The Dark Balloon

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Gerard, who now has two stories about him.

Gerard can’t remember meeting Big Love. But Big Love, a large Hagrid-like blond man with cheerfully blue eyes, is Gerard’s nemesis.

BIG LOVE LIKES SITTING.

Big Love’s evil power is sitting on things. Sometimes Big Love sits on people’s chests until they can’t take it. Big Love gets up, wanders around, and comes back to sit some more.

Sometimes Big Love sits on friendships, cutting off circulation until a limb dies. When Big Love stands up, the necrotized issue travels throughout the friendship, tiny little bits of resentment, anger, and jealousy. Death by a million little pieces of necrotized tissue.

BIG LOVE MAKES MISTAKES SOMETIMES.

Big Love has been known to sit on two people at once, fusing their chests, sometimes permanently. These pairs of people must then live together and share the maps they’ve made of their own souls to each other. Big Love tries not to do this too much.

BIG LOVE HAS A REPUTATION TO PROTECT.

Big Love’s other evil power is removing taste from food as soon as Big Love leaves the room.

GERARD HAS NO TROUBLE TRACKING DOWN BIG LOVE.

Gerard has a keen eye for the person in the group of friends who stares at his hands and feet while everybody’s having fun, the person who always laughs a few moments behind, or the person whose smile seems thin and difficult. Gerard has had no trouble seeing these signs ever since Gerard began wearing contacts.

BUT YOU NEED MORE THAN CONTACTS.

Gerard remembers kneeling on the lawn in front of a boy and a girl, a messy scene in the aftermath of Big Love and his sidekick Unrequited Love. Gerard kneels and looks at both in the eyes. To the girl, Gerard says in perfect French: “You must know—”

The boy and the girl, children of expatriates, interrupt and tell him they do not know French. So Gerard switches to accented English and addresses the girl again:

“You must know that everything heals with time. You must know that your soul’s foam will gradually reshape and form better molds for different, better people who will navigate them with better maps. You must know that the time machine we are given, the one that moves one second per second, is not shabby, not shabby at all.”

The girl looks at Gerard, smiles radiantly, brushes back a strand of her shoulder-length hair beneath her ear, and runs off to play in the wind and sand.

HOW GERARD WAS ABLE TO GET RID OF BIG LOVE.

Gerard snapped a twig off of the orange tree growing on the lawn. He threw it at Big Love. Big Love is finicky and hates oranges.

THE GIRL SMELLS OF SUNSHINE AND BUOYANCY.

Gerard turns to the boy.

“As for you, ….”

Gerard carefully inspects the boy.

“Ah, you were in love all along because of this.”

He reaches behind the boy’s elbow and flips a switch.

“All along, all you had to do was flip the switch. It was that simple, all along.”

Gerard pats the boy on the hand and stands up. He walks off the grass and onto the driveway. He jogs around the block and is gone.

WHEN GERARD STANDS UP, HIS PANTS SLIGHTLY RUSTLE.

The boy looks around. Nobody is watching. He looks at the switch behind his elbow. Carefully he flicks it back into its original position. He listens to the gears turning inside him.

SOMETIMES THAT IS GOOD ENOUGH.

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Wedding.

(via MetaFilter)

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How to make money from: love.

As you know, I like to think of The Dark Balloon as a place where you can come, set your suitcases down, and get some sound financial advice. As part of my continuing effort to turn you from a poor orphaned elfling into a rich orphaned elfling, I’ve compiled lists of ways you can make money off of simple household items. Today’s household item: love.

• You kidnap your rivals’ girlfriends, leaving a business card that contains only the URL of your website. The website is a Netflix knock-off for parts of said girlfriends. After signing up, users can choose to spend unlimited time with two queued parts, and then return them to receive the next two parts. Is this week more of a thigh-and-waist or elbows-and-fingers? Choose carefully! Your first month is a free trial. There is also an “Instant Watch” feature but, really, it’s just a gruesome photo gallery.

