting on future meeting locations will commence shortly, in the meantime let’s check the real time online voting and message board which is now projected and which you can access via this safe url. We have here in Hong Kong again, we have Tuscany, we have outside of Barcelona by the coast, of course that’s in Spain, we have Banff, which is Canada. And now let me just say this should be a democratic vote and you should vote how you want but let me just, how do I say, the local Hong Kong government gave a lot of money to support this and there’s a lot of fundraising that goes into these meetings and these decisions have to be democratic but they really want an increased foothold in Asia, the organizers do, and Hong Kong is an easy or easier one for a lot of people and I’m just saying on behalf of the next chairs who have to raise money, what’s the name for the thing that has to grow exponentially to survive?

Jessica is talking with one of the attendees at the hotel bar after the sessions. When my parents immigrated from China to Hong Kong in 1985, I followed them a year later and tried to enroll in university. They said your scores are too low, you don’t have the right coursework and so have to repeat 10th grade. Then they said you do not have the right middle school classes and so you would have to repeat middle school and then you don’t have the right elementary school classes and so I would have had to repeat everything and so I worked for a year in a biotech company and studied for the GRE and TOEFL to enroll at the University of Pittsburgh and finished my bachelors in America. I came to USA with ten dollars in my pocket. They wouldn’t let me into Hong Kong, but I came to America and here I am 20 years later and now I’m back here giving a lecture. You visit here ten years ago, Hong Kong University doing much better training best people in Asia, in the world, now today it’s the other way around, they’re just trying to survive, it’s PKU, Zhejiang, Fudan, USTC, the best students want to stay on the mainland. Doe sow che means how much is it and it’s pronounced like you read those words in your head. So, it turns out that it takes almost no time at all to change the default psychological proclivities of an entire nation of 1.5 billion people when you have perfect control of information.

Gone are the deferential nods, the baseline subservient smiles, the accommodating shows of admiration and—albeit always somewhat quite vacuous—goodwill, replaced in a few months, Fall 2018 until Spring 2019, by distrust, disdain, grimace and undisguised condescension. You could blame him, but there must have been movement before Xi and he just accelerated it. All signs indicate things are going to get much more painful before they improve. Several people intimate this to Jessica because the Party assumes 5 more years of Trump after which a new more capable (read: pliable) diplomat leads the USA, but this is only half of the Party’s bet on the current strategy of confrontation. Do you realize that where the West is with China right now is already decades longer into the confrontation than we ever got with Nazi Germany? Which really was only in power for a decade? The confrontation, even more ideologically cataclysmic, with China, is already much longer in duration. Basically, we have been fighting a cold war with China since 1946. Or at least since they got the bomb.

Collaborating with the Chinese was a protracted episode of blue balls, her advisor told Jessica before their first trip years earlier. As example, imagine you are an electrician and you happen to make a new acquaintance on this basis of this fact who, after getting to know you and your area of expertise, invites you over to dinner. You arrive and are greeted by his lovely, demure wife and introduced to his precocious, nubile daughter and given a tour of his lavish new home, during which he makes a point in each room to intercourse on some exotic aspect of bespoke electrical design with you, soliciting your opinion and praising your judgment and acknowledging your credentials, track LEDs in the game room say, reworking the laundry area to accommodate another stacked washer/dryer, a total redo of the kitchen, some tasteful and low profile and durable lighting throughout the backyard and around the pool. You then eat a multi-course truly magnificent dinner of strange species of flora and fauna, some identifiable and some not, with him and his wife and his daughter and your wife and have an after dinner nightcap and another relaxing stroll around the garden, all the while him yammering on like a madman about the total redo he wants to do on the electrical in his house and then suddenly you are departing and he sends you off with a handshake and a bow and a small gift, some tea and biscuits and maybe a scarf for your wife and you and your wife are driving home on some type of majorly pleasing saccharine buzz off the night and the implicit and explicit acknowledgement of your skills and their desirability. And then you never hear from him. Until about a year later, when he’s in a new house and the process repeats itself.

People seemed to intuitively recognize she could take the emotional neglect and so they emotionally neglected her, because there is an intoxication to be had from neglecting someone, denying them, especially someone you are ostensibly supposed to care for. And the high to be had from this is never greater than in the dispensation of scorn for those closest to you—her mother taught her this by example, though Jessica could never bring herself to feel scorn for anyone, family or otherwise. Neglect was not scorn—she was just not tuned into the frequency where anyone broadcast their emotions. This was not the reason why she always traveled alone, never took Jason to meetings, but it was not unrelated.

The other hope, the more substantive and opportunistic hope is that any subsequent American president, because of the West’s self-righteous indignation and obsessive image consciousness, would be required to attempt détente from a position of weakness, in clear acquiescence to a new global norm and indeed a new global leader. In the afternoon on June 4, 2019, the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre—which has been completely expunged from the official history in China and referred to even within the Politburo as a minor put down of a minor uprising by counterrevolutionary traitors inspired by a meddling West—CNN stopped loading over on her phone. All morning they had been running stories about the massacre, vigils worldwide, highlighting the Party’s incomplete erasure of this event from the internet. Amazing it took them until noon to give CNN the hatchet. Meanwhile when the page was loading earlier in the day, as one scrolled down, there were headlines from America about Menstrual cycle tracking added to iWatch and meet the drag queens and kings with Down syndrome. Regime change in China will not look anything like the USSR, Iraq or anything else in recorded history, no matter what factors precipitate it, she’s telling Jessica. It will be nothing short of a complete reset of the rules governing the modern world. Ee sure are nyow means kill two birds with one stone and I can fucking promise you are not pronouncing it right.

On the way home, the woman across the aisle from Jessica wore a black dress, knee length, with white cartoon spray painted looking smiling human skulls, interspersed with what were either roses or raspberries, she can’t be sure, and hoop earrings and sandals with 4 inches of black foam and large faux crystals encrusted on the straps (the sandals’ straps), a monstrous—for all accounts real—diamond on her finger and burgundy nails (fingers and toes) and her hair is held in a low bleached blond bun by one of those scrunchies that were ubiquitous in the 1990’s and are recently making a comeback and large white noise cancelling Bose headphones plugged in, through adaptor, to an enormous iPhone where she was watching The Sound of Music. Someone taps her shoulder and it’s a short bald man of either Latin American or Subcontinental origin and points to the middle seat and then seems intent to dive across her legs before she begs him off and stands up. It’s the scene where the Von Trap children are making a puppet show for the tough, patriotic, brooding, taciturn widower father with perfect hair and impossible cheekbones and chin and his tough, ribald, buxom slightly scheming would-be second old lady and virginal, doe-eyed, rosy-cheeked sister Maria, and she (the lady across the aisle) is bouncing, literally side to side bouncing in the seat and the passengers continue to board, singing along (blessedly, silently…or maybe not, she may have a voice like Callas).

Jessica’s grandfather had moved her father, uncle and grandmother to California in 1957. Just up and packed the car and drove out. There may have been a dog as well, her father was five at the time and it is always sketchy about whether they had the dog beforehand, picked him up somewhere in the middle of the country or whether her grandfather just brought him home one day after work. He was working, her father’s father, in welding at the time and got a job in Long Beach repairing container ships in the port. They bought in Playa del Rey in 1958 for $63,500 (with just a grand put down), a three story home with detached garage a block from the beach, with a view of the ocean over the neighbors’ roofs. When Jessica started medical school in 2005, the house was worth $2.8 million.

She’s shaking her head slowly now, with great apparent consternation and disapproval as the scene plays out where the elder Von Trap girl’s teenage love interest, who we met and came to find quite charming in an early duet number in some ridiculously ornate Viennese garden in the first act, is revealed to be closeted member of the Hitler Youth. The scene when this young private, disarmed literally by the father with the great cheek bones played by a much younger but still somehow wise looking and angular Christopher Plummer, is disarmed also figuratively, the audience and the woman across from Jessica surmises, and in his shame alerts the more senior members of his party, the music hating Austrian Nazi collaborator does, to their, the Von Trap family’s, presence there in the dimly lit convent courtyard, blowing his literal and figurative whistle as they run away and she, the woman with the headphones and foam elevator shoes, shakes her head in knowing dismay and brings a slow pensive fist to rest on her chin. The Viennese garden scene Jessica remembers from her childhood as a first example to young women about the dangers of falling in love with a man just based on his olive oil voice and terrific dancing abilities. He might be a confused closeted member of the Hitler Youth that will try to kill your whole family. These are the sorts of things men do.

This was possible 50 years ago: uprooting your family to leave a stable blue-collar job, relocated across the country to a city where no one knew you, only to find a stable, blue-collar job waiting for you.

Jessica falls asleep for a few minutes during takeoff and when she wakes up, the woman across from her is now watching some sort of superhero movie of the kind that is released almost monthly, Jessica feels, with scenes of A-list actor dialogue and intense facial close ups, plus an endless stream of CGI shots of battle prep, battle, superpower brandishing, saving of normal non-super people, building and automobile destruction. She looks over her shoulder with the clairvoyance of the watched and Jessica narrowly avoids the faux pas watching someone else’s personal entertainment device. The inflight magazine promises UK Estates, Renee Zellweger, Shark Diving and 7 Perfect Days in Los Angeles. Jessica closes the magazine: the things they want you to do in LA would take 4 hours a day in traffic, hundreds of dollars in parking and offer a tour of the newest and most substantial urban homeless encampments that have in the past couple years moved out of Skid Row and the freeway on-ramps and closer to the firmament, physical and spiritual, of the city.

As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

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What I’m saying, Mark is saying, is that your good deeds can never absolve your bad. I’m sure I saw it different at that age, but not like this. You have to take a basic responsibility for yourself.

I see it, Jason says. They are sitting in Mark’s backyard. It’s just the four of them. But it might just be back in my dayism.

No. This is different. There are expectations, spoken and unspoken, of parents and children surrounding us throughout our lives. Where does motivation come from if not laid out from your parents?

Are you the owner of your life?

Yes! Are you living for you or for someone else, are you living for now or for the future? There’s a profound isolation, I get it, in realizing that there is no reason for any of this to go on, that most things have already been done and said and found out. That everything is made up.

If you don’t reproduce yourself, you have nothing to pass on.

As someone with one already out in the wild, I have to agree with you. Harder to take a flying leap when there’s college tuition.

But you have to think about it from their point of view, Mark, Jason is saying, topping off Mark’s drink and raising a quick eyebrow to Jessica who is in the kitchen window just then. What is all the effort for if not to please parents or feed children?

I’ll tell you. The answer is vanity.

You see yourself as vain? Your son as vain.

I’m a realist man, Mark says and they drink their drinks for a minute in silence. But let me tell you this: I noticed something significant a while back that I hadn’t realized most of my entire life, not sure if I already mentioned this to you. In Empire, after they have escaped Cloud City with Luke, the Star Destroyer with Vader aboard is approaching the Falcon. Vader asks did your men deactivate the hyperdrive on the Millennium Falcon? The response is affirmative. Vader instructs them to set weapons for stun, so he seems at that moment still intent on boarding the ship. Vader speaks to Luke, and Luke hears him, acknowledging that Vader is his father. Luke is clearly conflicted and doesn’t refute Vader’s pleas, even calling him father. Instead, Luke asks Ben why didn’t you tell me.

Go on.

Moments later, R2 stops working on 3PO and zips over and within seconds fixes the hyperdrive and the Falcon escapes. Vader watches all of this from the bridge of the destroyer and after the Falcon jumps to light speed, turns around and leaves without any larynx compressing. The question is, what happened? I can think of two scenarios: Scenario 1: R2 got the information from the central computer in Cloud City or just took the initiative, the latter being strange for a droid and therefore some kismet, and went to fix the hyperdrive, allowing them to escape. The dramatic moment was heightened by the anticipation of Vader killing the bridge commander on Star Destroyer …so that when he doesn’t, it’s somehow more poignant. This is the scenario that I believed most of my life.

Likewise. What’s the alternative?

Scenario 2: R2 knows nothing about the functionality of the Falcon, as 3PO points out. So, what happens is, at the last possible second, R2 is thought-controlled by Vader, who we later find out once owned him as a child, who tells R2 how to fix the hyperdrive, thereby facilitating Luke and Leia’s escape. This is the interpretation I now subscribe to, which leads to a much more interesting question: why did Vader do it?

Go on.

To this, I can think of several interpretations, but two main ones stick out: First, Vader still wants to convert Luke and wants him, Luke, to find his way to Vader on his own. He, Vader, wants Luke to come to him freely, as he ultimately does in Jedi, rather than to basically abduct him.

Or Vader subscribes to the Emperor’s mumbo jumbo…

Repeats it, yes, but doesn’t really subscribe to all the mumbo jumbo about ruling the galaxy and yada yada. His, Vader’s, antidisestablishmentarianism vis-à-vis the Force as religion is in part reaction to the Emperor’s bastardization of the religion to which he, Vader, truly believes. Subscribes. He wants his son to be free and independent, but sees it as his duty to challenge him to reach his, Luke’s, potential. The last thing he wants is for Luke not to wield the Force. Vader just wants to make sure it’s just not in service of Palpatine’s ersatz protestant sect.

Makes sense.

Or, Vader actually doesn’t want Luke to join him and the Emperor on the Dark Side but does relish the potential of Luke as an adversary. At the end of the day, in this telling, Vader is drinking the Emperor’s Kool-Aid, but likes the idea of someone, Luke, to counterbalance him, Vader, so that life doesn’t get totally boring for him. Vader.

