I Started This Essay Before Class

Nathaniel Page

Professor George Potamianos

History 9H

May 20, 2004

I Started This Essay Before Class

The Cold War started before class today. Tensions between the Truman and Stalin administrations had been ongoing, but only flared up at about 9:45 on Thursday when Stalin demanded Truman write him an essay detailing the reasons for his offensive foreign policy. Truman refused, and the nation was put on Defense Condition 4. Meanwhile, Russian cruisers were spotted off the coast of New Guinea, suggesting an ominous alliance between the two superpowers.

Alfred P. Sloan was reported to be in negotiations with the military for defense contracts by 9:50. He was quoted as saying “If America is to win this war, we must overcome all this negotiation nonsense.” Other dignitaries chimed in. Said the body of Prescott Bush, exhumed for consultation, “I say we nuke them now and then take their money and oil. But first my bank must have access to Russian markets for war material.”

By 9:55, people were seen flooding the streets of several small eastern Oregon towns, waving American flags and revving their trucks. Signs urged Congress to restart public executions and open the hunting season early. Truman, reacting to this monumental development, immediately flew to Miner’s Gulch in Air Force One to console the crowd and meet with local leaders, including Mayor Randy Buckhorn and council members. Buckhorn reassured the President that the situation was under control and that the city was stockpiling deer rifles for the resistance.

Back in Russia, the populace was equally enthusiastic for war. Sergei Malokavokavich, caught on the street by for an interview by Radio Moscow, confirmed that mood. “Yes, we are all happy here in Russia. We all love our dear leader Joseph Stalin. Whatever he wants we will do.” Sergei’s eyes darted back and forth with excitement. Then, without a word, he hurried into the nearest building.

All over the world, people are bracing for the fun and exciting times to come. CNN news has put up “Nuke Watch” cameras everywhere around Washington so that viewers can see the spectacular destruction no matter where it hits first. Vice President Dick Cheney spoke in Texas before a crowd of 5000 U.S. Marines, pledging to torture, rape, and kill all Russian enemies to freedom. “Though the Russians may hate us, we hate them more, so kill, kill, kill!” he shouted, pumping his fist, before collapsing at the podium, dead of a heart attack.

At 10:30, after succumbing to bottle of vodka laced by the CIA with enough LSD to kill a lesser man, Stalin was dancing around the Kremlin in western African tribal attire and had declared Kwanza a national holiday. Meanwhile, Truman by this time was hopelessly strung out from a rock of crack cocaine placed in his corncob pipe by the KGB, and had summoned Marion Berry to the White House for a party also attended by rap stars Dizzy Bone and Dirt McGurt.

The Great Works of Herman Melville

Moby Dick

The Portrait of a Dick

Finnegans Dick

For Whom the Dick Tolls

A Dick of One’s Own

Dickalogues

The Tell-Tale Dick (short story)

The Dickiad

Guide for the Dicked

The Divine Dick

A Midsummer Night’s Dick

A Critique of Pure Dick

Don Dickote

Dickinson Crusoe

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dick

The Dick

The Decline and Fall of the Dick

On Dick

War and Dick

Tender is the Dick

As I Lay Dicking

Homage to Dickalonia

The Red Dick of Courage

The Scarlett Dick

Dick in America

The Origin of Dick

Hard Dicks

Crime and Dick

Madame Dick

What is Dick?