• At a bar, you wait for a woman to spill a drink on you. You create an optical illusion in which the woman thinks you are giving off electrical sparks. You introduce yourself in a robotic voice. She introduces herself, intrigued by your metallic accent. She asks you about it; you tell her you are a robot—a love robot. You two hit it off. Your relationship quickly progresses, but she knows deep down inside in her heart of hearts—she is part bovine—that your callous lack of emotional ability will stymie all hopes of true love. You tell her there’s a wonderful robot artificer who is willing to upgrade your emotional circuits but it’s too much to afford and you only have half the money saved up. She takes this news sadly. One day, she surprises you with the other half. She has been cutting corners and saving up ever since you told her about the miraculous surgery. Mechanically, you thank her as heartfelt as you can; she knows that in a few hours you will be able to truly express your feelings. You run away with the money. She dies alone, in poverty. As time progresses, you realize your heart has solidified during this long confidence game and, in a fit of irony, you become the robot you always pretended to be.

• You open an amusement park where visitors pay money to experience love. The nearby people are surprised; they had not seen nor heard the construction. Everybody comes for a look-see; you generously charge $5 for admission. At the entrance, the most wonderful fried foods are offered, from sweet to spicy, from juicy to crunchy. Visitors engorge themselves, and the food seems to always have the same warm, giddy effect on everybody, as if all the troubles in the world had melted away, as if nothing else mattered but that sensation of ecstatic happiness. The people amble toward the rides, knowing the emotion will never end. But no matter which ride visitors choose—be it the merry-go-round, the hula hoops, or the roller coaster—they end up vomiting. People begin looking for trash cans but there are none. Soon, vomit covers the entire ground and then the booths and then the rides themselves. As visitors wade through the Katrinaesque splurge toward the entrance, which turns out to be the only exit, they find you, the ticket taker, are gone, and so is that feeling of life and humanity that had so enraptured them earlier. Now they only feel hollow and aimless. And they return back to their prosaic, loveless lives while you escape with the money to your prosaic, loveless life, hoping the stench of dirty money can mask the stench of a dirty conscience—but it never will.

• You put yourself in a cage and hire somebody to paint a sign next to it. The sign would read “World’s Worst Person”, and you could have someone charge tourists $5 to watch you silently dance in uneven circles.

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Backsass.

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The fireplace.

“I’ll see you later, Jeff.”

“No, Grandfather. Don’t go.”

“You know I have to.”

“But it’s dark outside. And cold. And icy. What if you trip?”

“I’ll be fine, Jeff.”

“What if you fall on your back? You know your back is weak, Grandfather.”

“I’ll be back before you know it.”

“What if you’re rescued by a beautiful writer? And what if you fall in love with her, her long auburn hair, her hazel eyes, her warmth and her smiles? And what if you find true love among the family you create in Tennessee, deep within a forest, secluded from civilization? Where amid the intimacy of soulmates you spend the rest of your life, touching each other’s fingers by the fire in the fireplace you so carefully construct each morning, your footsteps lingering in the snow, your humanity forever entwined between your nation of two?”

“I—I’ve never thought about it.”

“Damn right you haven’t, old man.”

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The Morton salt girl responds to an overt attempt at flirting.

Recently, I was tagged by some creepy low-life to list seven personal things about me.

1. Salt.

2. Calcium cation.

3. Silicate anion.

4. Dextrose.

5. Potassium cation.

6. Iodine anion.

7. I have a thing for the Brawny man.

I tag Prashanth and Ethan, who are my only non-molecular friends. They must begin their responses with “Dear Penthouse Forum: Recently, I was tagged by the Morton salt girl.”

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I review Everybody Loves Raymond.