To me it seems equally plausible that Vader sees Luke can turn him and sees it as potential redemption. Like, turn Vader back to the good side.

Very possible. But why let them escape? Another explanation for letting him go is Vader realizes that Luke is stronger than him and is afraid that if he converts Luke, the Emperor will see this too, or already has, and Vader will be killed. In this telling, Vader is just really impressed with Luke’s having only trained for basically a couple days or weeks with Yoda and already being able to go toe to toe with Vader, and is surprised and momentarily discombobulated by this, and thus decides to facilitate the Falcon’s escape. For this interpretation to be valid, it really matters not whether Vader likes Luke and wants him to succeed in a paternal sort of mentorship sort of manner or not. Either way the driving force—Luke’s precocity—and the goal—staying on as the Emperor’s heavy—are the same. For Vader.

This is not incompatible with a spur of the moment decision. What if Luke actually does succeed in converting Vader through this initial interaction, but we just don’t know it? And neither does he. Vader. Or Luke.

There’s also something to be said here for the nature of the first light saber battle. We know that Vader has incredible skill, only a fraction of which he was using with Luke. Force throwing and mind control and whatnot. Aside from Kershner and Brackett1 needing to heighten the drama of the first encounter, consider for a moment what is going on in Vader’s mind: this is the first time he gets to roughhouse with his son, the first time he gets a real chance to see what the kid is made of. He’s going to let him make a few layups and keep the game close. He wants to encourage him.

Coaching. As an aside, if you google the empire s-t-r-i, stop at the i, you get a burlesque show. Just so you know.

Vader even lets Luke knock him off the platform at one point, histrionically moaning as he falls. Think of the old man groaning when you land a harmless upper cut or hit him with a pillow? Only in the very next scene to show his son that in fact he’s been playing with him the whole time and starts Force throwing shit at him.

Toying with him. All completely unnecessary if his only goal is to kidnap or kill the kid.

And then when they’re out on the gang plank Luke actually scores a hit and Vader gets pissed.

Was the chopping of the hand intentional? Capricious? Impulsive? Was it a premeditated rite of passage Vader is putting him through?

Let’s do a sidebar here and talk about the cutting off of the hand, which I submit is interesting for other reasons, Mark is saying.

The Bulleit is now finished and he shoots a furtive glance towards the kitchen and then his watch.

Luke has some minor bleeding from an abrasion around his left eye but there’s no blood that comes from the amputated right hand. This suggests that the light sabers, as more civilized weapons, have ostensibly been designed to instantaneously cauterize wounds. This would also gel with why on the Falcon they had the special sheath for Luke’s severed hand.

His exposed radial and ulnar stumps.

Those. A sheath for those. That Luke wears while they wait to make the jump to light speed and why the droid on the rebel ship has the kit and knowhow to fashion Luke a fully functioning new hand. In like an hour. Because for thousands of years Jedis had been chopping off limbs, this would have spurred biotech innovation for the development of artificial hands and feet and most medical droids would know how to attach them and even a smuggler’s ship has an old emergency hand replacement kit lying around.

Yes. Valid. I’m starving.

She hasn’t taken it out of the oven yet. I don’t want to go in until it’s out.

I’m fine. You need an outdoor fridge for such emergencies.

Let’s linger for a moment here on the set your weapons for stun. This was a major point of contention between Star Trek and Star Wars fans, the point being that pussies in Star Trek were always stunning people but in Star Wars you didn’t stun people you just blasted them. This is one of two times in the Star Wars universe, the original Star Wars universe of the first three movies, that we encounter the notion that weapons can operate in stun mode, of course in this case not actually utilized and the only case in which we do actually see them utilized, it’s the first time that Leia is abducted by the Empire in the first movie. It’s very clear that Vader has no intention of killing his kids.

There’s some latent affection there.

For the first time in his life, Luke has crystalline clarity with respect to his father. He has had father figures in Owen and Ben, but every fatherless son longs for the connection with the man. He wants to know the story, and this is the only guy who knows it. Luke’s angst at learning Vader is his father is initially so overwhelming because of the enormity of who Vader is but also because it confirms what fatherless sons believe at some cellular level: that they are being lied to. That the truth these stand-in fathers try to get them to believe is not the real one and so the agony we see in Luke is at this betrayal and further alienation from his tribe. And so, then, his next reaction, even though the man is the literal antithesis of his life goals, the man is the embodiment of what he has sworn to destroy, his next, Luke’s second reaction after trying to kill him is to reach out.

He’s nuzzling up.

He basically wants to hug the bastard. He’s a starving man seeking food, the chance to speak to his father, to call him father, and to lament that old Ben lied to him.

I think you are missing a much simpler interpretation here, Jason said, swallowing the last of his bourbon, which is just that the whole thing is a MacGuffin to get the writers out of the ridiculous plot hole in which Vader didn’t tell the commander to deactivate the hyperdrive, in which case the Falcon would have been immediately tractor beamed in. Also, this scenario gets them out of having to write another scene where, what do you know, the lackeys have again screwed up and Vader must again put his foot in people’s asses. I guess I’m saying I’m not totally sold on the Vader making the impulsive decision to deploy R2 to fix the hyperdrive.

I can refute this. It is essential to recapitulate the order of events here to make plain my line of reasoning: R2 says to 3PO that he knows the hyper drive has been deactivated but yet still continues to work on reassembling 3PO‘s leg. i.e R2 does not act on this information. During this time, we cut to Vader beseeching Luke and making what both parties and us as the audience must appreciate is a genuine father and son connection. At that moment, Luke wants more than anything to be with his father. Only after this does R2 then stop working on 3PO‘s leg and go over to nearly instantaneously repair the hyper drive. Had R2 known how to do this before, why didn’t he stop working on 3PO? The answer is he didn’t know how to fix it and he doesn’t have volition. He’s a droid. He was fixing 3PO‘s leg because that’s what 3PO or maybe Chewie told him to do. Only after Vader made the meaningful connection with Luke did he then decide that it’s better for Luke to get away this time, stew in his juices a little bit and ergo he instructed, Vader did, R2 to go fix the hyper drive.

I think I am digesting my own innards right now.

I understand and appreciate your point of view. Of course we can’t see any facial expressions but the movement of Vader‘s head, his posture and the body language when he turns and walks from the bridge are pensive, you might even say introspective, but certainly not angry or disappointed or threatened or worried. I’ll tell you what he is: he’s flummoxed. He’s been flummoxed by his son, by the turn of events. He’s deep in his own head. He’s thinking of rebirth. And he’s scared.

As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

On Monday the president sent an email canceling all classes for the rest of the quarter, moving instruction online and banning in person gatherings of 100 people or more. His last committee meeting before proposing a defense date was scheduled for Tuesday and no one bothered to check whether it was still scheduled.

John Billiard grew up on a corn and bean farm in Iowa, which miraculously his father had the foresight to sell most of, maintaining 100 acres for his parents’ retirement and for his brother to bring his growing family, having pursued corporate Ag and then moved to finance. An oops baby, there were 10 years between him and the oldest Mark. John’s high school was unremarkable despite, or perhaps because, him being highly intelligent but somehow shiftless. He had an autodidactic ability to work on anything with a motor, mostly cars and less frequently these days the farm equipment. There were fights in bars during his late teens and 20’s when he worked as a foreman at a grain distributor in town. His father would pick him up at the station, never one to lecture and pathologically taciturn, John would broil again in the passenger seat in his father’s ancient Dodge pickup on the way back to the farm, which had now been converted, the part his parents still owned, into an apple orchard and a bike track for the grandkids and a tiny vegetable garden for his mom’s tomatoes and peppers and a new, smaller cottage of sorts that his folks lived in, the old house basically repurposed for guests, who were varied and frequent, both his parents coming from large families and his mother being quite gregarious. But they still called it the farm. A new driveway had been poured a few years back. John found that unspoken expectations were far more painful, more invasive, than anything ever said and indeed it was some kind of catharsis when his father asked him simply, during what turned out to be the last of these rides home from city hall: are you finding yourself? His undergraduate degree was in biology—the puzzles of this field called to him, like a motor built by the most sophisticated engineer, waiting to be disassembled and put back together—there was the thought at the time of following his brother Mark into business but John’s mind could not focus on spreadsheets and his stomach couldn’t handle the dismal science. There was always the possibility of joining a drug or biotech company, but this required a PhD and he wasn’t wired for more school at 22. At 28, however, John decided maybe it was time to give it another go, and that finding himself—as his father finally admonished him to do—might happen in graduate school. The first year of classes was a revelation, he soaked up the material, read 10-15 original research articles a week in addition to his coursework, which was unexpectedly undemanding and which, to his amazement, he excelled at with relative ease, his 21–22-year-old classmates distracted by their phones and residual post-pubescent hormonal imbalances. For a year he advanced confidently. He chose an advisor, a surgeon in his mid-40’s (young by academic professor standards) studying the gut microbiome and its effects on cognition. There was this idea that the trauma of surgery, especially abdominal, liberated intestinal flora into the blood stream, which then took up residence elsewhere in the body and produced toxic metabolites that crossed the blood brain barrier and interfered with calcium homeostasis in specialized glial cells called astrocytes and maybe this was an unrecognized contributor to age related dementia. The decision to do something different everyday rather than the same thing. Well. He decided our modern society had decided, contravening 100,000 years of human evolution, to prize independence over community, creativity over competence, novelty over certainty, that this was the path to self-worth, that this is what his father, who did the same thing every day for 40 years of work and then retired to read in his wife’s vegetable garden, must have meant, although he didn’t say as much, of course, when he told his son to find himself. This was not how our lizard brains were wired. The campus was deserted except for a few scattered students and, oddly, what looked like a tour group of high schoolers. A Zamboni-like thing drove around cleaning up the muddy sidewalks from the previous day’s rain.

But then a year at the bench turned into five and no paper was imminent, his advisor, who himself had never worked in a research lab and spent all his time in the OR and who pursued research as some kind of show-offy perfunctory distraction necessary to one day be Chair, his mentor said to him that maybe John ought to wrap things up. And move on. This after 5 years in grad school and no publications and living in the megalopolis wasteland that was Los Angeles and basically having formed no meaningful relationships since relocating to the west coast and having no real job prospects, because of no publications and no patents, even if he did defend his thesis and get his degree, and none of these things alone were unbearable or really that bad. But together, along with not being able to form a long term relationship with a woman, and watching countless graduate students from other countries spend 14 hours a day 7 days a week in the lab and remain sanguine about the whole thing, and this making him reevaluate everything he was sure he knew about hard work and self-determination and self-reliance including his view of himself as someone uniquely able to work very hard without encouragement for long periods of time. And maybe this also needed reappraisal, and how his high school girlfriend would admonish him to grow up and accept that he was privileged because he was born in the empire and his parents were together and he was fed and not abused and to just get on with it and make use of it, this admonishment coming when he said he wanted to go out into the world with nothing and show that he could survive and claw it all back on his own and she kept saying it would never work, you would always know you had a net under you, and so you had to accept it and although she didn’t say it then, when he looked back he thought for sure she meant he had to accept a responsibility to deliver something. And so now he was having to reevaluate everything he knew about his own agency and frankly whether he had ever been in control of his life.

Not to mention that astrocytes, the cells he studied, are stunningly complex, anatomically speaking, and impossible to immortalize and grow in culture, the very act of isolating them already Heisenbergenly deranging their morphology and probably function before he could even get the bastards under the microscope, which necessitated killing hundreds of mice over the course of his project. Moreover the endogenous anatomy, with labyrinthine projections and highly compartmentalized internal organization, was lost soon after isolation, meaning that the experiments were affairs involving treating the mouse, euthanatizing it, dissecting the brain, digesting the cerebellum with collagenase to break down the extracellular matrix, fractionation and sorting by FACS based on a GFP tag transgenically encoded by an astrocyte specific promoter (which someone in another lab at a different university demonstrated, during the third year of his project, was also expressed in subpopulations of non-astrocyte glia, partially confounding the interpretation of John’s work) and then isolating and patch clamping individual cells, a technically demanding process that often failed to produce a valid patch, which thus required dozens of cells before a cell was suitably patched1, after which point the experiment could begin. So, he arrived at the small conference room for his committee meeting 20 minutes early and set up his laptop with his PowerPoint presentation queued and set his backpack on a chair in the corner of the room. Then he waited for his advisor and the other three committee members to arrive.

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⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

The idea that every fully formed person needs to have a role to play in society. They don’t. Some people are just here and working through it and will leave nothing substantial and there’s nothing you can do to change it.

When his mother wandered first to the library, where she alarmed the employees and patrons by saying she was looking for her sister and then proceeding to disrobe in the DVD rental section and then second to the supermarket a mile from her house, where she was found eating donuts sitting in the produce section, both times necessitating involvement of local law enforcement who had grown up with her son and daughter and knew her from when she worked at the local insurance office, in the same week, his sister told him, through a Pinot Grigio fog one afternoon that spring that it was time for him to come home so they could have a serious discussion with their mother about new living arrangements.