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Dick

Twilight of the Dicks

The Dicks of Wrath

The Wealth of Dicks

Selected Dicks

A General Introduction to Dick

Heart of Dickness

In Cold Dick

No Country for Old Dick

Snakes of the Lower Mississippi Delta

Corn Snake

Fly Snake

Rat Snake

Mud Snake

Hog-Nosed Snake

Hog-Nosed Corn Snake

Hog-Nosed Fly Snake

Hog-Nosed Rat Snake

Hog-Nosed Mud Snake

Rooster Snake

Hog-Nosed Rooster Snake

Muddy Rooster Snake

Bug Snake

Hoggy Mud Snake

Muddy Hog Snake

Gopher Snake

Mud-Nosed Gopher Snake

Roosting Mud Snake

Muddy Bug Snake

Hog-Nosed Muddy Cornfly Snake

Hopping Snake

Hopping Hog Snake

Yellow Snake

Hopping Yellow Hog Snake

Stinker Snake

Stinky Yellow Mud Snake

Yellow-Nosed Muddy Stinky Rooster Snake

Sucker Snake

Muddy Buggy Stinking Yellow Rat Snake

Sucker-Nosed Muddy Buggy Hopping Stinking Yellow Hog Snake

This Essay

an essay by Nathaniel Page

When I set out to write this essay, my first thought was “How shall I begin?” I knew I needed something to hook the reader in. I could begin with a shocking statement, like “In 1875, my father was eaten by a snake,” but to find a similar statement that was actually true, I feared, would be difficult. It seemed more reasonable to be honest, and start the essay where the action really started, at the beginning, when I was wondering how to start this essay.

But genre writers often begin their scenes in the middle of the action, so that the reader immediately has a stake in what is going on, before the authors flash back and fill in the back story. And with that statement, which provides a good transition for me to talk about the reason I chose to write this essay (which is, incidentally, the reason why I placed that statement there), I shall transition to a discussion of my reasons for this essay. Yes-- there is a story behind my wondering how to start this essay. That is, there was a motive for me to write this essay in the first place.

I’ll just be upfront about it. I wanted to see if I could lead a reader strait through an essay based entirely on itself. That is the thesis statement of this essay. I would build each sentence upon the previous sentences. It would be a giant pyramid scheme of an essay. That metaphor is meant to illustrate the more strait forward characterization before it; this is a common writer’s technique. In the previous few sentences I’ve created an effect by making a statement, itself based on previous statements, and then reflected on it; this pattern will end now. Do you think that the sentence before the last is a parenthetical, and that the sentence following it is a parenthetical to that? Has the last clause of the sentence before the last sentence been proven false by the sentence following it? Onto a foundation of nothing this essay would clump more and more suspense. The reader would be kept thinking “Where can he possibly go from here?” (The suspense of such a technique, though, would be severely undercut by my stating upfront my intentions, as I have done here. Was it the right thing to do? And if it wasn’t, would it be the right thing to do to erase this sentence? You are looking at the answer to those questions.)

All of which raises another question, of course. Why did I want to write such an essay? But I cannot answer that question, I’m afraid. If I told you about my deeper motive, it would call into question the honesty of the last sentence in the first paragraph of this essay, the one in which I said it would be “reasonable” and “honest” to just start the story where it started. And then, if I went back and changed that sentence, as I am doing to some of the sentences here and there in the piece as I write it, going back and moving them around (not this sentence, of course-- this sentence is exactly where it was when I first wrote it) to make it more coherent, then that would change how my transition went, and there would be a whole cascading series of changes I’d have to make through the length of the piece, possibly effecting its structure. That would not do.

For lack of alternatives, though, I’d like to continue this discussion. My reputation for honesty has been lessened somewhat already, anyway. Maybe, somewhere deep in my subconscious, I wanted the essay to be a commentary on postmodernism, insofar as it would spring from nothingness and be relentlessly self-referential. It might remind a reader who had studied philosophy of the ceaseless and seemingly pointless cogitations of that craft, the way that thought experiments, casting doubt on everything we have never thought twice about, amble further and further from tangible reality, circling back around eventually to devour their own roots, leaving everything dead.

