The Dark Balloon

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Life is precious and God and the Bible.

When Jesus Christ first met Mary Magdalene, they were both seniors at Bethlehem High. They were both in biology, and Jesus felt his heart lubricate and become unstuck.

“You’re Jesus, right? You dropped this pencil,” Mary said as they walked to their next class.

Jesus blushed. He was well-known throughout the school. Not for his vast knowledge of biology but because juicy paternity secrets rarely remain that for long.

“And you’re Mary, right? Pleased to meet you,” Jesus said, shaking hands. Mary’s hands felt small, soft, and warm.

“Anyway,” Mary said, “I have to run. Social studies is so far on the other side it might as well be in Gaza.”

Jesus waved as she ran away. He looked down at the pencil, which he had never seen before.

All throughout high school Jesus wondered where he belonged. Studying late through the nights, Jesus pulled good grades and an even more impressive collection of eyelid bags. His teachers all recommended him for university rather than a life of carpentry. Secretly Jesus wondered why anybody would choose four more years of solitude over the concrete bustle of a carpenter’s shop.

But Mary made it bearable. Jesus met Mary’s friends, found his social circle, and learned to open up. He started hanging out after school instead of walking home. He began to take electives because his friends were taking them rather than picking them at random. And it turned out that Jesus and Mary both wanted to go into politics. Jesus wanted to help the poor underclass while Mary wanted women to have a bigger voice in the government.

“Why would women need a bigger voice to cook in the government’s kitchens?” Jesus asked innocently, dodging a punch to the shoulder. Their friends would laugh, but behind their backs they would exchange exasperated glances.

Gradually Jesus' heart liquefied until it had expanded to fill its container. Later in life he would forget this moment where he came close to being human.

Two years and five minutes passed. Everything remained the same, except the things that were different, which did not.

Jesus stood still in front of OV Biology (Oy Vey Biology, for seniors going to university) as the other students walked around him. He bent to pick up the prom invitation that had been dropped as it was handed back to him. He stared at the card, which would not reveal to him what had been said no matter how long he stared, words he would try to recall for as long as he lived.

Peter walked up to him, having seen everything. He mumbled something, which might’ve been a joke. Jesus moved his face, which might’ve been a smile.

The two stood there well past the bell that rang in the next period, staring at the card, which was pink and hateful.

“Cheer up, Jesus. I hear she’s a whore.”

“Is that true?” Jesus asked, dully.

“No.”

Jesus crumpled the card and threw it as hard as he could against the school’s trophy display, turning it into water.

“My shoes are wet,” Peter said.

Jesus punched the wall as hard as he could, turning it into water. Jesus took off his backpack and ripped it in half, turning it into water. Jesus wrapped his fists in books and punched the glass installed in his biology classroom’s door, turning it into water. Jesus strode into class, picking up desks and chairs and terrariums and lizards and frogs and rats and abacuses and women-in-government pamphlets and tables and chalk, turning it into water.

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The Daily Show: Oscar Romero and textbooks.

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Butter-related greetings.

Nice try, butterfly.

What’s up, buttercup?

What’s the haps, buttersnaps?

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Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. day.

With an excerpt from This American Life.

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Chances, part one.

Nobody knew when the kill-safe switches first appeared. Learned historians estimated it guardedly. “A thousand years ago,” a brash young historian might say before blushing and muttering that he didn’t really know; that it could be anywhere from five to one thousand years ago; that evolutionary history was a difficult field with few if any definitive answers; that his parents were disappointed but supportive about his career choice.

But, for as long as anybody could remember, everybody had a switch.

A curious knob of nerves and membrane located right beneath the left forearm, the kill-safe switch would end the user’s life. Not temporarily, not painfully. An end; a proper end. It was customary to walk to the local kill-safe clinic. You could reserve a booth and hire cremation services for a little money—most of the cost was subsidized by people who scribbled “solution” by the word “money” in the thesaurus.

In this way, the people lived and unlived for centuries and fillenuries, a unit of time so alien to us that we could not possibly conceive of it—that is to say, quite a long time.

And now, lights.

“Lights!” cried the child, pointing skyward. The mother walked onward, carrying groceries. “Come on, Michael. Hurry up,” she says. It’s hard to count just how many extraterrestrial attempts at communication have been lost on mothers carrying groceries, but scientists have examined it, and it’s certainly “many” if not “a lot”.

The flying craft seemed to curse. “Shit!” Then the lights went off.

“Shhhh,” hissed Captain Steer. “And why’d you turn on the goddamn lights on the goddamn disco setting?”

“Clumsy hand,” muttered Admiral Klutz.

The Second Battalion’s FSS Encounter glided quietly through the sky, thankfully without any more sightings by nosy, sticky children. It glided past the forest, where grandmothers with a poor sense of real estate lived. It glided past the city, which sparkled with poverty. It glided past the river, the meadows, the farms, the unused hills. It glided past the mountains, though “collided” would be a more accurate word. It went down, with a crash. At the end, it exploded in flames. That just seemed appropriate.

