Temerity Theatre

It was that time of the month. You know, the time when I really wanted some sex.
It was the busiest of times and it was the slowest of times, because there’s nothing rational or productive about me as an adult devoting all my energies to pursuing sex. Engels may have challenged Marx on this point, but he was a bottom anyway.
I must have been on my B game, because this quest brought me to four houses, all of which started with a B. Once through the door, I and everyone else started crying for joy. No wonder they call it Blear House. All the emotions tend toward purging, and all eyes are full of tears. It was like Zeno’s paradox. Everyone held space for everyone else, so no one could get close enough for sex, but it’s the feelings that count.
How relieved I was to arrive at Bleat House. I cracked the door and saw couples smearing goat cheese all over each other. Was it aromatherapy, or some offshoot of silent disco, but not silent because of all the bleating? In any case, I decided feta was not a good lubricant, and walked away.
Next stop was Blood House. Naturally, this was dedicated to donating plasma. It was a bit exhausting, though I did experience a long line of tiny pricks. A nurse in a very short lab coat brought me fresh juice of blood red oranges. I hope someone, somewhere, benefits from having my life force put in them.
At long last, I arrived at Bleak House. There was a one-question screener: “Are you a lawyer?” I knew what this meant. Everyone was getting fucked in this place.
As I felt beatified by this belated bliss, a moral burned in my mind.
Don’t be aggressive. Don’t be sharp. Don’t be flat. Just be natural.

Our entire civilization huddles in the shadow of the foreskin.
Whispers from ancient pottery are a grim foreshadowing of doom stemming only from thoughtless neglect.
How can we save ourselves from the grim reaper?
He laughs at all of us as he proclaims:
Never cut off tomorrow what you can cut off today!

Abraham was circumcised at age 90. Is he a jolly good fellow? That is the question.
That must have hurt. Back in the day, they didn’t have CBD gummies. Your choices were: pray or curse.

Just cut that shit off. Nowadays, we have other types of accessories for the penis.
You’re just adding one more place to clean, or god forbid, a place for germs and you could give someone a yeast infection. Don’t be that kind of douchebag!

The field lies fallow. This year, we will harvest neither cucumbers nor zucchini. There is not an eggplant to be seen growing in the entire land. In the sky, no one knows where the drinking gourd is. The laborer is in pain, sitting in bed holding his groin. The surgeon may have cut off a little too much. Don’t disrupt the agricultural cycle. This man will have to be buried, and you will trim the grass on his grave. How much easier if you had done that trim when he was a baby!

The writing was on the wall. Men will always have fewer nerve endings down there than women. Why make it worse by keeping that flip flap thing? What are you, a bird? A naked mole rat? Can you not go buy a hoodie If you want to wear a hoodie?

Yes, you can call me a Debbie Downer. In fact, I am a professional race car driver. I do not need to have to peel something off of my stick shift every time I change gears. I hope you follow, and take the necessary steps.

Too much garlic fell
In your cauldron, dearest one
Sorry if I fart

As tonight we light
Candles in that special shape
And ask for the help

Of a higher power
Or a lower some would say
Power schmower, right?

Tough to say we tried
Threw ourselves on the mercy
Of Satan and yet

I just had to be
The one who farted a lot
Fire and brimstone

Yes, in one fell swoop
Life and dignity erased
Gas incontinence

For as we all know
Veggie farts always offend
Mephistopheles

Yell for justice or
We always scream for ice cream
And we sigh alone

Laughing at trouble
Farting at the devil in
The palest moonlight

Lucifer he sniffs
Murmurs, “yo man that’s foul”
Flexes his wing things

Terror swells in me
The miasma of Brooklyn
Swirls more smellily

And away he flies
Smiling like some Totoro
As he springs aloft

For even a being
Evil, Lord of Hell itself
Likes to breathe fresh air.

