I came across this on a piece of paper left on a subway car bench on a Manhattan bound N-train I caught at Pacific Street on my way to Union Square. The title above was the title at the top of page one. I have used it here as the title of this entry for you to read. The single sheet of lined paper was in long hand, pen, black ink. It was set up in the context of a story with a narrative preface and a subsequent series of very, very short paragraphs, one line paragraphs, several of them. So, in effect, we have before us an anonymous story with an unnamed narrator and an unnamed chief protagonist in what we could now name flash fiction because of its extreme brevity. I am here publishing it, but I am other than who you might imagine me to be; who I am is another unnamed person, this time, an editor–yes, an unnamed fictional editor of a fictional review, presenting a found manuscript, presumably fiction, if not simply an attempt at a fictional essay that never got written or again a short story never fulfilled, only what it is as it is how it is here. Whether the form as is presented here is the totality of the vision of its author or not, whether this is all that was intended is not significant for publishing it as it is. Whether the intention was such or not; this is how it appears and is how we read it, unless we want to add a number of what-ifs to the equation and discuss, discuss, discuss, not in themselves disgusting (hah, hah).
The piece begins here:
A man not so unlike any other man, perhaps even a lot like you, as you imagine yourself, not as others tell you you are, but then this has little to do with who he is in actuality because all the potentialities you and I could discuss about this man not so unlike any other man or a woman or a child or a chimpanzee (seeing as he is 98% identical with a chimpanzee in his DNA) . . . how is it not true that so much of what we do is monkey doing what another monkey does, monkey saying what another monkey says, monkey media images projected by media monkeys for other monkeys to receive the ways monkeys everywhere receive what they say and do? Questions breed questions the way not drying your shower stall breeds mildew–but then what does all of this here mean for this man not so unlike any other man when he speaks about what he imagines thinks believes affects him, as today so many people have become polarized, and Trump is only dividing us to conquer us for the money and power elite because do not think that the Democrats or the Republicans even imagine that they are opposed to one another anymore even in policy because we could not imagine that for however long we have deluded ourselves that there has been any ideological differences between Democrat or Republican, and they have no intention of doing anything for anybody at any time anywhere in America and are now fully in coalition, a government of the elite, by the elite and for the elite that shall not perish from their sights on how to fuck us in the ass and get us to say we like it.
Truth. Transcendence. Knowing. Words. What are they? How are they received?
Patriotism today is a lot like sodomy in prison.
No love and bleeding assholes.
Do you really have to be an egg to know a chicken?
If I were a carpenter I’d build a guillotine and have a big Bastille Day Bar-be-cue.,
The Falling Leaf Review 