Such an essay would illustrate the dramatic irony of such cogitations. It would draw a comparison between its own pointlessness and the pointlessness of mulling a semantic trick like “This sentence is false.” Like philosophy, it would earn a meager living off the connotations of the words it used to describe itself, on self-reflection, and on logic. I would find it humorous, and at bottom that would be the real reason for its existence, which bears the question, from what ineffable source springs humor? What causes the human face to twist up involuntarily and the human to emit animal sounds and to convulse? At the same time the essay would be attempting to be philosophical. It would be trying to “work on several levels.” The essay would have long sentences self-consciously followed by shorter ones. It would even point out that it was aware that the sort of irony it peddled was transparent and had been used to the point of cliche. The lens could always zoom further and further out, but it could probably never look at itself. Paragraphs would end with strong, short statements.

This essay is the essay of a Facebook user-- (Google Docs still calls “Facebook” a misspelled word. Passive aggressive? (Okay, I confess, I found that joke on Twitter))-- of an author living in the era of reality television, that pinnacle of post-modernity. By creating, from nothing, simply one comment, and then eliciting further comment on that one comment, and another comment on that comment, eventually opening the doors to comment from all possible personae in my imagination, I could create an almost infinite well of content. The first comment of course, is a comment on itself, a singularity of sorts, onto which all else can be built. My essay would be an incestuous orgy of comment and reflection. It would be autosarcophagous, but it would go beyond self-cannibalism by building itself on nothing first. It would be an Ouroboros of an essay! Such an essay would become the final antidote to writer’s block. Just as each of my stati, updated, contribute a fraction of a cent to Mark Zuckerberg each month, subsequent reflections of my essay could far eclipse the essay itself. This essay, if it attracted attention, would inspire whole other essays about it, and about what it meant, much improving my reputation and talked-aboutness. I can see follow up essays coming out, years later-- “‘This Essay’ 25 Years Later” for instance.

This essay suffers (suffers!) from the problem, pointed out above in reference to the lens, of the lens itself never being visible to itself, the object changing under observation, the light particle experiencing the standstill of time. The meditator who attempts to watch his own mind will become aware of this lens situation, just like it is becoming more apparent in this essay with each next sentence. It is a paradox. This essay is breaking down a bit here, so I’ll insert a margin note to break up the rhythm. This idea of the transparent process is also important, though. I ought to comment on it here. Why don’t newspapers publish the banter of their editors in regards to their stories, unless a story seems to especially merit it? Margin notes are relevant. They are a meta-narrative on the writer’s process that in itself contributes to an understanding of written work, and might even reveal a writer’s blind spots.

Then again, the Psychologist Fritz Perls suggested to patients afraid of public speaking to “take back their eyes.” The patient was to stop looking at himself as the audience saw him, which tended to make him think of himself as an object, paralysing him. Nietzsche warned against the rot of a too-inward-looking soul, a soul that might one day look at itself and realize it looked like this essay.

How to add another layer irony to his essay, how to reach the exalted state of meta-irony, a perspective of irony like the light particle’s perspective of time, like social commentator Lewis Hyde did in his book The Gift, when he claimed that criticism and commentary were “imitations of creativity.” (The Gift was criticism). The irony, unmentioned, unreflected upon, was brilliant, probably the most literary and creative moment of the book. It was an event horizon of irony. The essay changes back into the present tense. The cogitations continue, but how to make them compelling for perhaps one more paragraph?

I ask because at this point in an essay about itself, the writer will begin to come up against a growing itch in the reader to encounter some meat (or some cheese, for vegetarians, or some soy protein, for vegans) in this sandwich. This has all been building towards some kind of epiphany; the author must deliver. The reader’s interest is flagging by now. The initial conceit of an essay about itself was worth a chuckle, but can he be expected to actually follow it through another inane paragraph? That remains to be seen.

My triumph, if you are reading this sentence, is apparent. We can now say that this essay is a successful essay. How will it look on a second read? The problem, of course, is only that it is so silly and I fear, so self-indulgent, that I probably won’t show it to anyone.