The Court Martial began. Magnolia Flowerblossom Summerfield was to held in contempt.
“You have broken the cardinal rule of our nudist colony,” the magistrate fulminated.
“Flagrantly broken them,” echoed the bailiff.
“You were supposed to be in flagrante delicto, and yet, you chose to wear clothes.”
“I was trying not to be too flagrant,” she said falteringly.
“Everyone knows we here at Bain de Soleil Ranch go to great lengths to prepare our Midsummer Festivus.”
“Great, foreboding lengths,” echoed the Bailiff.
“Didn’t we braid the floral garlands? Didn’t we mull the wine? Didn’t we fill the bird feeders? Didn’t we dice the watermelon?”
“So nice we had to dice it twice,” echoed the Bailiff.
“Please, your Honor,” fumbled the Defendant.
“And yet, when it came time for the main event, the traditional Jell-o Wrestling Classic”
“Oh, sacred tradition! Oh contest that molds character,” echoed the Bailiff.
“We found, after your victory, that you had participated wearing NUDE TIGHTS!”
“How do you plead?” asked the Bailiff, anticlimactically.
“Guilty but I have an excuse,” foundered the young woman.
“Oh do you? Did we raise you that way? We are strict nudists! That’s a red flag!”
“We’re flexible but not that flexible,” echoed the Bailiff.
“Your Honor, may I approach the bench?”
“Defendant may approach, but please keep in mind that object are closer than they appear.”
“Your Honor, for your ears only, I must come clean. There’s a reason I didn’t want to get Jell-o all over my bod.”
“Come clean, is it? As I’m sure you’re aware, the winner of each match gets licked clean by the opponent who is vanquished.”
“I know, Your Honor. And believe you me, when the person you’re Jell-o wrestling is your fiancé, getting a tongue lashing is no big whoop.”
“So what is the problem?”
“They break out in a rash every time they touch cherries!”
Under his wig, the Magistrate had a Shaking My Head moment.
“So, if I understand you correctly, you wanted to be licked clean but also to spare your counterpart the allergic reaction to our all-natural, famous cherry Jell-o.”
“That is my humble wish. Cross my heart. I stand before you naked.”
“We all stand before each other naked. At least we do now. You may return to the penalty box.”
The Bailiff cleared his throat. “Has Your Honor decided?”
The Magistrate banged his gavel. “I have been made aware of some extenuating circumstances. The Defendant will not be exiled. She will be flagellated until she shakes like a bowl full of Jell-o. But we need not keep the court in session. She may be dismissed to go home and self-flagellate.
The gavel was banged. The Defendant was released. The Bailiff rose.
“Oh no,” moaned the Magistrate, “you’re not going anywhere. I want you to take this gavel and do some meat tenderizing.”

The Axis of Eggheads had determined it was time for them to strike.
The Axis had become well aware of their own fragility. It was the yoke, I mean the yolk, no sorry, I did mean the yoke that bound them to this world. So, hey, being human and having limitations is something most of learn to acknowledge. Or, instead, you could try to destroy the world. Show that world, hey, don’t fuck with me!
This was why, until recently, the Axis had been behind bars, leaving only their fans to talk about them on the Dark Web.
Oh, Darkwing Duck, come and save us from this mess! Don’t let us down. Because ducks and down. Little girls pray to you. Ryan Gosling prays to you. Darkwing, if only you were my nesting partner.
How dare you ask about the Axiom! The whole purpose of the Axiom is that it is above the horizon of questioning. Like the Noble Gases. Like Yo Yo Ma. Like Yo Mama. Like Maury Povich. Like Shostakovich.
Anyway, instead of “Release the Kraken!” someone heard “Release the Crackheads!”
Thus were the Axis of Eggheads at liberty. What a terrible idea, unless you believe in the rapture or something.
Should we give them the benefit of the doubt? If so, while we wait for the apocalypse, what should we do with the last night of our one, precious, beautiful life? Should I give you all the pleasure I know that you know that you wanted me to all this time? Or does stress give you the vaginismus? Of course, you’re not wrong. But, no matter what, let’s go out with openness and transparency. If we were made with ax wounds, let’s open up those wounds tonight.

