Babes with big lips (1/5/96)
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I went down to the Saint James Infirmary
To see my baby there.
She was lying on a long white table
So pale. So cold. So fair.
............
Ming [flinging the lever that launches the fiery projectile]: I’ll crush all those who dare to balk me in my determination to conquer the universe!
Dale [seeing it in flight, throwing an arm before her eyes]: Oh Flash, it’s terrible!
Flash [grimly reflective]: Ming’s first harbinger of death...
............
... a heart attack. Apparently by fax from Neptune. I came back from an errand in the early evening and found her fallen back upon the couch with her headphones on, torso slightly twisted, lips slightly blue; her dog barking at her, trying to convince her to get up. — At such times, I observe, the certain knowledge of fatality is immediate and instinctive, and the silly shit you see in the television shows [CPR, atropine, paddles, action, excitement, snappy dialogue with girls with big hooters] seems completely pointless. — I tried to revive her; dialed 911 on automatic pilot; watched the EMTs go in and go out; explained everything to the cops, the coroner, and the victim assistance ladies; called her friends and her parents; and never once, not then and not for days, had I the sense that I was other than walking in my sleep...
...............
Mad Scientist [rubbing his hands together and cackling]: In your laboratories, Sire, I have perfected the Death Dust!
Ming: Perfected?! Hah! It is already capable of killing every living creature; of depopulating the universe!
Mad Scientist: That’s just it, Sire ... at present it kills everything! everybody! ... Wouldn’t it be better, Sire, if the Purple Death spared those millions of slaves to labor for you, and killed only those with intelligence enough to oppose you?
Ming: You can name your own reward if you can prove this to me...
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We wish to know how the conception of death will transform a man’s entire life, when in order to think its uncertainty he has to think it in every moment, so as to prepare himself for it. We wish to know what it means to prepare for death, since here again one must distinguish between its actual presence and the thought of it. This distinction seems to make all my preparation insignificant, if that which really comes is not that for which I prepared myself; and if it is the same, then my preparation is in its perfection identical with death itself.
[Kierkegaard:
Concluding Unscientific Postscript.]
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Let her go, let her go
God bless her
Wherever she may be
She can search the wide world over
And never find a man like me.
...............
... I’d long thought it a sophomoric triviality, you know, that existentialist sentiment that you always, as it were, drop dead in the middle of a sentence. But, like most sophomoric trivialities: it’s true...
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Mad Scientist [indicating his two experimental subjects]: This man of low intellect has the type of mind that is easily controlled by a superior will ... and this man has the type of thinking brain that exercises a will of its own! the type we must destroy!
Thinking Man: Sire! there is no dictator in the universe powerful enough to destroy — human thought!
Ming [clearly impatient]: Place them in the Dust Chamber!
...............
Figure and ground. — The patch of white, surrounded by black.
...........
When I die dress me in straightlace shoes
Boxback coat and stetson hat
Put a twenty dollar gold piece on my watch chain
So the boys will know I died standing pat.
____________The importance of being Cindy (11/11/95)