You don’t understand Jay, I can’t be here all day every day. And she doesn’t want to…she won’t listen to me. Like yesterday I told her Mom listen we are going to pick up around here and then I will take you to the store for grocery shopping and then I’m going to the gym. That’s when she wandered off the second time. I was at the gym, and she, I told her, I’ll take care of your laundry and then while it’s in the dryer I‘ll go to the gym and when I get back we’ll go to Finast. She kept coming into the kitchen while I was doing the dishes and she would stand there and look at me and I would say Mom go watch Wheel and walk her back in there and then I’m in the front room trying to get caught up on emails and I hear the toilet flushing and she’s in there again flushing her socks down the toilet. Don’t fucking laugh. It’s not fucking funny, you fucking try and…and they went down just fine, her socks did, but then she’s with the nightgown trying to flush it down the toilet so by the time I get back there the thing is overflowing all over the floor and so I yelled at her Mom go back and put another dress on and go finish Wheel while I clean this up and she did and so I cleaned it all up and threw a load of laundry in and went back in there and she had dozed off. And so I figured fine, I can sneak out now so I locked all the doors from the outside too, but don’t ask me how she found a way to take the window screen off and climbed out the front window and went down to the library on her own. I was just getting onto the bike, Jay, when they called me. That’s how fast she Houdinied out and beat feet across town to the library. That’s like a mile or half mile at least. You remember Tony Aguilera, used to live next to the high school, a year behind you I think? He called me and said my mother was running stark naked through the library and maybe I better come pick her up. That was my Tuesday, Jason.

They had progressed to this point through a non-linear trajectory—things would plateau for a while before veering inevitably downward again—over a time frame that tended to be accelerated, the physicians told them, with cases of early onset. It progressed faster and he, Jason, needed to keep an eye on his sister for burnout, the doctor admonished. Not picking up the mail for two days. Calling twice in as many days to report that the tree in the backyard needed trimming and that she wanted to have the oil changed in her car before the snow arrived. Finding the shampoo in the fridge and the television remote, after a two-hour search, in the dogfood container (their dog had died years ago) in the garage. Hearing the same story three times over dinner, coffee. Having a dessert of vanilla ice cream served with unused coffee grounds in it. When she took her uniform out of storage and showed up at work two years after she had retired. Explaining how to log into email one thousand times before buying her an iPad and disabling all login requirements and security and printing out large font instructions about how to open the app and how to charge the device. Having the conversation about taking over paying her bills and managing her personal finances. Cleaning out the garage to install parking aids. Convincing her to just park in the driveway after she tore off the side mirror pulling in, twice. Hearing again about how much she loved the Cosmos series on Nat Geo and how it reminded her of their father and his love of the unknown. Hearing again about Wheel and how happy she was that Drew Carey, a local boy from Cleveland, took over for Bob Barker on The Price is Right, lost all that weight and kept it off, a former Marine, Jason’s sister used to serve him four eggs over easy, dry white toast, bacon and black coffee at Bob Evans in Seven Hills. Cancelling the newspaper subscription. Running into a high school acquaintance who said she just ran into your Mom at the store the other day and who starts the conversation with a pregnant Hey how’s your Mom doing? Finding spoiled milk under the bathroom sink. The first time she slipped and sprained her wrist going out to get the mail. And then the second, a week later, at the grocery store, slicing open her knee in the process on the shopping cart. Arguing with the clerk at the grocery store when he won’t accept overripe peaches on return two weeks after she purchased them. Getting a call from the Finast store manager expressing Concern About Your Mother. Catching her spooning baking soda into her coffee after dinner. Jason relocating to the garage the DVD player, CD player, desktop PC, food processor and treadmill (they argued about the microwave but it stayed for the time being—their mother being a stickler for finishing up leftovers) one afternoon while her sister took their Mom shopping. Her not noticing their absence but accusing them of stealing her hair dryer, which was found hidden under the bed. Convincing her to let them relocate the washer and dryer to the first floor and padlocking the basement door to keep her from monkeying around with the hot water heater. The third time she fell, again getting the mail and again scraping up her knees, the arm requiring a cast and the knees taking stubbornly long to heal because of her constantly removing the dressings and treating the wound with toothpaste. Initial episodes of incontinence, discovered in bedding days after the fact. The first time she wandered off in the middle of the day without her phone to sit in the back of the church only to be discovered by one of the priests after evening mass and driven home, dehydrated and having not eaten all day. The first time she took off too many clothes in public, again in the church, where she was found sitting in a confession booth in brassiere and undershorts, having deemed it too hot for confession. When she sat through dinner and said nothing, just smiling and moving the food around mindlessly on her plate. The conversations about the car and not driving anymore, after she coasted through a red light and side swiped a UPS truck. When she snuck out in her car again, used a valet key no one knew about in an unpoliced junk drawer somewhere and parked in the grass outside the bingo hall. A one month span where she fell a fourth time and was picked up by paramedics and taken to hospital for a broken rib which progressed into an infection and pneumonia, which kept her in hospital for two weeks, during which the neuro consult told Jason and his sister that they were on a months not years timeline for getting things in order and whereupon coming home she at first didn’t eat because of the pain and then after a week’s more rest wandered off while his sister was a work, stopping first at a Denny’s and ordering food and leaving without paying and then walking down to the cemetery to sit next to their father’s grave, where she fell asleep, caught pneumonia again and was back in hospital where she again refused to eat, deployed startlingly brutal racial slurs at the black nurses to the horror of her children (for their part the nurses were unphased, the unreconstructed grotesqueries lurking in the minds of Midwestern white women born before the 1960s being well known to them), striking the Vietnamese pulmonologist and calling him Charlie during chest auscultation and in the process reinjuring the wrist, after which she had to be thorazined down to prevent her from removing IVs, striking a nurse trying to administer the injection, transitioning to full incontinence, and prompting a return visit from the neurology consult along with a social worker who met separately with Jason and his sister to discuss concerns about advertent and inadvertent self-harm by their Mother and care taker burnout in the case of his sister. When her mother, Jason’s grandmother, came to visit it was by surprise and without invitation, Jason arrived to find her standing next to his mother’s bed talking to the attending, hustling around the bed, tucking, untucking adjusting and discarding, his grandmother said, in response to Jason’s inquiry of what the hell she was doing here, that she always knew that all those years of anti-depression medications would come home to roost someday. And here we are. His sister visiting the house once a day turned to her staying over twice and then 4-5 times a week turned into essentially moving into the spare bedroom and living with her full time. She was pretty much at her wits end, Alice said, and thought it was time for him to come home and call the game. She will be one of the younger ones on the floor, by almost a decade, the manager told him and his sister during one of the first visits to the facility before they took his mother in in what struck him as a somewhat tactless statement, however factual, from someone who should have more experience and grace in discussing such particulars. But then, very quickly, one realizes that nothing in a place like this has much to do with tact or grace. I mean after all, how graceful can one be with someone whose mother can’t remember their name, can’t control her faculties and has gone, in the span of less than a year, from a reasonably pleasant, if sometimes brash middle aged-retired woman to a vulgar, confused invalid. That word: invalid. His mother hated that word. He remembered her speaking of how her own mother cared for her father after he injured his back: she treats him like an invalid. The word spat out with scorn and indignation, like the person was somehow no longer enough. As though he were invalidated. He wept that when the term finally became objectively appropriate for his mother, it was his grandmother who uttered it and his mother was too confused—even had she heard it, which she didn’t—to understand.

The worst part of The Billionaire’s divorce-plus-infidelity scandal that year was the truly awful text messages that were released, in which he talked about just wanting to smell her, used the phrase alive girl…inexcusably cackhanded unromantic high school bullshit. Maybe the redacted text that went along with the pictures of his junk was redeemably raunchy? But what was released was unforgivably insipid and about as romantic as ordering your beloved flannel pajamas from Amazon. I love you. I am in love with you. I want to hold you tight. I want to kiss your lips. I love you alive girl. I want to smell you. I want to breath you in. I will show you with my body and my lips and my eyes, very soon. Basically I WANT TO BE WITH YOU!!! Then I want to fall asleep with you and wake up tomorrow and read the paper with you and have coffee with you. It wasn’t the loss of the hundred billion dollars or whatever it was. It was the godawful prose. Go deeper, she said. I’m out of adjectives, the poet replied.

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As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

She pulled into the driveway, killed the engine and sat motionless until the dash lights went out. No, their therapist (their Coach) had gently corrected her, it’s more than just playing his role. She was like the Scandinavians who view sex like sleeping or eating or grooming and even the temporary absence of it evidence of some physical or mental dysfunction. Self-diagnosis was always suspect, but Jessica saw in herself a simple failure to empathize, so why didn’t this woman just come out and say it? Epidemiological studies showed failure to thrive and failure to empathize almost never occurred in the same person. Their Coach, at minute 43, circled the three of them up for the circle of trust or whatever and said why didn’t they, the two of them, work to connect this week. To help her partner, her best friend, to feel, not just see, life through her eyes.

Access to chemical means of making your period come back have an interesting history stemming from the use of a stomach ulcer drug called misoprostol which is most effective when taken with mifepristone, a.k.a. RU-486, a.k.a. a progesterone receptor antagonist, blocking the effects of progesterone on the endometrium—which include local suppression of immune response—and thereby disallowing implantation of a fertilized egg.

Alright. She could go first. It’s called ablation. A small incision is made in the groin to access the femoral vein, under local—or general, for the skittish—anesthesia. A catheter is advanced up the vein through the thoracic cavity and into the right atrium. A needle is passed out of the end of the catheter to create a hole in the septal wall (clarification: I cut a hole through the fucking middle of the beating human heart…stay tuned), enabling access the left atrium and then through the mitral valve into the left ventricle, the source of the most acutely dangerous fibrillatory activity, after which a separate cauterizing light saber-like thingy is advanced out the end of the catheter and, guided by real time contrast dye enhanced x-ray imaging (and in most modern tertiary care centers like ours this is complemented with magnetic resonance imaging [MRI] of electrical depolarization to map, in real time, electrical heterogeneity with really awesome spatial resolution in 3D), the interventionist (that is, me) ablates, that is, she kills the offending regions of myocardial tissue responsible for the aberrant electrical activity. Warfarin, a.k.a. Coumadin, a.k.a. rat poison is administered in some cases prophylactically to prevent clotting (via its actions to inhibit vitamin K epoxide reductase), thereby reducing the incidence of stroke and deep vein thrombosis but increasing the risks of internal hemorrhage. This is a several hour procedure, during which risk of various new emergent arrhythmias, in particular repeated episodes of ventricular tachycardia, a.k.a. chaotic electrical activity that uncouples depolarization from contraction, causing circulatory collapse, a.k.a. VT storm, a.k.a. a shit storm, must be unerringly guarded against and/or mitigated, basically.

So, ok. Now I do you, right? Imagine for a minute it is Saturday morning and you’ve had a cup of Joe and a bagel and scanned the Times and Post and maybe raised your systolic blood pressure a little with a glance at Drudge and you decide to get off the couch and throw in a load of laundry. You of course have an energy efficient front-loading washer which has to load sense to allow precise volume control and thus does not immediately start filling with water like the top loaders of the last century (ownership of which, I get it, is a human rights violation in the present day). This is relevant because it gives you time to walk back to the living room, maybe get another cup of coffee and grab a magazine or maybe—hell, go for it—a novel to, along with the simple but satisfying physical task of loading and starting the washing machine, expunge the digital bolus from your cerebrum. To basically unwind. Let’s say you get 1,000 or so words in when you hear water. Trickling or running or something. The dog lays at your feet and thus is not urinating on the house plant, there is no one else in the house, so you surmise it must be—and leap up, disturbing the dog who lets out a short plaintive bark, to find that it is!—the washer’s drain pipe, which exits the back of the machine and makes an immediate 60 degree turn into the wall, that has become occluded with a vigilante sock, handkerchief, lint ball, hair ball (your wife, we have established, has thick hair, no need to cast stones), or paper receipt from an unpoliced pocket. The water is draining onto the floor under the washer and dryer. Your systolic shoots back up (it’s stress-induced catecholamine release, BTW). You leave your coffee cup and novel on the kitchen counter and, fucking goddammit, shut off the machine. You put on your shoes and go out to the garage and get your pipe snake, a.k.a. your cable drum, a.k.a. your drain auger and head around the side of the house to the access point just where the washer efferent articulates with the pipe that runs to the sewer which, when you remove the pipe-strapped rubber stopper that covers it, promptly ejaculates two gallons or so of soapy hot water on your shoes. Mentally picture how you then advance the metal tipped (perhaps if you had plumped for one of the models with crab-like pincers at the end or the corkscrew…) pipe snake into the pipe and—since you did pony up for the drill powered version and you did purchase a cordless drill which miraculously yes is charged—then proceed to advance the writhing metal auger snake cable into the pipe to extirpate the culprit sock/hankie/lint/hair/Taco Bell receipt. Imagining this? Got it? This is absolutely nothing like catheter ablation.

When the drain is clogged and your shoes are wet and you’ve fetched the stale Newports out of your underwear drawer and you realize you have to fix this problem. That the possibilities have narrowed and despite any of the day’s quote-on-stunning-sunrise-photo MEMEs, they will continue to narrow and you will have to continue to get more serious and more focused or the world will fucking devour you. I get it, she had said. She realized she was not the type of woman that other women felt comfortable with their husbands being alone with, but this was not her problem.

She couldn’t remember the last time she said how much she loved her life. This was something he once professed to so cherish about her. She no longer fell for it. The fear of what happens if you stop. The fear of the thing you have created and the momentum of emotional violence visited on people, some of whom remain and others who have left, all of whom are weaker than you and now all you can do is fear for their survival. She drew the key from the ignition, opened the car door and walked toward her house.