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Jammies.

“Jammies”, an SNL Digital Short. (Amuricaonly, sorry internet.) (Likely to have expired on Hulu by the time you’ve read this.)

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Pitchers on the mound.

Life is a football game. Someone passes you the shuttlecock. You remember there’s a badger infestation at both end zones, so you slowly run toward the sidelines, dodging your opponents. The coach blows the whistle; you sit down to drink and regroup. Someone you recognize walks past you. You remain quiet, until he’s out of earshot, to say hello. Everybody waits for the shuttlecock to grow another tooth, as it does every inning. This time, it’s an incisor. The coach blows the whistle again. You run onto the field, waving to your fans, who—standing in the bleachers—stare silently and wait. Their unreasonable expectations buoy you, imbue you with warmth. You high five your parents, the other players can’t see you, and it is always nighttime.

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Problems.

• Candyman: I think her name is Tong-Tong or something.
• Candyman: Apparently she’s really good at physics.
• Candyman: So good that she takes five or six hours to finish problem sets that should really take no more than 1.5 hours to solve and type.
• Me: Ha, you’re just jealous of Tong-Tong’s ability to not make any Wrong-Wrongs on her physics tests.
• Candyman: hahahaha

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The fountain.

The business school building was a generous donation from the Gentrifik family. Built of marble and columns, it stood above a rectangular fountain with a statue of the Gentrifiks in the center. The fountain’s job was to spray water, much as the Gentrifiks’ job was to spray money. Water gushed from the floor, from the Gentrifiks’ eyes, from the sides, and from the air, carried by the wind as a mist. Kids played at the edges, water lapping their feet. Adults sat at the bench surrounding the fountain, admiring the fountain by reading or being absorbed in their own problems. Students exit the fat white rectangle and run down the steps. Students take off their shoes and socks and backpack and run into the fountain. Students would climb the statue in the center, slippery footholds and all. Students would take the climb all the way to the top, miles and miles above the water, above the children and adults and reading and absorbing. Students would perch on the top, fumble their pockets, and pull an orange thing of blood thinner pills. Students would ingest them all in a gulp and leap and plummet for what seemed like forever but was really ten minutes, because that’s what it took to fall all the way down, because that’s what it took for all the blood thinners to squirm their way into the students’ veins and arteries and all the other fantastical backalleys, and students would be unthinking, per usual, and students would land with a great noise—a splash and a smear—and students would lie their in the water not moving, not feeling, not doing anything really, and students would have their blood seep out quickly like hot red milk plunged into ice water and students would have their blood circulate through the fountain and students would have their five point seven three liters of blood misted over to the adults and children and reading and absorbing who would all suddenly feel the delightful same.

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The longest journey.

• Candyman: Here, the RAs have the keys to everyone’s room, so you just walk down a couple of door and get the key.
• me: A great idea that earns the college $0 and is therefore unacceptable.
• me: We can however ask the RAs at Princeton for condoms at any time.
• me: I wonder if keeping a bag of condoms on you at all times is worth the larger room and the stipend.
• me: Not to mention the wonderfully smooth and natural conversations with people who ask you for them.
• Candyman: To get our free condoms, we take a bus to the central campus, walk 10 minutes, and then enter a dingy house.
• me: hahahaha

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Scenes from traveling abroad.

• A man at the airport holding a sign that read “Wank”, growing increasingly anxious as the curiously named person for whom he was waiting never came;

• A man driving a golf cart, utilitarian, janitorial-type vehicle labeled “Logistics”, invoking perhaps a secret Logistics department where all problems miscellaneous and last-minute are solved;

• A beautiful woman of long, symmetric hair wearing a white hat and all-white clothes walking into a spot beneath a ceiling window at an airy cafeteria, then illuminated by sunlight, then walking away, then never seen again;

• A very polite child telling the airplane waitress that, yes, he would like a lemonade and his sister chiming in that, yes, she would like a lemonade as well please before the two returned to unheard conversation, though one likes to imagine they talked of the financial markets and international diplomacy before sipping their lemonades, yawning, polishing their cuff links, and reminiscing about their favorite toys.

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Graduate schooling.

From reddit:

• <IbnReddit> What is TAing?
• <sydryx> Teacher assistant … ing.

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Ukrainian band Los Colorados cover Kate Perry’s “Hot and Cold”.

Stop the world; I want to get off here. (via reddit; Wikipedia)

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Fiction.

From Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:

Mushari dutifully went looking for a copy of the book for his dossier on Eliot. No reputable bookseller had ever heard of [Kilgore] Trout. Mushari made his last try at a smut-dealer’s hole in the wall. There, amidst the rawest pornography, he found tattered copies of every book Trout had ever written. 2BRO2B, which had been published at twenty-four cents, cost him five dollars.

[Mushari] was witless enough, too, to imagine that Trout’s books were very dirty books, since they were sold for such high prices to such queer people in such a place. He didn’t understand that what Trout had in common with pornography wasn’t sex but fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world.

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Wedding.

(via MetaFilter)