Everybody Loves Raymond is a gem among sitcoms. It’s not about bratty adults, usually post-collegiate, with messy relationships (Scrubs, Friends, Graey’s Anatomy [which might as well be a huge medicine joke], How I Met Your Mother, House, The Office). It’s about a family, but not about kids (Fresh Prince, Two and a Half Men, George Lopez, The Simpsons, and the list goes on). It’s about adults in a family, which isn’t dysfunctional, which is as apparent as the difference between its finale shot—in which the family sits down for dinner—and the Arrested Development finale, pre-teaser shot—in which Michael and George-Michael sail away from their soon-to-be convicted family. It’s one of the last sitcoms that’s not afraid of love. So many shows treat love as a ten-foot high dragon with a bad breath and a crippling social awkwardness. It’s “he might love me, he might not” or “should I commit” or “doesn’t everybody deserve second chances” when you flip past prime-time sitcoms about relationships. And it’s annoying that writers can’t approach love with any kind of sentimentality or tenderness or even realism because it has to be frigging dragon with a frigging flamethrower on top of a frigging castle. In fact, the show that anywhere approaches this level of frankness in dealing with love is Pushing Daisies on ABC, and it’s being canceled after this season. (Editor’s note: Fuck you, ABC.) ELR is refreshingly, retrospectively different. Debra loves Ray, despite their flaws; Marie loves Frank, despite their flaws. The family loves each other. It’s one of the few TV shows where I’ve watched all the entire series more than four times. Because it’s radically different comedy, where you can turn on the TV and not think, “Ha ha, what horrifyingly emotionally disfigured people these are” but “What a lovely place to be.”

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The desert.

Maria is hugging Jark from behind, and they are gazing at a mirror. Behind them are their roommates. Maria’s chin is nestled in the crook of Jark’s neck, and her hair, auburn, threatens to smother them both. The room is cold, but they are warm. Their clothes are being worn, but that is now, and soon they will be without them, unencumbered and lovely.

“Who’s that handsome young man in the mirror?” Maria says, playfully. She shakes Jark from side to side. They are beautiful.

Jark grins, shyly, for even though he is in love, he is shy and guarded. He is a sensitive person.

“Oh, it’s just Joe, our sexy roommate.” Maria laughs into Jark’s neck. It tickles him, but he cannot laugh because he is genuinely affected by this slight.

And in that flash of sadness on Jark’s face Maria sees how she has hurt her friend with her insensitivity. She sees how she has become her mother, who in her last years lashed out at all those who tried to keep giving. How she cannot be the person she wants to be. How the increasing financial pressure and the likelihood of eviction are about to destroy their beautiful nation of two.

So she decides to go for broke.

She says, “You’re such a fucking man-child.”

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I kno-ow.

(via waxy.org)

Update I have converted the song to an MP3 form for downloading sensual pleasure.

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John Hodgman on the sweet memories of love in the enormity of space.

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Lateral puzzles #2: The complicated drink.

A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The bartender pulls out a gun and points it at him. The man says, “Thank you,” and walks out.

In this answer, everybody dies.

Charles rushed into the nearest bar. He looked at the bartender, straight in the eyes, and rattled off a long list of words that constituted a fancy drink served, traditionally, as part of a week-long celebration of sexuality in some Eastern European duchies. He hurriedly drank it and tried to leave.

“Not so fast, Charles,” said the bartender who, while saying this, pulled out a gun, which was dozing peacefully between the bourbon and the vodka.

“That’s a cat, Simone. But thanks anyway.” He walked out.

The bartender cursed, but it was too late. Charles had made his escape. The bartender threw the cat (Dr. Whiskers) away and leapt well over the counter, hitting the floor running.

They ran through the city night, passing by an old woman who unbeknownst to her was about to die of old age peacefully, 20 years from now. The old woman fed the pigeons because her children never called. She glanced at Charles and Simone as they ran by.

They ran through the city night, passing by the statue of Wilhelm, the city founder. Wilhelm, who had imbibed an immortality portion to prevent death only to have his political enemies bronze him to a supposed death, heard the pit-pat-puts of the footsteps on the cobbles. He sighed and re-derived the Grand Unified Theory for the 1.48e18th time.

“How’s it going, Wilhelm?” said the old woman, tottering past the man with the golden body.

“Fine. You, Agnes?” said Wilhelm.

“My back’s acting up real bad.” The old woman grunted and shuffled away.