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As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Jason was passing Vineland headed west on the 134 at a Thursday afternoon pace of 15-20 mph when he started to perceive the acute need for a bowel movement of tectonic proportions. He remembered a time when he was in grade school and was sitting on the toilet when some of his classmates opened the door of the stall in surprise and proceeded to tease him. The entire boys’ restroom erupting in laughter at the sight of him sitting down to take a shit. He thought of this almost daily when shitting in public places and to this day always triple checks the latch before turning around to wipe off the seat and deploy the tissue paper seat cover. Was there a way to prevent people from having these experiences? Anyway, the B.M. that now beset him threatened cataclysm. A two martini, five beers, foie gras tower and calamari appetizer, Caesar salad, 24 oz rare porterhouse and baked potato with side of spaghetti Carbonaro and asparagus, brownie a la mode with salted caramel, half bottle of Buffalo Trace and a 60 ring gauge triple Maduro chaser plus six Doritos Locos tacos and Mountain Dew at 2am type of shit. A black Friday, door buster day after the all-American gorge fest of bird, pig, root and pie, followed by a mid-morning four egg McMuffins, breakfast burrito, 17 hot sauces and three cups of coffee type of clog the fucking toilet at Home Depot and sidle out past the employee break room avoiding eye contact type of shit. Where your viscera settles. Where you can actually feel a release of pressure in the back of your throat. We’re talking substantial mass. We’re talking poundage definitely in the ‘teens. The kind, as Pacino said, that makes you feel like you slept for 12 hours. Giving birth. The kind that makes your pelvis expand and then crack, not uncomfortably, like a chiropractor’s adjustment. Multiple vertebrae involved. We’re talking about the kind of shit where you stride from the can with purpose, member of the realm, chin up, ready to fuck anything that moves. We’re not talking about a fire hydrant through your gastrointestinal tract. Where you have time to jot something clever on the wall of the head like would shit here again or dial this number for a good time and leave a star ranking or something clever. The college game day three pitchers of beer, dozen teriyaki wings, dozen 911 wings, dozen spicy garlic wings and large bacon jalapeno and onion pizza type. The Old Faithful pressure build up, black powder muzzle loaded ordinance and then finger over the garden hose eruption, pancake batter—burning—and intermittent, terror-inducing occlusive pellets, then back to free flow, then incendiary shrapnel. Grabbing the sides of the bowl with your hands in terror. Not that kind of shit. Not a post-curry chutney and Baba Ganoush and yogurt Bangin Bertha rapid fire oatmeal-textured projectile that starts as a piercing pain under your rib cage and progresses, in 30-45 seconds, to an intense abdominal sensation like someone has your small and large intestines in a plastic bag out behind a 7Eleven and is repeatedly swinging them against a brick wall. That makes you hunch when you duckwalk to the head. Like birdshot in the gut. The putt putt putt, paaaaaaaaaa that comes after a case of Busch Lite or eating Mediterranean. The kind where you can feel your jejunum and duodenum wrestling for space, shoving up against your other organs. Where someone is slowly probing with knitting needles against the side of your gut, then escalating alarmingly to hammering out the 1812 Overture and then suddenly applying SERIOUS ALL-AROUND FUCKING PRESSURE. Where there most certainly must be some type of chemical disruption of membranes or something in there somewhere. Acid. Faucet ass. Not that kind. Not the petrified wood kind. Not the kind, either, that stalls mid-exit, halfway breeched, you having left the Nicorette on the kitchen counter when leaving for work that morning. The morning after a night of an entire bottle of Hendricks plus copious prophylactic NSAIDs and for-emergencies-only Vicodin washed down with Alka-Seltzer and Gatorade before bed, hard coal, way down on the periodic table dense, poundage modest, but really just dense, but girthy and feeling somehow strangely coarse, as though covered with bark, drawing heat out of the colon, in a capsular contracted niche, a crucible, dense and firm and wide in a way that causes a startling but not entirely uncomfortable micro tearing of the external anal sphincter and whose expulsion, after all that struggle, is quick, and leaves little trace except the water that splashes up from the bowl and the near syncope of reactive bradycardia from bearing down. Not that kind. The kind where it feels like it requires handling and extirpation with cast iron pincers and asbestos gloves, by trained staff in aprons and flash goggles and SCBAs, some kind of plutonium turd to be stored in some bespoke lead-lined dewar and transported in an unmarked truck to be buried, in the dead of night, deep deep down, in a mountain in the desert southwest. Different than that.

His phone is ringing then, and he picks up and it’s his sister Alice. What have you been doing? My computer’s not working now. It’s down now. The internet’s not working. The wifi.

You’re roughing it.

Sad to see President Bush died. Well he was 94. I never realized that he was shot down too. He was shot down and yet he survived and look what he did with his life. He had a three-year-old daughter died of leukemia. So. But he had an interesting life. So anyways, that’s about it, that’s all I know.

How are you doing otherwise?

How am I doing? I’m alright. I’m just a little stressed with Mom, she’s pulling some stunts that I’m not liking. And I’m a little bit worried about Brady. I just got off the phone with my girlfriend Lizzie not too long ago, Lizzie found six empty bottles of beer up in the loft where they have a TV in her house and she heard Brady up there in the loft, Charlie her boyfriend was with her, he come down and left, and then Brady come down, but she heard Brady talking really funny with the baby like she never does.

Drinking again?

Drinking. And Brady’s lying to the boyfriend too, he doesn’t know about her record. So, she’s got a mess going on there, it’s just not good. I feel a responsibility, you know I am Brady’s godmother, I feel a responsibility to try to help but it’s, I don’t know what to do and Anthony. He’s no help. He doesn’t want to hear anything. He thinks his daughter’s just fine because she puts on a great act for her father. And she’s coming home for Christmas, Anthony sent her airline tickets. I’m debating what I should do, should I talk to her, what should I say.

Do you have a regular relationship with her, have you spoken to her?

I have developed one I guess, talking with her about her future about what she could do. She’s gonna work on it, she’s very. She, she lies about everything, I mean, I can see right through it. But I’m trying to get her to trust me and she does. She has been calling me and and and so I think it’s time for me to say something to her with all of what Lizzie just told me is going on I mean Brady you have to take care of the baby. She won’t put the kid on a bottle, she’s only breast feeding.

Don’t you think you need to decide what is the most important thing to talk to her about? Jason said. You just switched from potential DUI to should the kid be on the bottle. Unloading on her is not going to fly.

I mean her Mom has been unloading on her and that hasn’t had much effect. I mean Lizzie is no shrinking violet. She’s not going to sit back and be passive, I imagine she’s had many occasions to have strong words with Brady, Alice said.

I think someone needs to take a different approach.

Maybe. But Lizzie can’t get past it.

Past what?

Ok here’s what she did: she was drunk out of her mind she gets in her car and she backs up and she hits a car. In the parking lot because she’s drunk and she doesn’t know what she’s doing and so she goes forward and hits another car and somebody saw her do that and took her license plate. And then she goes to drive home or wherever she’s going and she’s stopped for speeding and swerving and then she’s arrested because she’s drunk and then they run her plate and find out she’s got two hit and runs. In that parking lot. So she’s arrested for the drunk driving and two hit and runs. So she’s got what they call a record. She’s got a record.

Ok. But she has a job now, no?

No. When she worked at the restaurant, I found this out, the reason she got fired from the restaurant, when everybody was leaving the table, she was drinking all the drinks that people left behind. She’s a mess. She got this boyfriend after she’s pregnant, this isn’t the same guy that got her pregnant, she’s letting him in her bedroom window, Lizzie found them in the bed together. She’s seven months pregnant and she let’s this guy in and she’s sleeping with this guy. You know how she found out? She went into Brady’s room without knocking, and they, they are on her bed, her twin bed, and she walks in, Lizzie walks in and there’s Brady giving this guy a blow job. I mean this is Donahue for sure.

Yikes. What about her father?

I told you, useless. He won’t even talk to Lizzie. Lizzie has asked him to call her to talk about Brady. He won’t even talk to Lizzie about it. And unfortunately, the whole incident, the first thing that happened with Brady, when she turned 16 she went to live with her father because he promised to buy her a car. And she moved in with her father and she lived there a year and that’s when she first got into trouble because she was home alone all the time because Anthony traveled a lot, you know, he’s hardly ever home and she was partying and she got caught with marijuana and Anthony had to go to court with her. You know Lizzie’s got things on him. From before. On Anthony from before they were married. Some stuff with cocaine. But so. Her problem, I mean her personality is she has what do they call it ADHD and she’s never been treated for it. And her mind just, she cannot focus. But she doesn’t want to be on medicine because her father told her she didn’t need it when she was 8 years old. Anthony refused to let her be on it. Yeah well her doctor when she was 8 years old she was having trouble focusing in school and that and they said that she should take the medicine and it would help her focus and everything and Anthony said no and the doctor said if you don’t put her on this medicine when she’s an adult she will abuse alcohol and or drugs and she’s doing both. She’s doing exactly what the doctor said would happen.

The text came through after he hung up.

<I’m sorry>

<Don’t be. I’ll see you>

<BTW…I’m the whale>

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⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Jose and Alexa married out of college and got to work. DINKing, he never tired of adding to the end of a sentence relating with false modesty a new professional coup. The union invariably couched in terms of a business partnership: his interests in residential and light commercial real estate and hers in whole body fitness and wellness, her classes taught on the beach near their Manhattan Beach home which they purchased for just north of 3, Jose told Jason, after they had been married for 5 years. Her clientele was 30-50 year old wives of older retired doctors, lawyers and industry types that had bought up the beach front. Their house was one back from the beach front and had a rooftop balcony with an unobstructed view of the ocean, the marina to the north and the pier to the south. He bought his first Maserati in 2012 and she got her augmentation the same year and they hosted parties for their friends in from out of town for the UCLA/USC football game and the Lakers playoffs, plus Cinco de Mayo and Christmas. Jose started convincing several of this friend group to invest in the property business with him around 2016. Several went in for $5-10K with Jose promising 8%, but several went big: Stacie Wang and her Swedish husband (himself a trustafarian of unclear provenance) punted for $150K and Tony and his girlfriend, probably the result of Tony and Jose playing too much golf together, and Pablo being unable to handle his drink, ponied up $200K, basically all of Tony’s inheritance from parents who had died when he was a teenager. When he turned 35, Jose rented out the top floor of the Intercontinental and invited this same group, which had expanded now to include other investors, including some of his wife Alexa’s client’s husbands plus some neighborhood friends they met at sunset walks on the beach, plus some other neighborhood friends from back in the day scattered around LA, plus some family. His mother was there, about 5’ tall and 3’ wide with sackcloth black hair as thick as a Persian rug and who spoke next to no English, and he stood in between her and his wife when he took the mic and announced to the assembled group how proud he was to share all his accomplishments with his friends and family (and he actually at one point used the term partners) and how the party that night was a reflection of his Gatsbian dreams come true. He didn’t actually use the term Gatsbian. In a dipsomaniacal stumble towards the bar later that night he confided to Jason, saying that I need to confide to you that this party cost me $65K, but you can’t tell Alexa. I’m gonna make that in a week but you can’t tell her that either. Double Income No Kids. Six months or so after that it was a party bus to Vegas and the wheels came off. It was for Alexa’s 35th birthday this time and somewhere around Barstow, everyone already knackered to the gills, that Alexa took the mic this time and announced that they had purchased a pot farm in Nor Cal and were adopting two girls from their home in El Salvador to come live with Jose and Alexa in Manhattan Beach.

Ok, back up for a second. Alexa’s mom was pregnant in El Salvador at 14 and escaped her parents and Alexa’s biological father first to Mexico and then through Texas and into southern CA where she met the only father Alexa ever knew, Juan, a Chicano born in Echo Park. Juan was soft spoken, genteel, so totally calm as to seem almost perpetually narcotized. Stable. A provider. He worked at a defense contractor, giving Alexa and her mother (Maria) an upper middle-class decade and a half until Alexa graduated high school and started at USC. Alexa remembered her father, Juan, out of sorts exactly two times: the first time when the photos of the activities of American servicemen and women at Abu Ghraib prison were released on 60 Minutes along with stills of Bush and Cheney having just viewed them, looks of deep consternation and disappointment on their faces and the second time when the Dodgers bombed out before the playoffs in 2007. Both times, Juan had stood up from the TV, placed a hand on the wall and another on his head—as though he might pass out—gave a barely perceptible shake of the head and left the room. By some bargain—tacit or otherwise, Alexa never knew—Juan’s anesthetized personality was a necessary insulator for Alexa’s mother Maria, a woman Alexa found out she barely knew when, at 32, Juan handed her papers and moved in with a white woman named Dorothy McFadden from Simi Valley and she, Alexa’s mother, ostensibly lost her tether and in the parlance of her, Alexa’s, college friends at the time, wilded out, Maria did, buying a whole new wardrobe, clubbing 4-5 nights a week, sleeping with guys Alexa’s age and hoovering up massive amounts of cocaine, while spending her days in the gym and getting a job (she hadn’t worked since taking up with Juan) as a massage therapist, which Alexa didn’t ask about but which furnished rent, clothes money, and the note on a CLK convertible. The SHTF when Alexa’s maternal grandmother died and her mother’s siblings admonished Maria to come back for the funeral and that was all it took. San Salvador had her for two weeks and she turned up pregnant with what turned out to be twin girls and found herself under the thumb, their father’s, of the only type of man that was able to settle her. When the girls were 3, Alexa’s mom retraced nearly identically the trip she took with Alexa in her belly years earlier, through Mexico and Texas to CA, her daughters DACA’d in, and 10 years later worked at a Safeway in Inglewood while Alexa and Jose built their lives across town. The girls—your sisters—are starting middle school next year and they deserve the same shot you had. Are you, reader, still with me? There was no asking Juan (he and McFadden had gone on to have a baby boy, Derek, and had moved to Sylmar) and there would be no second Juan and so Alexa was her mother’s only hope, she said. It turned out that since returning to the US, Alexa’s mother had mostly calmed down, rarely went out with men and in fact became a de facto member of her daughter’s group of friends, but still occasionally supplying her and her friends with bumps time to time and on the sly, and coming to all her parties including the 35th birthday trip to Vegas, to which we will now return in real time narration.