Why I am the Wright Candidate for the New Yrok Times Sumer Internship

Dear Sir or Madam:

Every once in a while I glance oevr the New Yrok Times and I start dreaming about what it
would be lkie if it came ture, my dream of wroking there as a editor. I would hereby like to apply for your Sumer internship programth erfore.
In my yoUnth I read “The Jumping Forg of Calaveras county” by George Orwwell, as wwell
as “Who Moved mY Cheese?” by Dr. Spencer Johnson, 2 semenal works of journalism. And
war&Peace, a short essay by the Russin author Baskin Robbins a greta work of literatur that
won two caldecot medals. Inspired me, alright. My thesis roeport for Ms. Abbot’s english class
titled “Who Moved My Chese? & The Jumping from of Homage to Catalonia: A Constrictive
Comparation”? earned me a C++ and the eulogy “Cletus You need to sturctureyour thoaughts,
and so plese turn back it in with the better second fradt cleaning up grammer, punctuation, sand
pelling.

–Mrs. Abbot”.
I also edited my scool newspaper, the “Bohefus High Vice-Moron”. For seven years. During my
tmie there, I reported on events as dirverse as the
k

your adcepted to Squid County adult
school studying diesel heavy equipment tech! congraduationls!
From there at the age of twenty-six in my heyday and with the prime of youth I moved on tho a-
internship at the local paper “The Bohefus Noon-Time Herald”. Where I checked the
classified section for periodic mistackes at times and at other times refilled the coffee dispenser
and preformed other tasks tc=rusical to the running of a newspaper of 1500-circulation like
cranking the generator on cold mornings. Our editorials arguing fro the sudden and accidental
death of a local miscreant won several community accoldates.l For example: Editor Buffard
Boonfunt had this to say of me: “Cletus is a fine boy, alright. {Goddamn these wasps! eustice,
get me the Raid!} Keeps the toilet klean and when you want him to, goes away.”
During my time at the Noon tTmei herald”. I

revolutioniszed the layout departrment.
You can reach Mister Boonfunt at 55-342
on weekends he stays at his hunterin g cabin
otherreferences are available upn request

BRWEAKING NEWS: NEW YROK TIMES BUIDLING BLOWN UP BY DISSATISFIED EMPLOIYEE

Of the one of the one times that I felt msot enthusiastic about wreporting was when I covreed
a water leak at the main water plant building of the adjacent to the adninistartion buidling of
Bohefus, the “City Hall, if you will. I was duck hunting when the call came in : fiften hours later I
had been on the scene of the story.The water leak threatedned a major fire in the buidling, due
to the fires proximity adjacent to the leak, was not allowed to progreass by fire fitiers. The mayor
was killed. I west all night at the buidling, interviewed admisinatiors, and also fire fighters, to det.
Our paper scooped the story that morning, not counting several local blogs.

It must also be noted that I am highly active in True Not!, an advocacy organization for
linguistically challenged people. As you may be aware, linguistically challenged people are a protected class under US anti-discrimination law. In this regard I am represented by Ebenezer Cohen of Cohen, Steinberg, Cohen & Steinberg, Washington’s most litigious employment law firm.

Please see my bolg atblog.net where I uptade every five to seventeen days, with pictures of cat
doing funny things. and also, I twitter frequently and am familiar with media.
In conclusion, therefore, Jounrnalism is a long and storied profesion, and i have Long dreamt
of occupying it. From the castle of otranto to the Halls of Charles Foster Kane. My idol in
journalism. THey say print Journalism is a dying craft, but I I have I will not give up on the my
dream of being one there her. Journalis-
m needs beople who are filred up about the issues of the day. I am fired pu.

I can also take it easy on the booze (if needed. )

Thank you for your consideration.

Regards

Cletus Theodore Buckhorn, Esq.


My Epiphany

My epiphany started with my nose. I was awake in bed, late at night. I was rubbing my nose, thinking about how ridiculous it was that I had a fleshy appendage projecting from my face.

My next thoughts concerned my ears, two more fleshy appendages, and the tufts of dead cellular gunk coming out of my scalp and face. It was like I was stuck in a clown suit. Just look at the way I walk. Loping forward on preposterous limbs, like a funny little animal.

