A MORE COMPLETE UNDERSTANDING OF THE MISERY OF THE WORLD
BY CHRIS DIKEN
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Notwithstanding the implication of her cocky obstetrician, who she claimed, taking the complaint as far as an actual courtroom, had maligned her vulva with his tools, his forceps, flamboyant forcepsing, she called it, a fed line doubtless, the mother, who over the course of her life had had her birth canal ejaculated into many times and until this point with no kind of reproductive consequence, was completely totally happy when the kid was finally out, literally dragged out of her, she said during cross-examination, totally happy double XL head or not-- relieved to be relieved of the burden of carrying a child with an abnormally large cranium, a feature which upon crowning elicited murmurs in the birthroom questioning the limits of human elasticity and also predictable stereotypical comments about physiognomy, to the effect that how could the kid not grow up to be an astrophysicist or chess grandmaster or genre-defying, ostensibly race- and class-insensitive visual artist possessing a curiously prescient ability to read the art market's notoriously fickle mind with his huge noggin, which, although it became what is recognized as normally shaped after the fontanelles recovered from the claimed forceful extraction process of the obstetrician (who, after the mother's lawsuit was filed in conjunction with the lawsuits of other mothers to whom the obstetrician attended with [again, claimed] coarseness and inelegance, was indicted on several counts of battery in the widely publicized "case of the manhandled mothers," a trial during which the obstetrician wore comically oversized neckwear depicting serene children interacting with conscientious caregivers, a different scene for each day of the trial, the scenes drawn onto blank create-your-own-design novelty ties in a loose, sloppy hand, the obstetrician's hand, these wildly unrealistic cartoon figures which the jury noted as corroborating with the prosecutor's assertion of the obstetrician's carelessness), was always something that drew attention to the boy, mostly unwanted, mostly in the form of double takes and stares and the occasional light fondling, this last kind perpetrated most often by mall teens, who, regardless of location (e.g., not necessarily at the mall), while coping with hormonal onrushes, would sneak up and brush or graze his skull with bold fingers, actual skin on skin, checking to see if the thing was real or what, bringing to the fore the question of where the boy's mother was during these episodes, why wasn't she keeping an eye on his head, and in fact she was not present, but she left him with a babysitter who was distracted by beauty magazines, thereby permitting the brushing/grazing, perhaps encouraging it even, a babysitter who became obsolete once the boy began to attend school, a place free of double takes, stares and brushes/grazes because teaching tolerance and diversity was part of the school's mission statement, and it wasn't until fourth grade when all of the horseshit about tolerance and diversity began to wear a little thin on the students that the boy was approached by a classmate and told that the reason for his head's hugeness was because his mother had abused beer and cigarettes and illegal drugs during her pregnancy, the result being that the boy himself had abused them as well, an accusation that the boy found troubling initially but not long after began to agree with and actually exaggerate in order to cultivate a mystique about himself whereby he himself had been a beer/cigarette/illegal drug addict for nearly ten years now and no one else in his school had ever touched the stuff. Although he did not exhibit any unusual precociousness as the birthroom personnel had predicted, throughout high school he did endure a number of "rites of passage" style incidents which he felt gave him a more complete understanding of the misery of the world, incidents which most often transpired in the boys' locker room where varsity athletes would snap wet twisted towels at his head while he wasn't looking and then when he did look or after he felt the sharp damp sting and took off they would chase him through the labyrinth of benches and lockers and stalls and sinks, whirling the lasso-towels and threatening to submerge his head in a toilet if only it would fit, if only the high school had had the foresight to equip its stalls with oversize bowls specifically for this purpose, they made a point to yell that regardless, their school's negligence notwithstanding, they would undoubtedly make it fit, incidents that grew more sinister and punishing to the extent that the boy reclaimed religion in order to beg forgiveness for the myriad sins that he felt he had obviously committed as why else should he or anyone have to experience such daily torment, he did not know if he was the only one, reclamation in the form of wearing anew the gold cross he had received for his eighth birthday and for which his grandmother had to rig up an extra long gold chain so that he could slip it on and off over his head without fear that he might snap the links across his forehead and accidentally sever his ties with God, his grandmother actually said this to him, the severing stuff, the restored jewelry displayed at the open neck of his button-down for two days, on the second day his Advanced Placement Biology class began to study diseases and their causes and cures, the first test-case example disease mentioned in their textbook being Acute Bacterial Meningitis featuring symptoms in the infant of dehydration, vomiting and a substantial increase in intracranial pressure, this last which may be observed in the form of macrocephaly, that is, an enlarged cranium, which by all