It was the year of the Muslim ban. When they went out for dinner Alexa’s mathematically perfect tits were on display in some MTV Music Awards Red Carpet gown that was strapless with a giant gap in the middle and one breast covered by a tiny piece wrapping around from the back of the dress and apparently glued to her nipple. Jose had taken to calling the twins his empanadas almost immediately. And so Alexa’s mom was with all of us when she, Alexa’s mom, received a text message with a picture of a tumescent gherkin from her daughter, who we’ll call X, followed 3 seconds later by oops, wrong number, and then hope you’re having fun in Vegas and she, Alexa’s mom Maria, may have waited until she got back from Vegas to confront the twins about why X was downloading and texting DPs to her sister, who we’ll call Y, and maybe their friends as well but she, Alexa, just happened to be standing next to her mom at the bar and recognized immediately the kielbasa as belonging to her husband and, snatching her mom’s phone and seeing the message was from her sister X’s phone, grabbed a full bottle of Stolichnaya and nearly crushed Jose’s occipital bone. Did it really matter at that point whether Alexa’s sister X had sent the photo accidentally on purpose to her (Alexa’s) Mom or whether she had meant to send it to Y, and whether Jose had sent it to X or to both X and Y? And did it really matter whether she, X, was just trying to score points with her sister for seeing Jose’s thingy before she, Y, did?

So put yourself, reader, at the bar with Jason and let’s talk about connotations when you hear the word statutory in a nearby conversation after someone’s just been carried away by medics after a bartender had vaulted the bar and pressed a not at all clean looking towel against the wound on Jose’s head, from which blood was not exactly spraying, but flowing nonetheless quite impressively down his neck and onto his back and arm, carried him away like a refugee in a thin foil blanket and Alexa being treated for shock with feet elevated and the crazy dress even more askew and an actual whole breast with tantalizing potential of just falling right out, while you are sitting there watching but not like openly staring, and then not hearing the rest and catching well maybe it was audiophile but probably not and then definitely hearing something-philia and man that means only one thing. It turned out he approached X first, or she discovered him shirtless after a workout and asked to touch his abs, and then told Y about it, details Jose relayed in an initial and hairbrained and highly legally inadvisable attempt to answer the Big Question. But then both Y and X started hanging around the garage when he was lifting and Y asks for his phone number first and then gave it to X and this was even before X and Y moved in with them. With Alexa and Jose. The one that was pushed by the State as indicative of Jose being culpable in the initiation was actually quite banal—to the non-perv, that is—a photo of X’s feet, sent to Jose by Y, to which he replied how pretty, which to a preteen girl translates to what else do you have to show me, and the answer to that was plenty and even though it didn’t progress for another month this was clear indication of manipulation. Grooming. The State argued. A power play by an older authority figure. X and Y were both made to testify. X breaking down and saying she loved Jose and that he said he loved her and Y laughing at this in the courtroom and X calling her a stupid bitch, all of this while Jose stared at his shoes and Alexa cried and Alexa’s mom sat ashen looking at the back of her son-in-law’s head. Everybody getting this so far? It was Y that started it, X said, started the problem and not Jose’s fault, and Y was just being jealous of X’s closeness to Jose, as evinced by the fact that X often got texts from Jose inviting her to come to the garage while he was working out, while Y never received such texts. If not for Y’s interference, X submitted, X and Jose could be happy and it was Y always flashing her stupid boobies which were nothing at all, while Jose was trying to exercise and bending over and putting her coochie in his face, while X was just trying to keep him company and actually bond with him on a deep emotional level, X testified. No, X said, she and Y did not do it with him at the same time but she, Y, did smell her, X, on his thingy one day when X was with him after a workout and this was the last straw and why she sent the picture of his thingy to her mother. No, X said, she didn’t really know whether it was accidental or on purpose that she sent it to her Mom instead of to Y, to which Y blurted out I had that dick way before you did you dumb bitch, to which the judge yelled for order and which elicited no reaction whatsoever from Jose, Alexa or Maria.

And something to think about is the fact that while Alexa was losing her mind, while her entire life was peeling apart in real time in a bar in Vegas as her husband’s head bled and Jason and Jessica all her friends looked on as she screamed and cried and attempted to kick him multiple times and then half-fainted and then actually fainted and then sat up with M. Mason-esque makeup running down her face and hair totally a mess and looking at this point more like a car crash victim, at one point one of her breasts is, finally, momentarily all the way out and everyone either doesn’t notice or pretends not to notice, and then jumps on him again and has to be pulled off and threatened with handcuffs by the police, that while all of this happened, her mom, Alexa’s mom Maria, who received the text, looked at her daughter as though Alexa were executing some act that Maria had paid for lessons for ages ago and she was now forced to watch with equal parts pride, disgust and resignation.

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As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

According to the rules the monk and notorious fudger Gregor Mendel extracted from his peas, the likelihood of two parents with brown eyes producing a blue-eyed child (brown being the dominant and blue the recessive allele for eye color) is about one in one thousand, give or take. Now if you examine family photos in your neighbor’s house the next time you go fetch the kids from a play date or while waiting for him to tend grill at the next get together, you may notice evidence of the following fact: the actual occurrence of blue eyed boys being born to brown eyed mothers married to brown eyed men is several standard deviations away from the mean in the positive direction, which means, it has been estimated, that upwards of one out of four, or 25% of US American children were sired by someone other than the man they have known all their lives as Dad. About the time he crashed out of grad school and took the job teaching high school freshman Holden Caufield and the Prince of Danes, his close friend since kindergarten Frank Mustard finished his residency and fellowship in GI and went into private practice. As Jason was upsetting his career’s proverbial apple cart and cutting his earning potential by about 100k USD per year, ostensibly in search of some life-fulfilling reward from serving others or whatever, Frank joined a group outside of Strongsville, Ohio which was one of these towns that exploded with home developments in the late ‘80’s when their parents’ generation started reaping the rewards of several decades of post-war American hegemony and consuming their full meals of comfortable middle class life, with bachelor’s (or in many cases only high school) degrees, two-story homes, plus basements, 3 car garages, large green yards with no fences and no dandelions, newly constructed community centers, yearly vacations to Myrtle Beach or Palm Beach and then Vail in the winter, abundant middle brow fast-food at the metastasizing enterprises of Applebee’s and TGI Fridays, no crime, great schools with free sports and free music and art classes and guidance counselors and aggressive D.A.R.E. evangelism (and the now forgotten groups of M.A.D.D. and S.A.D.D., mothers and students against drunk driving, respectively, the latter later devolving into student athletes detest drugs and then, as harbinger of the evisceration of language into vacuous banality, into students against dangerous decisions, before being scrapped more or less altogether), along with free concerts in the park, Home Days at the end of summer (also free), Veterans’ and Memorial Day parades with fire trucks and the Boy Scouts and the high school band and a couple of well attended and non-born-again Protestant churches, plus a Roman and Greek Orthodox Catholic ones, good snow removal, grass cutting and sharp landscaping in public places during the spring and summer, police that were your parents’ age and clean cut and that would stop by the Dairy Queen and talk with your old man whom they went to high school with on hot August nights as the humidity lifted, the sun still painted the sky orange until 8:30 and all the kids got wistful about the last few days of summer. So, Mustard took a job here straight out of fellowship, starting salary for a GI surgeon of 475,000 American greenbacks per year. The group covered malpractice insurance, the lease on the building, all the kit, admin, billing, patient recruitment, EMR, hiring and firing and HR issues for nurses and PAs, so all Frank had to do was show up three days a week at 7:00am and perform appendectomies and resections and hernia repairs until 2:00pm. Basically cleaning up what the ‘80’s and ‘90’s did to our parents’ abdomens. At 475k per. His 7,000 square foot home on 10 acres of land with a dozen massive deciduous trees and even a small stream running across the back, built as part of a glut after the 2008 shit sandwich, was a three-story, 5 bedroom, 4 bathroom, 4 car garage-containing mausoleum that his wife and he bought for 585,000 using his signing bonus of 50k plus some bread from the old man for downpayment. For perspective, Jason’s house in Vanvleck cost $1,725,000 and is just shy of 2,000 square with a one car garage (where you keep all the shit that goes in a normal person’s house’s basement), single story, concrete patio outback that abuts a hillside. Six months into the private practice stint and Frank is thoroughly burned out, doing essentially the same procedures every day and no longer having the energy to chase nurses or the means to build a patient caseload to take on new conditions and hence to perform new and different procedures given the highly managed and slick business model of the practice group.

A word of backstory is necessary here: while in fellowship, Frank and Candace, Candy, were trying fairly seriously to reproduce themselves, for about a year and a half via the conventional means and then, both being scientifically minded (Candy a mechanical engineer) and fairly type A, through a series of specialist visits to examine their respective gonadal health. There was some lighthearted discussion at some point about Frank being a seed that won’t germinate, between Frank and Candy and between Mustard and Jason. There’s a name for this that won’t come to me. Followed by changes in diet, a teetotal stint, changes in exercise. Followed by hormonal treatments for her, in vitro tries before finally surrogacy was broached before fate saw fit to allow one of the oocytes retrieved from her fallopian tubes and injected with his sperm in a Eppendorf tube, which he retrieved, the sperm, following another painful week long sober stint and with the aid of some truly avant-garde domination porn on his phone, which he found was necessary to execute the procedure in the bleach smelling chamber allotted him for this purpose in the fertility clinic, and the egg, the fertilized egg, was stuck in Candy’s uterine wall and grew for 30 weeks, 209 days to be exact, before it wanted out and then spent two weeks in an incubator that reminded Mustard of research he did on chicken angiogenesis during undergrad. There were some not totally obvious but also somehow impossible to miss physical development issues with his daughter that didn’t exactly make her deformed or hard to look at, but that caused you to look away after a few seconds feeling things didn’t come out exactly right, like someone had assembled one of those really detailed, super involved Lego kits of a village or an F15 or a fire truck without the instructions, resulting in a couple extra pieces being included and a couple pieces left over at the end just being kicked under the bed. It looked like what it was supposed to look like, but not like the picture on the front of the box. His daughter was 3.52 pounds at birth and was 8 weeks premature and had no hair and arms the thickness of a number 2 pencil. And his daughter wasn’t, clinically speaking, mentally slow, but she was physically slow and didn’t talk until her third birthday and didn’t eat much other than hot dogs and American cheese and apple sauce and had a sort of mean streak through her, even as a toddler. Candy took indefinite leave from her job (she and Frank didn’t really need the 275,000 per she brought in) and spent her days first with their daughter, feeding her, reading to her, watching her watch TV, taking her to the park and then when she started preschool and then kindergarten, Candy spent her days having compulsive sexual intercourse with one after another trainer from her gym, and then patrons from the gym, and then patrons at the coffee shop next to the gym until one Tuesday morning she was fellating a 19 year-old trainer, a recent high school graduate and former heavyweight varsity wrestler named Dwayne in his car outside the gym in the gym’s parking lot and the manager, who had been caught up in the Candy maelstrom himself a few weeks back saw them, and fired Dwayne on some shaky, hypocritical fraternizing-with-clients grounds, and then other male trainers caught wind of the dust up and steered clear of Candy, causing her to seek out another gym.

While Frank was repelled by her body, Candy became obsessively in touch with it, intensely physical as though all her senses had been subsumed to tactile, like the way the newly tattooed recognize new ownership of their bodies and become enamored with the large canvas that, unbeknownst to them, they had been carrying around with them their whole life and are possessed suddenly with the compulsion to fill it up. So, she had to find new outlets for this curious, unexpectedly awakened need for rough sex with strangers which it turns out is not as easy to find as puerile fantasies would lead you to believe. When confronted with a request to truly dominate a woman, most men wilted into attempts at clever flirtation and then embarrassed retreat or bullshit apologies meant to save face and not look like a pussy or real apologies that the world had treated her so bad that she had to be in this kind of spot where she could only see her self worth through a man degrading her, or some such thing. Or else she would find some truly psychotic bastard that would damn near choke her out (there was more than one of these) or in the case of one dentist she met at tennis, hit her so hard with his belt while entering her from behind that she needed two stitches in her lower back, just to the left of her L4. She did keep a tally, although couldn’t be sure of all the names and faces.

After one year without visiting her bed, during which time she had one form or another of intercourse with 147 men, Frank and Candy got drunk one night when their daughter was at the grandparents and had uncoordinated but, by his estimation, respectably varied and not brief sex in the kitchen and then again in the bedroom on a Friday in December. It was February when Candy told him she was pregnant and gave birth in July to an 8 pound 14 ounce baby girl, with blue eyes to match her mom’s and with, for all outward appearances, every single Lego in exactly the right place.

