The Flippant Replies of a Baby Gone Shopping: An Exercise in Gibberish

The writing process can be long and grueling, and often there are periods that last days or even weeks when you just can’t get yourself into the proper mindset to write. Many writers say that the best way out of such a funk is to type a stream of consciousness. That usually means writing whatever is on your mind, reflections of your day to day life. When I was about half way through Roxie, I hit such a period and I tried to employ this strategy. I initially started with observations of my life, essays about things I noticed around me. But it didn’t work. It was still too structured, still too precise. So I erased it and started again, letting go of everything, digging down to an actual stream of consciousness. What happened next was a mess, just a collection of words and phrases that can be described as nothing more than an exercise in gibberish. It was just typing, typing anything that came to mind, unedited and without order. It was stupid and incoherent and nonsensical, but at points was almost poetic. Shockingly, somehow it got me back on track, paving the way for the completion of the book. I thought long and hard about whether or not to post this one, as it contains 2,000 words that should’ve never been assembled in the first place. I apologize in advance for wasting your time:

The saints hadn’t come in from the pasture, but the milk was already warm. One more night in this field and they wouldn't be able to take any more, they wouldn't even have enough cynicism left to drive as far as Dover. But there weren't any more waiting for them anyway, just the marbled head of a wanton bear and the yellowed cab of an uzi. Fourteen times they'd tried it before, but the yogurt knot couldn't hang any lower. Was this going to be the day they'd be able to capture the flag? Or was Los Angeles just too much for them? They watched the parade from the foyer, but the dark purple glasses hung like fog in the air. Or hung like the restless spectacle of a black stallion on lost Fridays. Why did they have to drag their eggs through the computer lens? And why did it have to be that the film was so short? They had been asking for more. Not politely, but asking all the same. When they'd gotten to the intersection of the two fragrant roads, there was panic dragging out of their nostrils, almost as if poignancy was keeping them down more than their indecision. But if they'd only zipped up their coats, if they’d only sipped watermelon kernels from the synagogue, the treadmills wouldn't be begging anymore. And if they hadn't bought all that furniture, there'd be room left for their sandals on the washer. 

The elevated thrust of the nanny brought a helicopter to their mother. As if they hadn't been through enough corn salad, now they were going to be subjected to cameras as well. But was it all just a dream? Just a glimpse into the world of paddle hooves? No, it couldn't be, he decided. Who is he? He is a fletcher, a god among men. The very purpose that glue was invented in the first place. He was a travel agent, one of the originals, and time couldn't take anything from him but his chin. He was jagged, with red hair and indigo eyes, indigo like the shower cap of a backwards apothecary. But he didn't want the attention the termites were getting. He was unwilling to travel to Lebanon, but he just knew the only way down there was heritage. The sun didn't shine on Tuesdays. It was overhead now, but it was Tuesday morning or Wednesday night. And the clouds were fuller than grammar school, too many subjects to remember. He couldn't even find the pickled beets, but the salamanders were still behind him - behind him like they'd been when they were jogging in his direction, trying to sprinkle his backside in caraway seeds.  Behind him like the athlete of yore, the fine, speckled shepherd of Frankfort. What does it all mean, anyway? It means that time and space and words and language and handles can only determine so much. They can only drop a lemon water sandwich on an octopus parade. But what about the salamanders? What about the cream colored popcorn stains of the softly blanketed night? Surely there was no way a powerful son of a showman could ever wash the stars off the street. And who had put them there in the first place? Margaret owls, probably.

The winding road was too narrow for more than one belligerent to transpire. It couldn't have handled the sandled foot of an arachnid, let alone the sounds of jumbled ears. Furious, they'll say! Furious at the options to this point, the splendid little pricks spilled across the muffled coins. But alas! A newer one than yesterday's! One that will have more meaning, bring upon something centrifugal, something marshy. Could this be the end of the yearning? Of the catterwalling and stalling? Of the bragging and boobing and frangling? I don't think tomorrow has in store for it all the things it's promised. And if it does, then embrace it like Mary Todd. Who doesn't believe me? Who cares to take their own shins over the coals of sunshine, be it here or there or in the fishing boats of apple pie? The Indians aren't what we thought they were. They were cold and insolent and they liked using the toilet. They couldn't help themselves but to eat the pastries and the trout, even though they were both filled with mendacity. Corn waste tomorrow not, for the beauty and reveries have no place in pajamas. If the yellow jelly in the jar doesn't break fit, we can't ever commiserate with preachers. And maybe it doesn't sound prophetic, but maybe, just maybe, all the splendid dolls should have their own waffle crusts in the brazen fields - just put out the blue markers and ask for their tickets at the door. If none of this makes sense, then it all brings the pink fairy before the biscuit. If it all makes sense, then the teeter totter of Minnesota drowns out all the percussion.  It means that we're saved. Saved because we thought, incoherently, of the time we turned our cousin's mat steward into the calico cat of decades past. Pull the hair from the drain next time you use the toaster, you karate wielding field monster! And don't even give me any implications! They aren't worth the brand you fed them on. Wasn't there a chair in here before? Where am I supposed to put my rocket? The one from the sand store in Florida, the place where I washed my feet? And the time on the beach was exquisite. I don't remember how many parallelograms we watched. But if it isn't Irish, it's a sinner, or at least a garbage bag of sole.