accounts is the least of an ABM infant's worries, because soon he or she will lose deep tendon reflexes, followed by circulatory collapse, followed by death, these resultant terminal effects occurring in almost all cases when treatment is not enacted immediately, all of this science engendering in the boy the thought that it was perhaps not faith that could help him, and with this the removal of the gold cross and the thankfulness for having been born under Taurus, the sign of excellent medical care, which saw the boy past the age of 18, and at 27, his then-current girlfriend, a woman devoid of the outward sexual thrust that the boy (now man) had come to prefer as a result of the extended sessions he had spent as a child ogling the secondary sex characteristics of his longtime babysitter, whose distraction via beauty magazines taught her to accentuate every curve, ample or not ample, and enunciate every syllable with moist- and breathiness, and carry herself with a kind of innocence masquerading as lasciviousness whereby her tiniest gesture or movement could be construed as an invitation to any proximal male to ravish her with utter disregard for the appropriateness of time, place or situation, on the edge of a bathroom sink or beneath an heirloom sewing table or just using whatever surface lends the greatest speed and immediacy and sexiness in accordance with what passes as sexy as far as one's dirtiest, lewdest sex fantasies are concerned, his then-current girlfriend who calculated most of her sensible passionless thoughts in agreement with the tenets of analytical logic she had learned while majoring in Applied Maths at some frigid manless liberal arts institution in New England, to what thing or things in real life math could have any possible application, the boy did not know, she suggested that it might not be such a so-called bad idea for the boy (now man) to get his head examined, not in the sense that she was making a figurative judgment call regarding his mental state, rather that perhaps he should bring his cranium to a specialist familiar with the sort of affliction or (she corrected herself) condition from which he suffered or (correcting again) endured, in that she was worried about the cranium, it seemed to be expanding, not that she had any physical proof, it was more of an eyeball measurement, which was very much unlike her because of the lack of adherence to a specific methodology, but the fact that she brought up her concern for his well-being in the first place masked and/or superseded his surprise at her sudden lack of ratiocinative thinking, these being words she used to describe her own processes, surprised in that he was glad that she was being subjective for once instead of breaking out calipers or setting up flow charts highlighting the loci in human development when any normal skull might swell regardless of affliction or condition. The fruit of the boy's (now man's) masking/supersession was that he entered a state of arousal that falsely led him to believe that his relationship with his then-current girlfriend could somehow be salvaged, although clearly it couldnít, and three years later, after a night of restful sleep and a productive morning in the studio, where he had been dealing with fleshing out some of the more personal ideas from his sketchbook, ideas based on his own feelings, the man went out and purchased lunch at the Plen-T-Full Deli, an Italian Club sandwich, a bag of potato chips and a soda, this last item which came packaged in a glass bottle as a reminder of the times when soda was considered a premium beverage, a bottle which shattered when the bus' bumper came into contact with it and presaged the explosive reaction to occur approximately one-tenth of a second later when the bus finished plowing through the lunch bag and into the man holding it, a bag held in the man's left hand and which swung sideways and forward as he stepped out from behind the parked car and began to cross the street which itself would soon be covered at least for a short span in blood, bone, and entrails, a span extended slightly as part of the man's body somehow became hooked onto the bus' bumper and was dragged the distance in which it took the bus driver to bring his vehicle to a stop, the passersby if they were listening deliberately would have been able to hear the distinct reverberation of breaking glass just before catching on to the sound of bus impacting human body, initial cracking of pelvic structure and then viscous semifluid pulverizing noises as the bus' energy was fully transferred to the body, certainly the sound of glass breaking would have tipped them off that something negative was happening or about to happen, just how negative exactly they probably couldn't have fathomed unless they were in possession of a collective pessimistic streak, or who's to say that there wouldn't be a passerby who didn't associate the sound of breaking glass with something negative, perhaps a person who doesn't believe that every little thing in life is good or bad or positive or negative, maybe some things merely are, free of reference or association, whether any particular passerby felt this way about the scene that unfolded in front of the Plen-T-Full Deli is unknown, but surely the dog that ran out into the street, whose owner relinquished leash control due to the shock of witnessing the collision, surely this dog who'd been put on a weight control program two weeks prior thereby curbing his daily intake of table scraps, found the mixture of soda and deli meats and viscera to be a strange but satisfying combination, free of connotation or value or significance. Please realize this was contributed by someone from New Jersey [Forever after at http://eyeshot.net/diken.html]
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