Ok now let’s come back to the present, or the near past at least, when Frank has bought a new huge house and is almost a year in at a new group and Kelly is 5 and Krissy is 3 and already reading and Frank invites Jason to stop by for a barbeque when he’s in town visiting his mom. It’s when Frank sends Jason into the spare bedroom that he discovers the AR-15, under a sheet in a large gym bag in the closet, trigger locked and no clip and after dinner, when the kids are in bed and Candy has gone to her mother’s house and after 6 or 8 Glen Livets that Frank tells Jason how he found out about Candy might be sleeping around and that he’s weighing his options and that he doesn’t want to confront her until everything is in place and he can pull off a smooth exit with the kids. He felt a pang of relief that stung for a few days but that then was slightly intoxicating, like some short acting hallucinogen, at the realization that she was starting to look around. Reminisce about previous lovers. Maybe even stray given a few more months of inattention and then he would have her, she would be in the wrong and he could end the thing in an ejaculation of sanctimonious rage. But then he found out what was really going on. The word for a seed that won’t germinate: dormant. Some seeds require temperatures in excess of 1000F to germinate, basically a forest fire. They only grow when everything else is dead. The attorney has basically gotten things buttoned up, Frank’s saying, he’s even got deposition from the dentist about the outrageous carnal debasement he subjected Candy to at her request, plus stuff from the wrestler and a half dozen other men saying some things that he never would have thought he would hear about his wife, including about how some of this stuff took place in his house, like transpired in Frank’s own house, with his daughter in the nursery watching TV. It was a little less than a month and it should be buttoned up, Frank is saying. And I have to tell you this: the intern, or legal analyst or paralegal whatever, she showed up wearing combat boots. I’m not fucking kidding you. Combat boots and a red, white and black plaid skirt and a tight black tank top over junior high tits and told me her name was Nethkoolang, which conjured images of trendy urban cigarette brands or athletic gear or some kind of anime. Or renewable energy. And I’m like is this a test or something whether I try to fuck this chick? But she seems good, she did most of the leg work and the attorney signs off on it.

She has no clue it is coming, he said, Candy, and it was the only way, because God only knows. Under your own roof. He was thinking of moving out of Ohio with the kids and just saying fuck it all, and giving it a go in, hell, California, or Texas everyone is moving to now, Austin, and what did Jason think. What no one would have predicted was that Frank’s wife Candy would pick up the children from school at 3:00pm the following Wednesday, four days after they sat drinking scotch on his back porch looking at the leaves which had begun to turn on the gargantuan maples and oaks, and proceed, Candy did, to remove the trigger lock from the AR and load a full magazine and execute both her children as they sat at the kitchen table, apparently, the coroner noted, with neither having the time to react based on something called a spray pattern and Frank read the coroner’s report which could not distinguish who was shot first but stated that the weapon was fired at very close range, probably within 10 feet and although he never saw the photographs from the kitchen, suffice it to say that the destruction done to hard and soft tissue in a child’s body at that close range, particularly on exit of the projectile, was vast and conclusive. Parthenogenesis is the development of an egg into an organism without fertilization.

But the final act Candy had in store for her husband he would in fact discover with his own eyes: the AR-15 operates also in fully automatic mode if modified with what is called a bump stock. In this way, constant pressure between the trigger stop and the weapon’s butt is transferred, through the recoil after each shot, to fire the weapon again. You basically just use the force of the weapon’s discharge to fire itself again, way way faster than you could ever pull the trigger.

Jason hung up after listening to Frank go on for an hour and there was a text from her.

<What would you have named the whale>

<I know it’s not the answer you’d want but I would not dare speculate on a better name>

<Why did he name it that>

<No idea. It’s not explained in the book. It’s a great irony of a masterpiece that leaves nothing else about the animal to speculation. You can find shit about it on Wikipedia but don’t believe it>

<Do you relate better to the captain or the whale>

<It’s complicated>

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As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Jessica and Randy met during medical school and somehow both ended up specializing in interventional cardiology and landing in LA, with Jessica at the University and Randy in private practice. This was the year when children eating Tide pods—the candy shaped and candy colored soluble packets of laundry detergent—was some kind of national emergency according to the internet, prompting detergent companies to release a battery of absurd commercials focused on how safe the packaging of their product was. You know, in case you accidentally popped one in your mouth. There was a once-a-month girls’ dinner for the female interventionists—they were 1:10 outnumbered by men and thus all knew each other, there were about 15 in the entire county of 15 million—sometimes including civilian friends. Randy was hosting, there were four of them that night, and had turned her kitchen over to a chef hired for the evening.

Prithi’s fiancé says to me while she’s changing out of her scrubs that he wants to be a writer, to which my ears perk up, Randy is saying.

Get in line.

And get this.

He wants to be the next John Grisham.

Man shit. He wants to write about man shit, he says.

A dearth of such, for sure.

Real man shit, for real men.

My old man farted like a foghorn when he pissed. He should put that in there.

Ok, TMI.

How did she find this one?

She’s a magnet.

Was she the ball stretcher guy?

Ok. Details. Hold on. Details.

Hang on, I need a refill for this.

That was the last one.

The last one, ok: she made the guy wear a ball stretcher.

And that does what, exactly?

Doesn’t get me riled up I can tell you.

I’ve yet to be with someone where I said to myself, I wish he had longer balls.

Low hanging fruit.

Is it a control thing, like binding woman’s waists or feet?

She said her boyfriend’s balls were hung a bit too high and tucked up close to his body. I think it’s all about cosmetics. She was a bit off because she was letting this man live with her half the time for the past few months. She broke up with him for his unwillingness to commit.

To the balls thing?

I don’t blame him.

Then she hired a private investigator just to find out he was using a fake identity with her.

The plot thickens.

So, he had a different name, lived in a different city and was married. He was letting her use all his fake credit cards.

Why, ok, why is she using his credit cards?

Judgement!

Should have been a red flag…boyfriend lets you use all his credit cards.

And is living with you.

I know.

She created a fake email address and emailed the wife about what he was up to for the past few months including screenshots, etc. I found this to be quite insane.

Oh boy.

But did she ask the wife about the ball height?

Shit, I didn’t think to ask. She also told me how her 14-year-old son who is on meds for ADHD decided to take acid which catapulted him into serotonin syndrome. He was covered in vomit and violently attacked her.

As opposed to what kind of attack exactly?

He punched her in the face, knocked her to the floor so her head ended up in his bathroom closet. She struggled to overtake him and had to choke him to the point of nearly passing out when he finally calmed down.

Jesus.

These I may be a sex addict or alcoholic but at least I’m not in this person’s league stories always make you temporarily feel better about yourself.

So, he ended up in the hospital and they ended up talking to the cops.

I don’t understand how people can maintain functional careers.

You’d be surprised.

Apparently.

It’s the back and forth. I don’t know how she does it.

There’s momentum. People get going and then you are on that track.

My parents were like that toward the end.

Ball stretchers?

No. But maintaining careers amidst a maelstrom. When I was 10 or 12 and we were still getting together with our neighborhood friends one, sometimes two nights on the weekend and going to my grandparents’ house at least once a month, my mother started bringing up a man she dated before my father. This was when she was drinking heavily and the subject would always be broached by her after she had put away 2 sometimes 3 bottles of fairly cheap red wine…

Hey, this is not cheap wine.

Amen.

No doubt, no doubt. Some things change. The subject was brought up apropos of nothing and for the year or so that it went on, she became increasingly brazen with her lead ins to the point where many of my parents’ friends would start to throw furtive uncomfortable glances at each other and raise eyebrows and scoot out to the bathroom each time she would find some segue between say, the Israelis in Lebanon or Saddam’s going into Kuwait or Perot and whatever.

Ross Perot?

Yeah, Ross Perot, I don’t know, I always remember them talking politics. But she, my mother would say something apropos of nothing like this reminds me of this guy I used to date before Henry. Before my father. Oh, don’t worry she would say, Henry knows all about it. Apparently this previous relationship had been one of considerable contention with my mothers’ parents because my grandfather would turn stone faced when my mother brought it up, invariably with him and her mother and siblings in the room. On several occasions my grandmother left the room and she always went ashen when Robert was recalled. I think she got intestinally ill, my grandmother, when this came up.

Understandable.

Your father was in the room?

In the room. Invariably.

And he knew about this?

Ok. My mother was in college at the time so this was way before my dad and she was still on a fairly tight leash held by my grandfather and since she went to school across the country he expected her to call on a daily basis to divulge on her classes, well-being and, he mistakenly anticipated, her personal life, such that when my grandparents found out, via an allegedly accidental disclosure from my aunt, she had been dating Robert for a year and not told them they were shocked and hurt enough by this ostensible betrayal so as to commence with 3 days of calling my mother’s roommate and then cousin in Pittsburgh, only to finally convince her, my aunt, they were distraught enough to be contacting the police and getting on a plane to fly out that she, my aunt, chose to divulge that maybe that wouldn’t be the best course of action since my mother had dropped her classes that quarter, the first of her senior year, and decamped with Robert to Paris.

Romantic.

Ahh. They went to Paris.

I’m guessing this ends well.

It sounded like the sort of rebellious thing you were supposed to do, right? A straight A senior at Princeton with an MCAT score in the 95^th percentile and an unblemished undergraduate resume of homeless clinics in the summer, an honors research thesis on nitrogen fixation by symbiotic arbuscular micorrhiza bacteria in soybeans and the effects of elevated carbon dioxide and atmospheric temperature, and a double major in art history. This is my mother.

Wait wait. Who’s this Robert.

He’s the ex.

An ex ex. Several before my Dad.

But what’s his story.

He had finished art school in New York the previous year and felt he needed to get away from the city and all its brash Americanness.

Yes! I love this guy.

What a hipster doofus.

To experience the Old World and to escape the hyper capitalist nightmare while he still could. I know how this all sounds, my mother said, so daft, but at the time it was romantic and crazy and I needed to break something. They spent a week in a shared flat near Montmartre…

Oh my God.

I know, I know. I don’t think it was much more than a week before my grandfather finally tracked her down over the phone and demanded she come home. After he asked her if she had had an HIV test, she hung up and for around 24 hours refused to answer the phone and when she finally did her mother snatched the receiver from her father long enough to pronounce her a harlot.

Very Old World.

Very romantic.

Montmartre. In springtime.

It was years later after my parents had split up and I was in med school that my aunt intimated to me, after several G&Ts something about a previous pregnancy scare with Robert and my mother, although she, my aunt, was speaking in such tongues at that point of a late Thanksgiving eve at Vail that I didn’t have the skill to pin her down and am not even sure that she wasn’t making the whole thing up, re-dredging her sister’s one big fuck up to silence her own voices.

And this was discussed. By your mother.

Not the pregnancy part or the HIV test part but Robert in the abstract, yes. It was a terrible experience my mother would say, with a performer’s mirth, sucking down more wine while my grandparents after first admonishing her not to speak that way in front of her husband, my Dad, acquiesced into silence. That a child was in the room never seemed to occur to anyone.

You have to learn somehow.

Sooner the better.

Passing on some serious wisdom there.

She was doing this to show my father that she existed and to show her family and their friends that she was a separate person from him. I think she was also doing it to try to somehow win my father’s attention back by reminding him that even though maybe he didn’t think about it very often anymore, there were plenty of other people interested in screwing his wife and running around the world with her, even if it was in the past.

What was his reaction?

He would mostly just stay quiet. Sometimes he would add a sardonic, self-effacing comment like back in your mother’s hippie days or before she met someone with less personality and no artistic talent to settle down with. The story wasn’t new to him, but it was my mother’s intent to add new details in every retelling to bring out some new, usually salacious component of the relationship and her dalliance away from her education and the completeness with which she ignored my grandparents’ opprobrium.

What a saint.

He was no saint. But he was not to be provoked, at least never in front of me or our guests or family. I think he had already emotionally moved on from whatever flash in the pan him and my mother had. At that particular point in time, she was all that there was and that was enough.

Yikes.

Ok, but at least she had her spring trip to Paris.

But here’s the kicker. That Robert was black came first in response to a barbed accusation from one of my aunts, after which my mother dove into a story of Robert’s mom being a waitress that had him when she was 13, delivered, these stories were by my mother, with some conspiratorial flair as though all fiction and fact were scuttlebutt she heard around the water cooler that afternoon. This fact came up a second time in front of our neighbors. My father’s sudden wistful countenance told me this was in fact a new tidbit.

After all those years.

After all those years. Something new. He tried to hide it, but I could tell he didn’t know.

Wow.

What bothered him, if I try to imagine what he was thinking, is not that the man my mother ran off with during her senior year—years before she met him—was black. He couldn’t have cared less. What would have bothered him was that she felt necessary to remark that he was black to use this fact to somehow injure my father and elevate herself and what did this mean about her and what she thought about what mattered to him.

And your aunt? What did she have to say about this.

The women in that family all sought husbands on bad streaks that they could nurse back to health and then demean for the rest of their lives. Only my father broke the mold, since once rescued from his own skid he steadfastly remained genteel and kind, notwithstanding 30 years of conditioning to belittle him.

Jesus.

I suspect my father already knew at that point that his marriage was unsalvageable and that he was just pursuing a least bad option by staying in it until I was myself in college. I don’t think he had any illusions about the divergence my mother and he had taken since my birth and yet I can’t help but wonder how he must have felt, what impact it had at the time on his relationship to me and my grandparents, who were scandalized, even at 12 I could see that, or our friends who per the social contract took my parents as one unit at least until the divorce was final, my father wasn’t one to lobby people to his side on that issue, before or since, and so the friends from those two decades fell away, for him. I’m also pretty sure, given the transactional way his mind worked, that on some level he was relieved to be emasculated by my mother in front of her family and their friends because it meant he was one up and could come back to even with a clear conscience by leaving her. My father filed shit like that away for future use. I could also see that it freed him to know, like Rabbit said, that having someone sleep with your wife adds some value back to her, even if it was in the past, although he couldn’t care less about the past and never talked about his. I think it did also make him feel hollow, because this woman he was married to was using this thing that would most hurt if he used it on her. The other lover, real or imagined, past present or future. She’s the one that would have been hurt by his past. And yet it didn’t hurt him like it would her, it only made him realize that he only existed for her as she related to him. He only existed to her in the capacity to which she increased her sense of herself and maybe it was a fallacy to believe this was not the rule but the exception. But my father had long since lost interest in playacting such things.