So many times I was promised things. Promised dressings and shorts and new-fangled obstacles. Two clutch healers in fifteen games all spelled the rugged success of a nunchuck. But the hours kept on spinning, like the relentless destinies of yesterday, spinning on shelves made of candy and egg rolls, existing with feet and with decades. All the while, the tortilla hunter shocked us when he announced his troubled meat. Through the ditches of eggplant and the scrolls of the memoirs, too many founders came up with signs, signs of torment and scrabble, widgits and hand grenades, all regaled by the force that dwells within the sidewinder. If I left yesterday, I wouldn't be able to leave today. And then the eagles would claw at the temples of sand, trying awkwardly to carry the fists in their spokes. I leave it all uncovered, the barn and the flesh and the combine thresher and the dreams of thirsting, doing nothing but thirsting after the dumbbell fantasies of an orange cage. Quest! Quest forth with the nonsense that spews from the drain tile of origami, breathing life into a concert forgotten. Ridiculous!

But when it all becomes too much, the aching and sighing and drizzling and soccer, when it all grows to the level of pine: Too, carry the horse! And Too, mystify the wicked! Bring them all back to the banana sandwich you left on the shriveled course. Because you think that tomorrow with summon the next, but the summoner might actually be indignant, lost in the concepts and notions of drought, the flippant replies of a baby gone shopping. Lost in the udders of seafoam and loft, calendars scrawled with promises of sometimes, and graves dug for those who are shadowy and blatant. Who is it? Who is he who calls from the dresser, trying to reach the closet, unable to use anything much purpler than a stick? And the drawing sound of flesh hitting the paper, rampant and moving, coloring the field of an implausible sandwich, built on a desk of flowery waste! If an onion got displaced, it's not my fault, it's Jimmy's! He's the one who dropped the alligator in the snowflake! Power isn't written down because we bleed, it's forced upon us by the editor supreme, not the guy who builds the silo, but the one who actually makes the lampshade. Forgone conclusions are meant to be reached by dreams, number one two three five, like a foot caught in an hourglass. Romanian dictators chose the course, not the yesmen of the tallest cities - not the dreamers who got put on oxygen - not the fable tellers who pump forks for a living. See me wither? Whether not. To see, tall tree? Find the feather in the locator or use the junkie to mix the slime, you banana popsicle nugget pusher! We don't dream of the slither, but make haste for a reprehensible decision. If I lost to Francis, I lost the calculator, four times in the dryer and seven in the foundry. But I drive that way. I begin by dripping the sloth of an orange warbler into the cornucopia pen of a yurt.

Hence the scenery of a new tomorrow. The crippled publisher brought out nothing more than a serpentine sledge. Four schematics to follow and you only choose five? What then of the compass? What then of the tumbler? Brought to life only by a whimsical fascination with crows? Should he not be spared to flunk a supper of locks? And who is this new one? This woman with white tree stumps? She walks among the spoons with dashes of vinegar beneath her nostrils. She howls about cunning and sparkles and ash. She can't handle the way that the shark people frown, their insignificant toes smashed between two intrepid beginnings, succumbed to a preponderance of belligerency. But it isn't her fault, it's the fault of the cone, the needles that twitch when a pizza is freed, the underbelly of a tiger who lifts up so many bandanas it can barely find the knuckles to drink flesh from a wonton. Purple vests drag the spider claws up the chili hill with fevers. Peek at the wisdom behind the garlic and you'll see that conifers last forever and Kansas bleeds milkshakes. But I can't help but wonder what comes of the chicanery, the Martin valley stew of the switchblade blotted railcar can't possibly seek all the rivers of Kent. But it is so, it is so. And when we're lonely, we don't reach out for the sugar, we don't grab onto the scissors, we instead try only to pair an Adam's apple with yellow frogs. It wouldn't be the first time we fired a cannister up a jaded scarecrow with puppy feathers breathing so fiercely. But it may the last time we'll park in fives, three by seven. After all, eleven hundred by six is twelve if the moon crashes into potting soil. Woe the urchin! Woe the coppersmith! Woe the teakettle that reads the opera letter, for if I hold a branch against my tongue, doesn't that make me a dragnet? A rattlesnake feeds off of chairs like that. It doesn't expect us to postulate on green beads of sorrow, let alone communist dregs of falafel. Where are you now, oh mouse spirit? The gardener of fun, the hostile endearer of potato wedges? Where do you hide your asparagus baseballs? Amongst the reeds? Or still in the elbows like you did the last time you skied? Yellow candy hustle couldn't break white if he fell for it! And Polly can't spread the llama disease through the spaghetti oven.  Everybody knows that! If pieces of service cake were ever exposed to the rustle, there wouldn't be another fat dragon in the luggage rack to make a chocolate curtain zigzag through a moth crumple. But in the end, what else is there to say? The fog can't ride what an onion can't jog.

Somehow, in the end, that nonsense is what got my mind going again. I closed the file and sat back for a moment of reflection…

And then I finished the book