The Surrealism of the Grotesque

On February 24, 1852, the mood in Moscow was one of joyful abandon. It was Maslenitsa, the last week of licentiousness before the sacrificial severity of the Great Lent began. Red-cheeked boys threw snowballs at passing sleighs. Neighbors carried trays of sweet buttery pancakes to the beggars in the alleys. Men and women laughed heartily at the ridiculous costumes of the masqueraders on their way to the countless parties around town. There was dancing and music and drink to be had in surplus.

But inside the Talyzin mansion on Nikitsky Boulevard, an emaciated and pale-faced Nikolai sat in the dark as a sign of contradiction. The deliverance of Russia, his Russia, he saw was beyond his reach. All he could do to assist now in its redemption was to cure his own filthy soul, and he’d gotten a head start. He’d barely eaten a bite since he made confession and received the Eucharist the week before. His stomach, always a problem for him throughout his life, now crowed like a rooster. He rarely slept, waking himself to recite delirious prayers of reparation.

“You are on the right path,” Father Matvey Konstantinovsky, his spiritual advisor had told him, “but it is your ideas, your imagination, your… your writing, Nikolai, that is the source of your gravest offenses. You must renounce everything you’ve ever done.”

Dead Souls was planned to be only the first book of Nikolai Gogol’s version of the Divine Comedy. Book II, his Purgatorio, the product of the last ten years of his life, he incinerated page by page in his fireplace that night.

It was not to be his only act of destruction. Nine days later, his doctors were shocked to feel his backbone through his belly as they unsuccessfully tried to save him from his “holy anorexia.”

A Convenient Indignation

In the late spring of 1915, all of Europe was gripped with fear. In Russia, the Germans had broken the lines and were advancing through Poland. In Belgium, poison gas had been deployed by the Kaiser’s forces for the first time against the French, with horribly devastating effects. And in England, they were calculating the days until they ran out of food, suffering under the third month of a complete submarine blockade of their ports. As the lamps went out across Europe, America remained rigidly neutral, at least officially, but behind the scenes the players continued to make their plays.

Two men stood in the Yellow Drawing Room of Buckingham Palace in whispered conversation. One was the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and the other was an American envoy with no particular title except “Colonel” House.

“Tell me, Colonel,” Sir Edward spoke through a haze of smoke, “what will the Americans do if the Germans sink an ocean liner with American passengers aboard?”

Colonel House replied slowly, with a hint of East Texas drawl, “A flame of indignation would sweep across America…”

From a window on the East Façade overlooking the Mall, King George turned and addressed Colonel House.

“Suppose it was the Lusitania?”

“I think that would be enough to carry us into the war.”

Just four hours later, the RMS Lusitania was sunk by German submarine U-20, eleven miles from the coast of Ireland. 1,200 persons drowned; 195 of them Americans. One of the largest ships ever built, it went down in only eighteen minutes.

It took almost two more years, but America finally did enter the war on April 4, 1917. Absent in the government findings of the incident was that the “ocean liner” Lusitania was carrying over six million rounds of contraband ammunitions and explosives.

Breaking News: Stories to Resume Tomorrow!

In the meantime, another thanks goes out to Dan Pegg for "following" !

I Missed a Welcome!

Thanks to Fazmyn for "following" and sorry I missed you for a week!

Hoşgeldiniz!

...to bıdı bıdı and thanks for signing on!

See You All Next Year

I've had a lot of problems with Word documents, internet connections, etc. over the past few weeks and I haven't been able to compose the several stories that I had planned before the end of the month. So I'll leave you with the timeless bit by Stephen Colbert to last through Christmas and into the New Year. Godspeed to 2011, hopefully we'll see each other in a better 2012!

A Violation of the Exclusion Act

His father had kept bees, and his father before him, and his before him. Tradition spoke of his ancestors pulling honey from trees for years untold before the first Portuguese sailors had even sighted Brazil. He was well-known by the biologists at the university in Rio Claro. He was their local expert.

So it was nothing out of the ordinary when he was seen walking around the experimental sector of the agricultural research facility on October 15, 1957. Everyone who’d seen him simply assumed he’d been invited to observe the apiary while the lead scientist was away. Several of the staff had even waved to him as they passed by and no one said a word when he began to open the hives.