Who’s rabbit? What rabbit?

Nothing. No one. No ball stretchers. Just a fucking man.

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⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

When he was in high school a friend’s brother, the lead drummer in their high school marching band, paid for his own ticket to fly to the city to audition for the recently vacated drummer position in the then enormously popular band White Zombie. His brother and him (he played bass) and another guy down the street (lead) had a band, with both his brother and him singing (they were also in a barbershop quartet, which was quite something in the Midwest in the mid 1990’s) and they used to play free concerts for friends in their parents’ basement. He remembered showing up to one of these and expecting the house to look like a Mötley Crüe tour bus. But instead, both his friend’s parents were slightly older than his own, and conservative looking, the mother still sporting a bouffant hairdo and the father dressed like he was watching the Saturn V clear the tower and the décor of the house Rockwellian and the father was actually reading the newspaper by a table lamp and smoking a goddamn pipe when his mother answered the door and the house smelled warm and like supper. The basement had been cleared out and was unfinished which in a Midwestern early century home means concrete floors, concrete and cinder block walls, glass block windows and particle board ceiling. They played Pantera and Sepultura and Sabbath and Cannibal Corpse and his brother took the mic while sitting at the drums between songs and said I see a lot of you standing against the wall and not in the pit. And after a pause, It’s a real shame. His brother didn’t get the gig with White Zombie, I’m not a hundred percent sure if he ever even got an audition, but Joe remarked nonetheless that he, Joe, was planning to move to the city next year after he graduated from high school because that’s where everything happens and that Jason should head out there if, he wanted to.

Jason went to undergrad and then started a PhD in English at a massive school nestled in a hillside in a town of 20,000 in a state where a college football game is the NBA, the NFL and the MLB all rolled up into one every Saturday in the fall. A year into his PhD the wheels came off what had looked to be a sure marriage and three kids with a girl whose father was a dentist in a town called Stalnaker and who herself was in the final throws of a hygienist degree and he realized at the same time that he didn’t have the stomach for a dissertation, which was supposed to be on existentialism in pop culture, which, to even think now about this topic and the proposal he submitted and had approved, makes him dyspeptic. In a fantastic move of pure caprice, he moved to the city in the fall of 2000, to write, he told his parents and began looking for work (he had nothing lined up and simply drove across the country with a carload of books and clothes). When 9/11 happened he was asleep, sleeping off his usual 12’er from the previous night and he realized while watching the story unfold on television that the world had changed and that he was an aspiring writer and that he had absolutely no venue to participate in the biggest journalistic event of his lifetime and that maybe this was pretty undeniable evidence that he ought to do something else. His father had basically tapped out of his marriage when Jason was a senior in high school: his sister had gone off to college the year before and the old man, premeditated or not Jason never had the chance to ask him, up and moved out, moved across town into an apartment and bought a motorcycle, leaving his mother the car and Jason the truck. A month later he was dead, having wrapped the bike around a tree down by the Cuyahoga River riding around midnight. His father had been off the drink since Jason was in middle school and a tox screen came up negative. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, so it was quick, everyone spared protracted vigils. The man had no formal training beyond high school although he could seemingly fix anything mechanical, yet he lacked the soft disdain and uneasiness espoused by the self-taught around those who had gone to school. His father thought it was a great thing that his son loved books, even though he had no use for them himself, preferring to learn by teaching himself and the closest he ever came to scorn or almost passing judgment on his son’s comprehensive ineptitude with all things mechanical1 – with using his hands to actually make something work—came when Jason was 15 and had just purchased a first beater that needed a brake job and oil change and had invited a friend, Jason had, to come over and work with the old man on the beater in the driveway. His father told him to place the plastic funnel under the oil pan pin and when he registered in his son’s eyes a complete ignorance of where on a vehicle one might find such a feature, and the accompanying crippling shame, paused for what may have only been an extra few milliseconds, perhaps to swallow his confusion at how someone could exist in such a state, his not disdain but disappointment, probably more at himself, for somehow not imparting that knowledge, through imprinting or nurture, on his offspring, and then a millisecond later his acceptance that this was a person he ergo probably was never going to understand, his own son, but then a millisecond later there’s a John Wayne smile, contented but focused eyes and he’s saying actually why don’t you let me handle that and you guys go grab the oil off the back of my truck to save his son from losing face in front of his friend. But also save him from ever knowing his father. Sometimes you have to really be dressed down by someone to know that love is reciprocated. When the grandfathers fought the wars and the fathers worked at the factories and the children were philosophers, what then of their children? Philosophers have no business reproducing themselves was the only conclusion Jason could come to and how much different was he than a philosopher as an unemployed English major? You needed another war to reset the system but when it came, he just watched his friends go. Most days you didn’t even think about it, even dialed in as he was to news after 9/11. There was not enough time after his father moved out and before he died to process any of the whys for this occurrence and afterwards his mother refused to speak of him, not out of disrespect or hatred, he felt, but out of the sheer meaninglessness of everything that his death made so blatant. Was the purpose to raise children, to pay a mortgage, to have a career, to someday be able to buy a motorcycle and call the game on your marriage? All these things he thought she must have wondered but could never get her to speak about in the first years after it happened and then whatever thread still held her to the social contract with family and community was not worth risking on this subject, until it too had finally, abruptly, snapped. There was no other woman, that much Jason had surmised. It wasn’t the old man’s style. He tapped out and just left, leaving her to stew in it. Jason didn’t even remember a blow up—his mother was the shouter, anyways. So he wakes up one early autumn morning in a city where fall doesn’t exist and turns on the TV to find out that some bastards from a cult he’s never heard of, or heard of and not paid attention to, and from a religion that half of his country could not distinguish from that practiced by Gandhi, have declared war on us, the media is telling him a couple hours later, on his country and that there would soon be hellfire raining down on that part of the world and he realized he claimed to be a writer and had nothing to say about this and no vehicle to say anything, even were he not saddled with a shameful, enveloping ignorance, and so with that realization he started applying for teaching jobs and within a month was subbing and then another few months full-time teaching freshman English literature and not thinking at all that he belonged doing anything else. No one held him to the fire. The rule for report cards was no C minuses because that was too close to a D but even when he brought home a D his mother would just frown and light a cigarette and mutter something about life being about choices. His father never said a word. The incapacitating listlessness in the absence of expectations. Not knowing what failure is, even when you are failing.

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⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Having run the experiment once and obtained quantifiable results, there was no need to repeat it, she heard her father deadpan to some of his physician cronies at a dinner party when she was 8 or 9. Just old enough to understand that she herself was the product of the experiment but too young to understand that her father’s dry humor concealed no displeasure in the results of getting her mother pregnant. That, quite simply, he had already done this and thus saw no reason to do it again. It remained, even after she was old enough to recognize all these things, one of those seeds of her personality, a single event to which she would attribute innumerable shortcomings over her two decades of education and relationships, romantic or otherwise. At four she had begun piano lessons. Her father had played the trumpet in high school and could bang out a few showtune ditties and her mother had come to love Mozart in college, she would report, Jessica’s mother would, to anyone who asked, although she didn’t play an instrument. Her mother would sit in the kitchen when the piano instructor would come to the house to teach Jessica, from age 4, on the baby grand Steinway the old man purchased before Jessica was born. But the child didn’t take to Mozart after she started learning individual movements and then whole pieces. I don’t understand, her mother would say to her, of her Chopin nocturnes and Debussy symphonies, circa age 10, why you choose to play such dreary, morose music. It’s such a tone of depression. Mozart and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, they wrote music that celebrated the virtuosity of life. The brilliance of living. Her father heard her perform for an audience precisely one time, in April 1990 when she was 12 years old, in front of ~500 people at the California Theater in San Bernardino: she gave a solo performance of the Moonlight Sonata—a compromise with her mother, who upon hearing the second movement only was indignant that her daughter was just being obstinate, but then acquiesced when she heard the third. She had won a competition the previous Fall amongst performing arts schools throughout San Bernardino county and the surrounding areas of 17 and under pianists. Most of the kids in the competition had painting or photography or sculpture or writing or performance portfolios that reached back from when they could barely tie their own shoes and many of the older ones she beat out were already on the radar of the best music schools in Boston or Berkeley or across town at USC. Jessica went to a public middle school and was admitted to the competition after her mother petitioned in person both the principal and the music director of the high school she would enter the following year. She had no portfolio and although she nor her parents knew it at the time, in less than two years she would give up piano and not touch one again for almost 20 years. She rode her bike to the auditorium 4 days a week plus Saturday for a month prior to the performance, which her teacher insisted on recording for Jessica to start building the aforementioned missing portfolio to spread more widely what everyone who heard her play that night agreed was preternatural brilliance and which was clear evidence of either divine intervention (there are pockets of the faithful in the Inland Empire) or a severe genetic mutation or mental instability but which regardless heralded a virtually limitless future career in professional performance. Her mother drove her to the theater the day of the performance, helped Jessica dress and apply some clownish makeup to counteract the stage lighting and gave her a flower for her dress and was in general just uncharacteristically sunny and agreeable and supportive and present. Remember, her mother told her as they pulled into the parking lot, you belong here. You earned this. And then in the way parents do when they don’t know when the hell to shut up, she continued, Just don’t forget to smile and I’m sure you will perform perfectly, no mistakes. As she walked on stage to welcoming applause from the full auditorium, she saw her father’s silhouette at that moment entering the back of the auditorium, his trench coat over his suit and hat in hand, having come straight from his medical office no doubt.

Athletes and artists will relate that when they perform at a certain level—with such concentration and intensity and apparent abandon—the experience does not even register in their consciousness. It’s an out of body experience that you hear about from others afterwards, a total loss of time, the performer’s conscious control rendered moot and having to essentially wake themselves up at the end of the exercise and to be convinced by others that it actually happened. Until watching a video of the performance or hearing about it from someone in the audience, the performer is not really confident that she didn’t get up there and hammer out Mary Had a Little Lamb over and over for 30 minutes. The comedian is so convinced that he stood up in front of the crowd and screamed or recited the Pledge of Allegiance and somehow hallucinated the applause and laughter. The golfer is not completely sure he didn’t take all his clothes off and run around the green making simian noises and gestures. So it was with this performance. Jessica received a 5 minute standing ovation, during which she embarrassedly took two dozen bows and was showered with praise in the hallway after the event and at the reception, for a 12 year old an even stranger concept, which was held in her honor where she fielded questions and accepted praise from adults many times her age that looked at her like some majestic tropical bird or space age humanoid robot while assaulting her with words like transcendent and brilliant and remarkable and virtuosic, all of which she knew the meaning of in the abstract but could scarcely connect them to what had just transpired. That’s what you’ve been working towards all these years, her mother told the 12-year-old girl, who had only recently had her first period and whose growth spurt had but one superficially redeeming quality of making Rachmaninoff easier to play, in a momentary interlude as they walked to the reception. All that practicing. I told you, see I told you, her ebullient instructor chimed in when she found them backstage. It really paid off. It finally paid off. Her father did not attend the reception and they got home before he did and she finished her homework and showered, still trying to process and organize the packets of memories that were appearing in her mind. She went downstairs to find him sitting in his study, her mother having retired early to some other part of the house, with his two fingers of neat Glen Morangie and whatever biography he was devouring at the time and he looked up at her when she walked in and smiled so effortlessly, exuded such warmth and ease and self-assurance and he put his book down and placed his hand on her shoulder and said, Jelly bean, that was really special today, and she decided that night to never play the piano again.

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⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Are you hiding from the turtle? Jason asked, finding her near the back wall of the property during his own solo exploration.

A little much, no? Jessica had perfected smiling with her eyes while frowning with her mouth. He seemed to her like a high school senior basketball player just grown into and not yet comfortable with his body. He was tall, 6’ 6” or 7” she guessed and because she was 6 feet tall in her socks, this placed him from the get go in the very small group of men who might not be intimidated by her size and physicality. His cheeks were red (did he even have to shave?) like he’d just finished running wind sprints or soloing the sunfish around the lighthouse off Nantucket. Every man thinks he needs to lead with wit as a stand in for prowess, but his wit was unaffected. Unrefined. He, to her, an unpolished diamond.

I heard the painting inside used to hang at LAX, he said. Was she objectively hotter than he could objectively justify flirting with? The instinct for comprehensive pairwise analysis of all major sexual phenotypes.

I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t been to a modern art museum in several years, she said. Actually, there’s just fewer people back here, she continued in answer to his original question. These things always make it necessary to talk to other people.

And here I am to prove that point.

It’s ok, I know what it sounded like but it’s not that, I’m just…not talking shop for a while is nice. She was flustered then, one of a handful of times in their entire relationship he would ever register this, for her, most foreign of conditions.

No shop. 10-4.

She had brown thick straight hair past her shoulders and dark skin. She wore no makeup—her complexion was the kind on which it always appears unnatural…the color most women try to tan their skin to be. She was tall and lean with a swimmer’s body he thought to himself, lithe arms and chiseled shoulders and back, high set calf muscles like a long-distance runner or a black woman. He could smell, in addition to her perfume, the slightest body odor that exerted some pheromonal control over him and which he suspected was not inadvertently unmasked.