It slowly began to dawn on me how deeply raw a deal is life.

Being embodied in material form is a staggering humiliation. I am a greasy, inadequate, fragile, demanding thing. Every day I must consume other organisms and extrude smelly wastes from my abdomen. The entirety of my will and boundless idealism is encapsulated in a bloody mass of tissue, one that will shortly shrivel up and die.

I got to thinking about how, ever since I was born, I’ve been marched relentlessly into a mysterious future known only for its cruel surprises and guarantee of annihilation. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m forced forward ceaselessly like a prisoner in a death march.

And while this has all been going on, while I’ve been at the mercy of a tyrannical series of events, I’ve also been at the mercy of space, hurdling along on a grain of sand through an endless, frozen void. I’ll never escape. The proud city I live in is shifted away from the sun every year, thrust through months of freezing weather, then shifted back again to endure a series of gassy storms. I don’t even know where I am.

I don’t know much else, either, about the workings of the world around me. No one can provide me with a convincing explanation. My search for the truth will be frantic and fruitless, and will nonetheless consume me until my consciousness is summarily snuffed out.

In the morning, I went to the laundromat. To get to the laundromat, I had to lope along on my limbs, moving my physical self across the frozen ground, buffeted by cold wind. Going to wash my freshly-deteriorated clothing, I thought about my endless struggle against entropy. Everything is constantly falling apart.

Everything I love and cherish will perish. All of my works will crumble into dust. The cognitive dissonance that these realities ask me to maintain if I am to remain even halfway content is unbearable. What do I have to be grateful for? That my life is infinitesimally less miserable that those of millions of others?

Life is a cruel trap. It’s like being on a sinking ship, lost at sea, all the while compulsively climbing higher and higher into the rigging, knowing full well the futility, screaming “why? why?” at a silent infinity.

It’s time humanity considered seriously taking on these constant humiliations. I envision a day when we are free from the constraints of time, space, uncertainty, physical embodiment and entropy.

The day will come, in the future.

The Things That Should Be Done to It

My bike seat was stolen today.

I had locked my bike to a fence on Carroll Street, west of Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, because of the snow, and taken the subway into town. A hose clamp reinforced the quick-release bolt, which in turn held my bike seat in place. The thief pried the hose clamp loose to release the bolt. When I got back that evening, the hose clamp lay twisted and useless around the stump where my seat had once stood.

What can be said for the thief’s soul? Its soul is rotten like infectious bile in the colon of a pig ten weeks dead. It is decayed like the the pedals of a corpse flower buried in offal. Its mind is infected with evil like a gangrenous sore oozing puss and churning with maggots. Its psyche twists around a monolith of depravity like a choking vine. Its body pulses with a life so gross that to kill it would desecrate the executioner by his proximity.

Many things should be done to the organism that stole my bike seat. Horrors inconceivable to the collective mind of humanity should happen to it. Punishment should rain mercilessly down on every entity culpable for this cosmic moral failure. Blood should flow like a galactic gas cloud at high tide.

All the resources in the world should immediately be redirected to righting the grievance. Martial law should be declared. Uniformed paramilitary groups should fan out through the world’s metropolitan and rural areas, kicking in doors, dragging the people out, sorting through all the bike seats everywhere, finding mine, and finding and identifying the thing that perpetrated this act of evil on me.

The wisest people in every country should be brought together to ponder the most humiliating and torturous punishment in all history for the depraved thing that stole my bike seat and every tangible or intangible thing that has ever been causally or materially related to the bike seat thief. Rats should be induced to burrow through its eyes. It should be garroted like a medieval heretic. It should be impaled on a red hot Judas cradle. It’s abdomen should be sawed through lengthwise.

Anything that has ever interacted economically or biologically with the thief, ad infinitum, should be strapped to Catherine wheels and cudgelled. Its tribe should be marched across the Great Plains. Its friends and associates and classmates and customers and clients and cousins and second-cousins and third-cousins and cousins once removed and twice removed, et cetera, should be strapped to racks and stretched until their bones dislocate. Then they should be stretched until they come apart. Then their flesh should be eaten by flies, then the flies should be burned in gas ovens. Then the ovens should be smashed into ruins and forgotten.

Those who speak the language and share the cultural affiliations of the thief should be found and concentrated and bombed with nerve gas. Everyone who’s ever come into accordance with the bike seat thief on any judgement or assertion should be identified and dragged out and stomped in public, forced to take enemas of lye, baptised in microwaves, and then their families should be cut apart with dull reciprocating saws while they watched strapped in a head crusher. The whole national power grid should be devoted to running the reciprocating saws.

And then all the resources should be put towards developing a time machine, and the machine should be brought back through the thief’s ancestry one generation at at time, and each of it’s ancestors should be pilloried, forced to drink Clorox, burned at the stake, stabbed with rusty spikes, and quartered by draft horses again and again, forever. Pet animals in the vicinity and the organisms in symbiotic relationships with all the thief’s ancestor’s bodies should be inoculated with botulism and rabies and dragged out to desert plains to die of thirst. Multiple time machines should be deployed to make sure all the thief’s ancestors all through time since the dawn of the universe are constantly being violently abused.

They are all culpable.

The crack teams should root out to the last every soul that still harbors the slightest modicum of empathy for the bike-seat-stealing thing. All through time and space the gangs should roam, beating and stomping and boiling the blood of everything that ever had any connection whatsoever to the thing that stole my bike seat. Sympathizers should be dragged into the nighttime streets and shot like mangy dogs. Then the fleas on the dogs should be picked out and crushed. Then the crushed fleas should be cast into a lake of urine.

Then those who sympathise with the sympathizers should be pulled out and forced to swallow feces and then shot, and then their limp bodies should be shot again a few times for good measure, and then run through wood chippers and mixed with the vomit of a billion bed bugs and simmered in septic sludge. Everyone who dies should be marched to the lowest echelon of hell and forced to dig a lower echelon. Then anyone whose mind has ever entertained the slightest sense of forgiveness for any part of humanity or the animal or floral or fungal kingdoms related to the bike thief should be hunted down like serfs by a pack of hounds, made to run over open fields and shot down for marksmanship practice. Then their families should be charged for the ammunition.

Then the crack teams shall all commit Seppuku in unison because they will have been befouled by their very existence in the same world as the thief of my bike seat.

Members of all the organizations on whose watch this happened, including the United States government, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, INTERPOL, NATO, the AARP, and the Chamber of Commerce, should be shut up in their buildings while the buildings are soaked in gasoline and packed with Tovex and imploded upon them. Then the workers who built the buildings should be tried in a tribunal and hanged by their necks. Then the rope that hanged them should be unravelled and chewed up by dust mites. Then the farms of the farmers who fed the people who worked in the agencies on whose watch this crime was committed should be gassed until they whither and cobalt bombs should be detonated over them to spread radiation on them so they will remain dead forever.

The nations that gave birth to the thief should be attacked with hundred-megaton hydrogen bombs and neuron bombs and q-fever and Marburg virus and VX gas. Hydrogen cyanide clouds should be unleashed over the fleeing masses. Volcanoes should be drilled with MOABs and nuked until the crust of the earth shatters open and magma boils the oceans. The moon should be pulled from its orbit so that it smashes into Earth and splits the planet apart. Then the sun should be blown up in a supernova, consuming the solar system. Then the galaxy should be crashed into another galaxy, again and again until every solar system is pulverized. Then God should be torn apart by a swarm of possums. Then God’s body should be vomited back up and mixed with pubic hair and boiled in stellar plasma and vaporized. Then the fabric of space and time should be sucked into a supermassive black hole and crushed into nothingness forever.

After all that has been done, I want my bike seat back.