On a small planet in the Oxygen Network Nebula, there was a man named Janet. Don’t ask, it was a Polish name that was spelled even less effectively in English.
Janet had two wives: Tate, who lived in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Tontina, of Hanover, whose motto was “surely you gesticulate!”
The wives were blissfully ignorant of each other’s existence. Tate was arguably the more modern of the wives, leaving Janet some wiggle room to arrange his comings and goings. Indeed, Janet maintained that since he was an adjunct professor at two different institutions of medium-to-higher learning, he had to travel and in some cases sleep over in different places. It was also highly convenient because Tontina, being more traditional, as she said, insisted that according to her astrological chart she was subject to occasional Wacky Wednesdays or Fucked-Up Fridays. On these days, she would scream, break plates, and annoy the neighborhood dogs. Janet believed her when she said she was going to rage, and tried to not be around on those days.
Is it easy to whittle an academic career out of the solid granite of New Hampshire? That depends! Although at first poor Janet might seem to be caught between a rock and a hard place, remember that this is New Hampshire, not Vermont. Some folks genuinely have such a hard time getting through snowy mountain roads that they de facto limit themselves to their local area. Thus, Janet could write peer-reviewed articles in one part of the state espousing radical Free Free Somewhere and then drive to his other institution and publish something else defending a completely different position.
Surprised? This can be explained by one humble theory: Libertarians don’t believe that fact checking should be an obstacle to life.
If you go snow-shoeing through the wilderness, all the while composing pleasant haiku in your head, and whistle while you work, perhaps you will be greeted by a nine-tailed fox. Or maybe, just maybe, your whistling will cause an avalanche. Many dream of a White Wedding, but not a White Funeral.
Who would miss me more, mused Janet? He could visualize Tate smoking a clove cigarette and sighing, yes, I loved him, for 7 years, and that surely has to be weighed against all the time I didn’t know him, not to say that I didn’t love him then, but I was incapable of loving him fully. And then she would ash out and, while coughing, think of the lingering love she, might feel for him two marriages on from now. Such is life and death.
Tontina, after having been told, might, instead of breaking things, put on her work gloves and, using Krazy Glue (trademarked item, never a disparagement) glue pieces of different objects together in a novel way. If life is going to go on, we must rebuild. So what if a piece of the Lighthouse of Alexandria ends up in the wall of a government building. We must reassemble. Did she even suspect that, in this way, she was even more like Janet? Janet, who, through the art of love wheedled pieces of different women, could make a new world, or at least a kind of map that resembled Settlers of Catan?
Long Live Janet! We all owned a fraction of him, just like the people of Green Bay are shareholders of the Packers NFL franchise.

The angels were busy doodling in the book of life. Not to say that they didn’t take the fate of fucked up, mortal humans seriously. Sometimes, they drew people with one eye, or with a naughty third leg, or with urine squirting out of breasts, or with a big tail that emphasized the diminutive size of something else, or with a forked penis that was facing north and south thus defeating its every intention. Angels did not understand the difference between prejudice and ignorance.
Then again, if humans planned on achieving anything, they had a funny way of showing it. Wake up, make the coffee, dawdle before drinking because they don’t want to get burned. What are you afraid of, hellfire? Just kidding! Of course you are! Dawdle some more. Maybe start writing a poem, maybe finish it next week or next year.
Diddling was about the only thing that humans did right. Diddling meant screwing, which, because it was not directed to high-stakes survival goals, proved that humans were not animals. Angels, who had neither penii nor penises, were impressed by all the diddling. They noted Oscar Wilde’s comment: The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”
If you must doddle, can you at least hurry it up? It’s so easy to fall in love, they would say. It’s so easy to fall into a pit. It’s so easy to ski downhill. It’s so easy to start the operation of compound interest. And it’s true that it’s easy to be a little pregnant which is the same as being fully pregnant. Doddling at its best.
Dandle me on your knee, that one used to say to me. And I would say, it was easier when you didn’t weigh 250 pounds. Then lie down and I will sprawl across your chest. I thought of what it would be like to take my last breath. Maybe, I ventured, we could do it with VR goggles? Then you could get dandled or diddled anywhere you want. She sighed. Do you remember when we used to close our eyes and just feel it? Try doing that in virtual reality. And so, that is why I am now writing my last will and testament. And the angels will get their claws on it very soon.

Innocuous you said
Was the name you named your cock
5 inches of fun but also stealth [note possible connection with stealth bodily invasion which is bad]

Alchemists once thought
They could make gold from something inert
Also that’s your cock

Inebriated
Smiling like Dylan Thomas
I thought of the rock
That’s above your gems
Which makes me the Chief of Staff
Liquid like the Thames

All the books I have
They are so ineffective
When I try to block
Thinking of your cock
My brain doesn’t need a foot [or heart]
Five inches is fine
No one seems to know
How to drive stick nowadays
Leave that up to you

Hello, Amalgamated Sex Change Company. How may I connect your call?
I beg your pardon? Does your mother know you use words like that?
Take it back. First of all, this is a great company. We help ameliorate the human experience:your human experience. We go beyond the binary. Because we don’t discriminate, do we? Bitch, did I say press 1 for male to female, press 2 for female.to male? I sure as Walter Mercado did not!
What if you want a change from neutral to female? Female to neutral? Female to female? Exactly. For those who like to sing “I’m every woman”. So you think it’s bullshit?
Do you know anyone who’s married and renews their vows? Or re-inks their tattoos?
Or has been circumused more than once?
We are a very amiable company. We offer the power of choice. Say what?
We have payment plans. Of course, you could sit around at home visualizing your true self. You could also visualize world peace and not do a thing to bring about world peace. What now? This call is making you amorous? You want to amalga-mate with me? You want to lose yourself in my holy of holies? You want to plug into my ecstatic electricity socket? You want to go where no man, woman or set has gone before?
You’re cute. But I only like to be objectified on alternate Wednesdays. Please hold.