It was Tuesday, no Wednesday last week. You must have heard about it. You can’t have not…the guy was flying west he was somewhere around Agora Hills or Calabasas and the engine failed or something. It was a single engine plane, like those World War II kind. He put it down right on the 101.

Ball of fire.

You’d think so, she said. But no. The guy walked away.

He didn’t hit any cars? Right in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday?

The cops must’ve seen him coming, he radioed in or whatever and they cleared it out. Lands the thing on the 101 northbound, jumps out and the thing catches fire.

I think I saw something about the fire online.

They shut down the highway for 4 hours or something.

It was the year of crossed red lines and no responses. They had found the back wall of the property and followed the solar powered LEDs along the stone path to the northwest corner of the lot. The second water feature was here on a low flagstone pedestal. He suppressed the urge to make a comment about being in a drought and they sat down on a bench placed in front, ostensibly for contemplation. The feature was in fact a black wall with water pouring over both sides from an unseen exit on the top that looked not unlike the enigmatic monument that appears in 2001 to herald quantum leaps in astral intelligence except for a raised, labial looking protrusion that gave the water’s path some randomness and irreproducibility.

There’s no way I’m getting into one of those things, she replied, as they watched the water meander. Not in self-driving mode anyway. I’ll stay sober and drive, thank you very much.

I don’t think you just, I mean you still have to control, you still drive it. It’s not totally self-driving. I mean you can grab the wheel anytime you want. It’s like a driver assist sort of thing.

I’ll stick with my old-fashioned gas guzzler.

And what is that? he replied, and then immediately regretting it. What did his father say: never ask a woman what kind of car she drives, it makes you seem materialistic.

They were disturbed then by some other guests who had wandered away from the mansion and the patio and the pool and the gardens and so they got up and decided to head back towards the house, drifting apart and into different conversations. When he looked up a while later, she was gone. Back inside the house Ed had installed a Britannica set from the 1960’s as wall decor. Waiting for the bathroom he picked up a random volume, which happened to be Cs, and scrolled to China, which came after Chimney, Chimpanzee, Chin, and before Chios, Chipmunk and Chippewa.

<Hey. Did you want to see the car?>

The text came through two days later with an option from his phone to Report Junk? and they made plans for dinner.

As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

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⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

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It’s not the sort of thing that you actively return to conversation, having by some means gotten past it, the fact that you and your father on several occasions fought quite viciously, on some occasions leading your mother to call the police. Getting past it is not the same as forgetting or discarding the instincts and animosities that made you seriously attempt mortal injury to a family member. Maybe it was his mother’s cancer when they were in college that brokered a tacit truce, that fueled the new détente. His father was a lifer in the machine and his son discovered, sometime in his early teens, that the old man had maneuvered himself into logistics and support as an officer in Vietnam through some never fully disclosed deal making, only to later, during the 1990’s, when his son was old enough to start asking questions, continue to bang on about the pissing and moaning of the vets from that era and how they didn’t have the patriotism and sense of duty of the Greatest Generation, capital G’s. When the events of 2001 changed ROTC from a wise financial decision and resume padder into a speaking role in the spectacular goatfuck that was the battle of Fallujah a few years later, he had no quarter for the old man’s comments and only contempt for the way he continued to lament Americans’ lack of respect for the military and their foreign adventures. When he was 14, the old man threw him through some drywall in their mother’s sitting room. The room that you never sat in, to the right when you walk in the front door of the house, with ornamental furniture, covered in plastic, where you placed guests’ jackets when they came in during the cold months. When he was 27 and the old man started up…he just left the house. The sorts of banal worries and ultimately inconsequential arguments and slights and considerations are instantly revealed for what they are when you start getting shot at.

Jason visited him when he was home between deployments that time. This one was no longer fun, it never really was that anyways, but there was reward in duty and being needed, which was now totally gone, he said. They walked down the street from his parents’ house, just wandering, Jason didn’t think he could relax in that house, and ended up reaching the end of the suburban Beltway development, with its huge midcentury style colonials on sprawling green green yards and surrounded by tall, new growth forest, American flags on every house, Don’t Tread on Me flags on quite a few. NRA stickers on every Honda, every Toyota. They walked onto a manmade bluff running under the power lines on an area cleared of trees for that purpose, a corridor running over the hills towards the horizon, rising and falling with the mounds of New World earth walked not long ago by terrorists against the British empire. This is what the army does. It fucks you, he said. Jason had some premonition that he wasn’t going to see him again, that this was going to be the tour where his luck ran out and he didn’t come back or came back horribly changed. You said to me once when we were in college, I love my country but I fear my government, he said. And you were fucking right. The fucking army will fuck you, they don’t care. I am done after this. They can go fuck themselves with retirement in 10 years and promotion and hazard pay. They watched Fight Club that night, quoting every other line. There’s no way you can make that movie or write that book after 9/11, he says. There’s no way someone born after 1995 could understand how that book ever made sense. To them it’s just a story about beating people up. Later, during his time back between the first and second tours in the just war in Afghanistan, he came to visit Jason and spent the weekend watching movies and walking around the mall. Doing things that, as a military brat, he grew up loving. Every new city in every new country had malls to cater to the GI’s and their families, imported brands and imported air to breathe, the video arcade, Spencer’s Gifts, Foot Locker, Orange Julius. I got an email from a writer in Kabul last week who is now looking for a position in America, Jason told him. He was a writer and teacher, in his late 30’s but because of all the shit over there is applying to come work here as a PhD student. And so I wrote him back and said I didn’t have a position but I admire your pursuit of knowledge and learning in that terrible, in that awful situation you and your countrymen are living through. And I wished him the best because imagine the strength of his spirit to overcome that terrible lot he was cast and still seek a higher purpose, Jason said.

His friend didn’t say anything, but his back stiffened and his gaze shifted away and the weakly concealed disappointment Jason saw on his face has made him wish, every week or two since then, when his mind returns to the conversation and he thinks about how ultimately he died, torn apart by an IED during a patrol outside the Green Zone around Baghdad in advance of a visit of Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, in 2010, and he wishes he could just tell him that I get it, I understand, not everything, but more, and I’m trying to at least work out the landscape of my ignorance because the hard truth is that the more you read about something, written by people who haven’t lived it, the less you know. The more peacemakers write about war, the more likely another war becomes. It was the year In da Club and spinner rims were the shit. That spring break Jason was in Palm Beach Florida in a night club near the beach with sunburnt shoulders and salt-stiff hair drinking a beer and watching, in night vision footage, men his age jump out of a helicopter somewhere in the Levant, headed for nothing nice.

Those who can, do, his father was wont to admonish. Those who can’t, teach. And so, when Jason went to teach high school English (the county had passed an ordinance, to abate a teacher shortage and flummox the teacher’s union, that anyone with a bachelor’s degree in anything could teach anything) he felt he got the message. There’s a whole complex web of horseshit that you can tell yourself to justify taking public money to do middling work in service of putting food in your belly. Stimulating the economy, mentoring the next generation, creating jobs, my entire lifetime’s salary is less than one armored tank and how many of those do we have. Lead follow or get out of the way, they say in the ROTC and he was doing none of the three which is not ok. It’s ok to fail big his father would tell him when he was in high school, before his father bet big on a new caprice and died weeks later, but it’s never ok to be content with continuing to fail small. And so, he drew a line under it and rolled a decade of small fuck ups into one giant one, deciding to try for something authentic, right around the time he met Jessica and was threatened with permanent tethering to one failure.

Jason was leaving school after completing the following week’s lesson plans when a text came through on his phone.

<Was the whale vindictive>

He laughed silently. Texted back:

<No. He just had to kill him>

<But why. He could just dive deep and peace out, let Ahab get his>

<That’s not the way it works>

<I know>

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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

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Consumption. Transaction. Every person living like they’re the only one on earth, like the Dodgers and the Grove and Santa Monica pier and Sunset, WeHo, Venice or the Valley are realities when in fact they are tableaus, ridiculous sets that performances of lives are staged upon. There is no culture, there is nothing stable, everything vapid and vaporous and ethereal, fleeting and if you think you’re from here and connected here, you’re not, you’re moving through like everyone else, here for the weather, as confused as the tourists as to why everyone doesn’t live here. Because you can’t live here. The timeless story of redemption on the side of the bus, For Your Consideration, will be replaced by a car accident attorney’s ad with her pet dog at the end of the month. To this day when he thinks of the city even having lived here all these years when he hears a story about it and has to visualize the city in his head, it’s the corner of Colorado and Ocean, up the bluff from PCH and he is looking down from above, some drone-like panorama, panning up to look north down the coast and the sun is always setting. He had never lived by the coast, in Venice or Santa Monica or Malibu. The closest he got was West Hollywood, his first touch down in the city when he wanted to be in the middle of things and thought this was the closest he could hope to get. But there’s a frenetic stasis, like everyone’s ambition and excitement is stunned by the light and heat. Like hot dogs on rollers at the 7-Eleven checkout. When you relocate west, the experience over the first couple of weeks of wanting to strangle someone to get them out of the soma haze to get something done until they, the transplants, by the second or third month, fall into the soma haze themselves and then just chill the fuck out. Someone even told him that people threw out perfectly good conditioned and high quality furniture and he was so buzzed about the move that he didn’t pause to consider the likelihood that a place would exist where the laws of capitalism and materialism were strangely suspended or nonexistent. To then encounter the conflagration of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. The needle jockeys outside the designer shoe store. The old woman who relieved herself in the mornings outside the laundromat in the alley behind his apartment building. The teenagers in the BMW screaming past at 2 AM on the way home from the club and crashing drunkenly into a street person’s shopping cart, scattering his worldly possessions of mostly cardboard and various beverage containers, some partially full with liquids of unknown provenance, all over the sidewalk, before swerving back onto Highland and off into the night. Of the male prostitutes that hung around the In-N-Out down the street from his apartment, one of whom OD’d in the bathroom twice in one week and was the reason the manager had a keypad lock installed and changed the code twice a day. The shiksas married to Jews telling their goy friends that Jews and Muslims cannot be friends and white women married to black men telling their white friends who can use the n-word and when. He found it impossible to establish a community, a sense of permanence in the city where no one had roots and everyone was, or pretended to be, a transplant. The inescapable history of your past, your family’s past, your history…where you went to church or watched a parade or walked to the park or the pool…this tapestry of experience that made life elsewhere so intolerable and unchangeable and unforgettable found its antithesis in this place, but this was no respite. The city was a bubble just like everywhere, but it was big enough that you could easily hide. Relationships and experience—your past and present—in the city were as ephemeral as an automatically deleting SnapChat message. The mentality is the past never happened, the present doesn’t matter and the future will soon be here and gone. A schizophrenic mix of lethargy and hyperactivity: it’s no wonder the place legalized weed1 in the early 1990’s when it was nearly derailing Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. No one wanted anything to exist for any time beyond the present moment and spent all their mental energy on the next thing. What was happening was old news. Shit going on off Hollywood Blvd across from the Rainbow Room down on of the nameless side streets that looking south gave you a view of the city stretching out down the hill. When you had an affair in the Midwest it upset families and caused drama in the PTA and rumors in the congregation and accusatory looks at the grocery store, maybe even a shouting match outside the high school basketball game—people cared, there was something more tangible and hurtful and meaningful about what you could ruin in a Midwest family than what you could in any relationship here where basically, once consummated, the thing was running on fumes. Once consummated it became part of the scenery, part of the endless trip of strip malls and apartment complexes, fast food joints and laundromats interchangeable people and relationships just like any other consumable. He watched the thermometer in his car creeping from 95 to 100 as he drove past Universal Studios, then Coldwater Canyon and sat for 15 minutes to go one mile because of a crash and the associated rubbernecking on the 405. Ticking up to 103 as he passed through Tarzana and then down to 98 again as he reached Woodland Hills and Calabasas. She had picked Vanvleck because it was far enough from the 101 to have no traffic noise and enough up off the Valley floor to get away from the circuit board cluster homes, nestled in the canyons west of Topanga meaning little or no marine layer but still nice and cool on the summer mornings and almost cold on winter ones. The dash read 88 as he rounded the corner to his street and saw the late 70’s Ford pickup that as it sped away revealed itself to be a stick shift, with a surf board cockeyed across the bed, back out of his driveway and pause for a moment—considering something?—and then turn to drive off in the opposite direction further up the canyon. Who it was not: his gardener (he didn’t have one), the pool guy (he drove a Tundra and the bed obviously didn’t have a surfboard in it but was full of hoses and buckets and pool chemicals), any neighbor he knew (BMWs, Land Rovers or Subarus were de rigueur in the canyons, and all less than 3 years old).

The blessed anonymity, the release of pressure to perform by being in a big city where there’s always someone better than you at everything you could possibly want to do. People who grow up in small towns never get this experience and so think they are all princes with their own duck ponds. He claimed this was part of the reason he stayed and why he thought he could start again here. But she retorted that in fact this is a fallacy because even here, especially here in fact, she feels the need to be the best at whatever she’s doing and she’s not casting stones or anything but it could just be he’s not as ambitious. She never said these things a few short years ago. That she in fact doesn’t feel the way he does at all, that inside she feels the city is just a much bigger and more real world, no microcosm at all, with more competition in every sphere and that’s why she was there, for the stress and the adversity and to feel on top of the biggest heap, not at all to feel buried as she claimed he seemed to want to feel.