Dr. Warwick Kerr returned a few days later and noticed a stack of metal-screened frames propped against an outbuilding nearby his experiments. He recognized immediately what they were, he’d built them himself, but he didn’t at first understand why they were there. They should have been in the...

Dr. Kerr quickly pulled on his hood and rushed to the hives. Each one that he opened revealed the same shocking fact. They were half-emptied and the queens were gone. All of them.

“Damn...”

The unnamed local bee-keeper didn’t realize what he was doing when he removed the “excluders” that kept the queens confined to their hives. He was right in his knowledge that it was too early in the season to keep the queens and drones from entering the upper “supers” but it might have been better had he been less generous in applying his knowledge.

Off in the jungles of southeastern Brazil, twenty-six swarms of African honeybees were spreading out, finding new homes in trees and caves and barns. It wasn’t long before the first casualties appeared.

OCCUPY Pittsburgh!

Since the federal government assumed the obligations of all state liabilities the nation was faltering under the weight of crushing debt. It seemed there was no easy way out of it. Austerity was proposed but it wouldn’t be enough. A new tax had to be enacted and it would be met with resistance.

The first protests were by just a handful of malcontents. They claimed the new tax was unreasonable, that it placed undue burdens on the working man while the money-men sitting behind their desks at the mega-corporations in the east didn’t miss a meal. It almost seemed like a deliberate plan to ruin small businesses, a conspiracy, especially since the big ones were fully supportive of it.

The movement grew organically. Those with any axe to grind against big government or big money filtered in and joined the phenomenon. Secession was a hot topic among the protestors. Foreign revolutions were pointed to as models for the next stage of the movement. Posters and flyers advocating the cause dotted billboards and newspapers ran threatening letters of opposition. The authorities, outnumbered, were powerless to stem the tide of revolt; any figures that tried to assert their authority were answered with violence.

When the radicals exercised their right to freedom of assembly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, their numbers had reached 7,000; significant considering that the population of the town was only 1,000 at the time. Several buildings were burnt. Finally, the President had to act.

Around October 23, 1794, a contingent of militia (larger than the army that had defeated the British just a few years earlier) entered western Pennsylvania and began to quell the Whiskey Rebellion. Those arrested for resisting America’s first internal direct tax on its populace were all eventually pardoned but the precedent of federal sovereignty had been established.

A Gentleman's Agreement

The President was beyond frustrated and he vented to his old Chancellor.

“I’m tired, Franz. I’m 85 years old and you know I didn’t even want to be here. I’m missing my retirement and instead what am I dealing with? We’ve suffered to keep this land together since the end of the war and we’ve never been able to form a consensus in the government – not once! All I’ve done is use Article 48 to bypass the representatives in order enact the most basic of legislation. And when they manage to somehow find enough agreement to try and nullify the laws, I simply dismiss the government and call for new elections! What’s the point of even pretending that we have a Constitution?

“Since you were forced to resign the Chancellorship, I’ve been miserable. The American banks calling in their loans, hyperinflation, six million unemployed, spending cuts, higher taxes... The economy? I don’t remotely understand it and frankly I have no desire to!”

Franz consolingly frowned at his old friend.

“There is a way; a way to peace. I have secured a gentleman’s agreement with the leader of the majority party. But there is one condition...”

It has been said that a person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it. Paul von Hindenburg appointed a man to the Chancellorship in order to placate him and avoid the continued deterioration of the Weimar Republic. He inadvertently placed his nation on its fated path because a year later he was dead, and the man he legally appointed used his unique power to merge the office of Chancellor with the vacant office of President.

Neville Chamberlain also made a gentleman’s agreement with Adolf Hitler on September 29, 1938 naively intended, as before, to achieve a “peace for our time.”

The Megalithic Magician

Edward stopped his work when the frogs quit their night-chorus. Someone was prowling about. Outside the walls surrounding his property two teenage boys crept through a grove of palms:

“I’m tellin’ you Johnny, that stone floated like a balloon, right over his head.”

“Okay, but if mama finds out I sneaked out on a school night again, I’m done for.”

“Come on, you chicken; boost me up...”

A few minutes later, the two boys peered wide-eyed over the top of an 8’ coral wall. By the light of the moon, they saw a short man in coveralls standing motionless before an intricate stone machine.

“What’s that thing?” Johnny whispered.

