For virtually as long as people have existed and kept records, they have returned to a single question. What does it mean to be human? Moreover, what does it mean to be an unique individual with self-awareness, gender, and a sexual identity? First theater, with the opportunity to portray fictional characters, tackled this question, most famously in Shakespeare’s “To be, or not to be” speech.
Madness is not the only art that consumes.
In our mind, rooms, and in them the scuff
of footsteps and faces veiled in tulle.
Since before we moved houses, that old Polaroid has been sitting there, beside my mother’s bed, for as long as I can remember. I try not to look at it when I walk into her room, the walls yellow with cigarette smoke. And even after she has shown it to me, I can never seem to remember his face.
Once I was immortal,
condemned to endless mornings,
empty of the knowledge
of manmade rituals.
PODCASTDrunk Monkeys RadioBest of 1997
We dig into the best movies of 1997 in the latest episode of the Drunk Monkeys Radio Filmcast!
Mike’s great-grandmother and great-aunt decided to go to the cemetery on a Friday, and forced him to come along. He dawdled, playing in the sandbox with his orange plastic alien action figures, then pretended he could not hear when his great grandmother called. Finally, she came after him and asked him to go get a switch. “I’m gonna get a hold of ya. Get a big switch. You get a small one and it’ll be worse,” Milly, his great-grandmother, said, hands on her broad hips. At seventy she was plump, dark-tanned, wrinkled and strong. Mike remembered yesterday’s beating, after he had drunk her last Mellow Yellow. It had been hard, but short.
my parents have a joint facebook account bc my mom found out my dad was messaging someone name TexasTitties2006 in an online poker game and she lost. her. goddamn. mind and threw the tv down the stairs.
“Welcome to the abode,” John boomed.
Mark found John in his usual state: The will-o’-wisp floating in the centre of the room. His naked form perched on a mountain top of rug and fur. His feet rummaging endlessly in a shag pile beneath his toes. His right and left hands fingering the invisible strings of a most exquisite instrument, while a large vein protruded from his abdomen and bulged in syncopation with his silent symphony; throbbing, it traced upwards past his thorax, found his neck and disappeared into his gaunt face, which surveyed his gaudy kingdom.
The bridge rumbles as I drive across,
trestles shake.
Below me is yesterday's town:
abandoned mills,
brick crumbling, machinery rusting,
the industrial revolution's terminal ward
by the slow brown river.
my mom got us banned from the swimming pool at the trailer park we lived in because she punched our neighbor in the face for walking to her mailbox to get her mail in sexy lingerie.
New skiff of snow on the roads and lawns
and a full moon above the night’s overcast.
I drive past two neighbors — two older men —
shoveling slush, their sidewalks scraped clean
I had seen a counselor before nine months ago. He really only had what I told him to go on, and I only went to humor my wife to keep our marriage together. I was able to manipulate him easily, and eventually I just quit going. I didn’t think this would be any different.
Buenos Aires, 1992:
It’s a sultry February here below the equator, where Nazis are harbored, where machismo reigns. Where Argentina’s middleweight boxing champion, Carlos Monzón, flung his wife out the window to her death. “My dinner was late for the second night in a row,” Monzón explained.
Me? I’m sharpening my housewifery skills.
The ambulance drivers in this town have no clocks
in their homes. Instead, the kitchen tables bear
sandbags and bean cans
and old issues of Playboy.
Iodine adorns the night stand.
When Kate was twelve years old, she started to shrink.
Her parents didn’t notice for several months, until she stood against the kitchen doorpost and the crayon balanced on top of her head created a line that was an inch below the one from six months earlier. “Maybe we marked it wrong last time,” her mother said. “Maybe you were wearing shoes last time,” her father said, looking down at her sternly. “I think my feet are getting smaller,” Kate said.
the worst thing i ever did was spit on a mcdonald's cheeseburger that my aunt bought for me and threw it at her feet because i was mad my mom kicked me out of the house the week of my birthday for telling my hot english teacher that i had been in foster care.
Their bones keen a brittle dirge
for departed faith in possibility,
legitimacy, carried to rest
on backs bent over.
Guys, I think I’m finally over Tim Burton.
“What took you so long?” is the response I’ve been getting from at least a few people. I don’t know if that’s fair. Burton’s work from about 2000 onwards has been consistently inconsistent. We get a movie like Big Fish or Sweeney Todd. Then we get wretched turd carnivals like Dark Shadows or Alice in Wonderland, or we get something that’s not terrible per say, but also ends up being oddly unsatisfying.
The default turf where I encounter Artificial Intelligence is on the chess board – the virtual board. That is where I meet and play Chess Titans, muted, stoic, and non-living according to scientific taxonomy but conscious, even self-conscious. Which should tilt the single criterion for classifying living and non-living more towards ABBA’s in Move On:
What really makes the difference
between all dead
and living things -
the will to stay alive.
Alex Schumacher's Mr. Butterchips returns for Drunk Monkeys' April issue!