Wilhelm loved Agnes. She was funny, and he knew she was beautiful because her voice was beautiful and even if she wasn’t he would still never stop looking at her, and if this wasn’t love what was? Wilhelm tried to send all his love to her. His love, honed by not having felt anything else inside the statue for all these years, was so strong it caused Agnes back to chronically ache. Agnes, feeling the pain every time she walked near the statue, eventually stopped frequenting Wilhelm at all in a twist of cruel, Pavlovian fate. Their love—for it was mutual—drove them apart.

Say “I love you,” goddamnit, Wilhelm thought to himself. But the embarrassment would be too much, even for a man trapped behind bronze. And so his love, like him, sat pure, cold, and untouched.

They ran through the city night, entering into a dead-end. Simone cornered Charles into an alley. “Why did you run?” she screamed at him, somewhat incoherently. “You know I need the money. I trusted you. I trusted you!”

Simone waggled the gun at him.

“Careful. Careful. You’ve never shot anybody before.” Charles tried to project a soothing tone of absolute care.

“I shot a man once, just to see what the police would do,” Simone said.

“What did they do?”

“Bleed, mostly.” But that’s not what her heart said. Her heart said this: “I love you.”

“I’M NOT HAPPY,” Charles screamed, incoherently. His heart said the same. And his hypothalamus agreed and added, “Why must I always be defined by whom I am below?”

Charles, a deer in the headlights, stared at Simone—a beautiful shaking woman with auburn hair and a gun in her hand pointed at him, shaking because she wished she had a bronze mask, shaking because it was cold inside and outside her, shaking because she knew why he was unhappy—, Charles being a man who only had the thoughts of Eastern European Carnivale running through his head, but a man, a man who had lived alone ever since his family died in the fire and he had found misshaped love in auburn elsewhere, a broken man with big brown eyes.

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Meeting new people.

This is a retort—the best kind of retort—to Jeff Bone’s “Haskell is like ‘that girl’,” as seen first on reddit.

She knew there were girls before her. Flashy girls—flashy for their time anyway—who were all pizazz and flesh, possessing neither substance nor soul. To her credit, C forgave you, which was more than anybody in the world had done. You quit those popular girls that got around with everybody sooner or later, the ones whose names were written in all capital letters. Some even remembered your name as you broke up with them.

As you replaced the receiver for that last entry in your little black database table, you felt the click in your soul. The one of loneliness, crazy regret, and echoes. Echoes of “Did I do the right thing?” “Am I with the right person?” Penniless and broke, you ran on the pure fuel C’s forgiveness. You lived because she was there when nobody else was. You beat those demons back. With a tempest and a hiss, they capitulated and went away in some dark recess of your soul.

A decade went by and then another. It was the 90s. Girls dressed more provocatively than ever before. Those demons, always prodding your conscience for ever-beautiful hairline cracks, came back. When you got home to kiss your wife C and she kissed back, you started flinching. She realized that you changed first, and it broke her in a way she never showed it for fear they would break her. She believed in you, and sadly she thought belief was all you needed. She knew you would do the right thing.

But you broke, and her forgiveness and patience followed her heart and broke too. “New problems require new solutions,” you told yourself before drowning in the liquor, the excess, the automated memory management, and the string of never-ending girls willing to turn a trick for a cheap buck—Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, D, Erlang. Or if you were short on cash, you’d flag down a shell language and have your way. You stopped looking at your wife in the eyes; it was the only way to ignore her gentle, silent pleas. You ignored the ways she tried to change: C89, C90, C99, C1x. So you packed your briefcases and one day you never came home from work. If you had, you would’ve seen C sitting at the kitchen table waiting for the kiss on the cheek that would never come …

… a strange scene lit by the fluorescent light that would never drive away the darkness.

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Stories of lugubrious romance

Susie was a romantic and believed in the notion that opposites attract. Because Susie liked math and wanted to be a teacher, she married someone who liked English and was a pedophile.

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And now: Pick-up lines that work infrequently.

• Me: I wish we were related because, then, our love would be incestuous.
• Her: We’re already siblings.
• Me: Then there is a God. Who wants us to be all sexy together.