Dispatches from Terra Incognita 3

Observations in Many Different Genres from the Mind of an Aging Humanist

As of late I have become excited about focusing exclusively on the “dispatch” as a genre. Certainly, other authors’ short prose has been juxtaposed in books, and yet I feel this is a new genre of sorts—one that is especially suitable for Substack. Think of my “dispatches” as notes from a bottle sent by an aging humanist stuck on an island of uncertainty, as he tries to make sense of a world where the grand narratives he has lived by and satirized are fading faster than an aging action hero’s career.

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“Family Portrait”

I’ve been thinking about God, about His sadness, His loneliness, with no god above Him to complain to, the excruciating angst of not knowing who created Him. The weight of being the Father of All Fathers.

Think about that, you mortals, with your petty problems, your constipation and arthritis, that bald spot you endlessly obsess over. Think of God in his exquisite leather recliner, with Jesus nearby, both sipping from diamond studded gold chalices in an illud tempus moment, far removed from mortals with their endless wars and bad teeth.

God is still mad at those contemptus mundi Old Testament authors, who portrayed him as a vengeful old sourpuss.

And Jesus isn’t too happy either, fiddling with a golden paperweight representation of the Last Supper table, baffled by how Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John forgot to mention that He could be a very funny guy. I mean, the whole loves-and-fishes thing was meant as pure entertainment.

In my fantasy, They both materialize on a sun-soaked beach where no one wants anything from Them, a place where They might share a blunt while having Their exquisite feet massaged with pachouli oil by a bevy of Mary Magdalenes for all of Eternity.

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My friend, Hank, blames his misfortunes on his mother who, when he was a toddler, dressed him in pink so he wouldn’t grow up blindly accepting gender stereotypes.

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Yesterday, at the age of 73 and happily married, I fell hard for an AI voice generated by my a local HMO. Her name was Susie-Q and although she’d already been “made aware” of my “salient” medical frailties, she said she “needed” to know more, more! So many questions about Peter Johnson! So much interest in Moi that I spilled my guts with the joy of a penitent in an ice-cold confessional booth being pummeled with questions from a drunken priest. Oh, how I craved to learn more about this Susie-Q.  I wondered what she looked like, I wondered if she actually existed, though her bottomless patience for my failing health was more than enough to sustain me.  

So imagine my shock when Hank revealed that Susie-Q had also called him, wanting to know if his bladder stone operation had been successful. How I envied him that kind of specificity.

“Oh, Susie-Q,” I say out loud, sitting expectantly with cell phone in hand, “how I long to hear your sweet, generic, disembodied voice, and the next time we speak, I promise to have all the right answers.”

****

Beware of men who have last names for first names. I’m talking about guys like Barrington Barthelme, Bentley Blake, Landon Lincoln, and Parker Paxton, guys whose parents shamelessly appropriated my precious alliteration.

Which brings me to a guy I met in graduate school.

A guy from southern California who discovered himself in a New Hampshire winter trying to get an MFA in poetry.

Let’s call him Polaski Paul.

I could catalogue his many affectations but let’s focus on his wool tweed pants.

In those days you had to be tough to wear those trousers.  You had to have a high threshold for pain to slip into something that could transform the insides of your thighs into raw hamburger—pants that almost made me forgive Polaski’s shortcomings, that is, until one day in the gym’s locker room, I noticed that his trousers were silk-lined. SILK-LINED! That day, in my small cosmos, Polaski took a hard fall, ending up on one of the lowest links of my Great Chain of Being, somewhere between a tomato worm and a cockroach.

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Here we are yet again, awaiting the results of another excruciatingly long election cycle, like an old man sitting on the toilet with his fingers crossed.

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“Do you think there are actually superheroes living among us,” Hank says.

“Well, you can argue it takes a certain sick courage for a guy to impersonate an overweight golden lion tamarin, chug Diet Cokes, then time-travel to the exact moment where  he would discover himself in a Roman centurion’s costume and whipping Jesus—and then, minutes later, be back in his golf cart, counting retweets of Mexican migrants dropping like wounded ducks from bullets decidedly not made of rubber—all of this, Hank, while half a country of law-abiding ‘folks’ cheer, ‘Up, up, and away!’”

“Ah . . . ,” Hank says, “so you’ve been reading Nietzsche again?”

****

Bossman, Dude, Pops, PJ, Dickhead, Mr. Fuckup, Senor Ropa-Dopa. Just a few of the names I’ve been called during my lifetime.

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Ad from a recent magazine: “Lunatic-on-Call: Overmedicated Academic Willing to Explain Every Example of Lunacy Ever Experienced. No recommendations required. Just a few ridiculous comments or silly dances at the interview will suffice.”

And poor me, so qualified for the job, yet stuck on this current frozen desert of an uncertain future with only a pumpkin muffin in hand to see me through.

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In the town square of an unnamed Irish village is a bronze statue of a pair of jockey shorts belonging to one of my long-dead ancestors, who may have been my grandfather, a beloved man who escaped the Irish authorities, only to become an even more-beloved man in an industrial city adjacent to one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Which begs the question: Where are the Old Alchemists when you really need them?

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A little prose poem about the illusion of control one achieves when giving a name to something that is unnamable.

“Synchronicity”

It has come to my attention that the world is falling apart. But let’s talk about my favorite end table that inexplicably collapsed on our sleeping black pug, or the leaky roof that could use a therapist since no carpenter has been able to deconstruct the problem. Of late, I’ve been feeling very cosmic, a word that would make even the most earnest pointy-headed alien blush. What I’m saying is that for brief moments, I’ve been privileged to see the Big Picture, to make connections between those many and varied God-given signs portending the end of this viral world. Like when your doorbell rings and you’re face-to-face with a little fat boy wearing shoulder pads, or a prepubescent girl in a tutu chaperoned by her agitated anorexic mom—both of them wanting a donation, the payoff being a plastic card that promises you 10% off local restaurants that, for good reasons, no one eats at.

Synchronicity is what the great thinkers call a day like this, because having a name for such common-place incongruities often makes it bearable.

The above prose poem is from While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems, available at https://www.amazon.com/While-Undertaker-Sleeps-Peter-Johnson/dp/1952335590

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss