The Commendation, and: Happy Hour

146 We had no choice but to live in a time of abrupt flowers. Oppenheimer drove a serpentine sports car. Marilyn Monroe vaporized. Our breath destroyed the old masters. Some of us wore opaque glasses to hide from the press but we’d read about ourselves the next day. Terrible things: heists gone bloody wrong; cheritable funds missing; lip-syncing; blabby, offended masseuses. So we’d make a statement: our fathers were mean, we could never determine both location and momentum, sometimes we were so frightened we turned into chalk. Then we stopped eating unsustainable fish, took a six-week crash-course in standing up straight which involved mostly writhing on the floor. If we skipped comprehension, the lessons sped by. We wrote a novel about a bunny in a spaceship, it felt like healing then a letter came saying we never stopped believing in you and it makes us feel like a mythical beast, an angel or one with the body of a lion and a head like a windowbox of chervil and dill or one of those rain forest clouds spiders and worms live in. THE COMMENDATION DEAN YOUNG 147 I was trying to read the minute hand in a ball of wire. Good times! The soundtrack was in its whoo-whoo stretch and the resolution of the satellite photos A+. I like getting e-mail on my phone so when I don’t answer my phone I can also not answer my e-mail. For as long as she could, my mother kept her identity a secret. She was so short, when she stood up her feet didn’t touch the ground. What she lacked in frontal assault, she made up in depth-charges. A dog urped up a diamond ring. I felt keenly again the loss of the special notebook, a robot riding a rhinoceros on the cover, some pages lined, some graphed, others colored and blank because my drawing of my gerbil did not win and looked like anthropomorphized Playdough illustrating a deep, third-grade pantheism they’d try to replace with the belief that everything is dead and everyone’s just a rock in an avalanche and the best you can hope is you land in the sea and the sea rubs off your rough edges and one day in the distant future a giant cockroach, sole representative of life after nuclear devastation picks you up and thinks you’re precious. You are precious. A vast amount of excitation accumulates in the tip jar, the opposite of a banana-bag emptying into a vein to help restore homeostasis. It’s comfortable in a coma. HAPPY HOUR DEAN YOUNG 148 A tree falls over, it’s tired. Hard to choose among the inhalants. Who am I? My inspiration is whatever occurs in the course of an ordinary day burning at 300,000 degrees in an underground castle pleading with the phantom dowager queen to supply me with a rocket. Like van Gogh, I have been trying to get your pants off and while he has the edge of being an artist of great renown, I have the advantage of being alive. Dreams are always truthful but as soon as I attempt to tell you mine, I become a curiosity-cabinet-headed embellisher. Anyone who thinks animals don’t lie hasn’t spent much time with a trapdoor spider. Just cross out what you don’t like in your version. Here comes the guitar. This is how stained glass windows are constructed. Don’t miss your stop. It seems you haven’t even been gone. I, however, having never left, will never come back. He acted out his knife wounds for us, a small appreciative crowd. My mother was white water. ...