“I don’t know. Keep it down ‘for he hears us.”

The man didn’t move for a long time and Johnny grew impatient.

“He ain’t doin’ nothin’, I’ve gotta’ go... hey... is he singin’?”

A low chant echoed through the night as the man finally broke his trance. He raised his hands into the orans position and slowly repeated a single word over and over.

“Mag-net-ismi...”

Suddenly the wheels on the machine came to life and began to turn. A shower of sparks erupted from it and a boulder beside the man shakily lifted into the air. But just as quickly as it happened, it ended. The machine went still, the rock dropped, and the man violently turned towards the boys.

“Who’s there?!” he shouted.

The boys didn’t stop running until they reached their beds.

Satisfied that he was alone again, Edward matter-of-factly went back to his block and tackle.

On December 4, 1951, after 32 years of solitary work, Edward Leedskalnin hung a sign on his front door: “Going to the hospital.” Three days later he met his end, but the mystery and legend of his Coral Castle was just beginning.

Mabuhay!

Welcome and thanks for the "follow" to YADU KARU!

"... or the goose gets it!"

A small group sat on a bench by the door of Callahan’s General Store, waiting for it to open.

“We ought to just snatch one from Town Lake,” Captain James said.

Lori shook her head, “Look, the press is already on our side, we don’t need to add a crime to whatever publicity we get.”

Mother Nature added quickly, “But there definitely has to be some kind of consequence, right? Like when those Vietnam protesters out in Berkeley threatened to burn the puppies if no one listened, right?”

The bells on the door jangled and an employee poked her head out.

“Good morning, folks!”

Diana replied with a warm smile, “Can you show us where you keep your swans?”

A few days later on May 6, 1988, the officers from the newly-formed Street People’s Advisory Council met on the banks of Barton Creek in Central Austin, Texas. About a hundred supporters were there, along with representatives from most of the major press outlets.

A man was listing his grievances behind a microphone but the attention of the reporters kept being drawn towards the bird honking away inside a parakeet cage.

“...and these are our ten demands: First, a public meeting with the mayor...”

A journalist from the Statesman leaned over to Lori, “What happened to the swan?”

Lori blushed.

“We only had $17... Who knew swans cost so much? We had to improvise...”

As the speaker wrapped up, “Either these demands are met...“, another homeless man came swimming up from the creek. He removed a Bowie knife from his mouth and yelled out, “...or the goose gets it!”

Homer the goose didn’t “get it” though, this time or the next. And his perpetual reprieves soon made Homer one of the celebrity-faces of homeless advocacy across the nation and the world.

Сардэчна запрашаем і дзякуй

Dimitri Bashko, the latest and bravest to "follow" here!

Sensical Nonsense!

Welcome and thaks for the "follow" to alix-black!

The Cosmic Conspiracy

Trudy Truelove. That was truly her name. What a name. She was Jim’s girl, in Roswell on July 2nd, 1947, anyway.

The couple reclined in the bed of Jim’s pickup some 35 miles north of town, giggling and kissing. A collection of empty beer bottles lay on the ground and bits of clothing were hanging randomly about; a shirt draped over the tailgate, a sock balancing on the mirror, a bra clinging precariously to a branch above them.

On the horizon, lightning flashed.

Trudy sat up and inhaled the ozone as the wind suddenly whooshed down from the sky.

“Jim, we better get the tent up before the weather sets in.”

Jim grunted and gently pulled at Trudy’s wrist, inviting her to lie back down.

“Sweetie, I’m serious!”

With a smiling sigh, Jim got to his feet. A long groan of thunder echoed through the hills and a streak of light unexpectedly caught his eye.

“Look at that!”

Trudy looked up just in time to see a fiery disk whiz overhead at a tremendous speed. A loud clap accompanied its disappearance over the ridge a mile or so away.

The lovers quickly dressed and sped off to investigate the crash-site of the flying saucer.

What followed proved to be a tangled web of deceit, fraud, and cover-ups. The government tends to be the usual suspect in these types of cases, but in this particular case the web was especially spun by the “witnesses.” (This version of) the story of Jim Ragsdale and the stories of nearly every single participant in what has become the colossus of all conspiracy theories don’t hold up to competing and contrary facts.

But that has never stopped man from believing, once he’s set his mind to it... or if there’s a dollar to be made.