Parody (Warning: Vulgar)

“The extent of our strength is measured in how we fare staring at the truth.”

— Logan Zelk

After posting late last night on my Instagram Story seven ruminative selfies, each appended with essay-length brooding reflections about my incorrigibly profound solitude and fair-minded judgments about the petty, superficial interests of others, as well as a picture of a clever Friends meme and my scabbed foot for good measure, I began to nod off, thinking to myself, “How glorious it is to cut through with my prophetic mind the veil of decent society (decency being, of course, a result of Christian slave morality) and, beyond the dominion of the They, to authentically be with, especially within, the Other! … Especially when graciously endowed (like my sentences)!” Once I finally fell asleep, I was visited, overtaken, infested by — indeed, one could say, I had — a dream. But what is a dream? A dream is a child of Night….

—5 pages later—

So, in this dream, I happened to be canoodling with a splendidly curvaceous futon made of sumptuous carmine velvet, when, suddenly, by some good fortune even Pygmalion would envy, it turned not just into a woman, but into a couple of Muses, each donning bright red yoga pants. Now, you might stop me and say, “TMI dude, nobody needs to know about your futon wet dream,” but this was no ordinary wet dream; no, with me, nothing is normal; people simply do not understand the baptismal sanctity of my wet dreams, whereby which Eros himself moistens my mind with the tears of lamenting Nereids. Case in point, I learned that these women were not just any old Muses. After I recovered my bearings, engrossed as I was in my futon, they introduced themselves to me as the little-known tenth and eleventh Muses — the Muse of Prose and the Muse of Free Verse. When I inquired into why they appeared to me, each Muse began to descant on the fundaments of her craft. The Muse of Prose said to me such enlightened things about style; for instance that overstatements in bold italics pack more gesticulated ethos than il Duce; and that the semi-colon is really just a period stacked on top of a comma and thus can be used in place of both — and that em-dashes are the irresponsibly promiscuous fathers of pregnant pauses (also that I should use parentheses (lots of parentheses ( to construct a linguistic matryoshka for the layers of my thought))). The Muse of Free Verse shed even more light, showing me how to mix my metaphors like tossing a salad, making them more tightly tangled than headphone wires in a packed pocket — almost as tightly tangled as lovers — and how to nonsensically confer sensory modalities to objects to pump out smelly, blue insight. They understood, however, that I was already full of smelly, blue insight — full of pungent cheese….

—5 pages later—

Therefore we must confront death, by which I mean that we must love, by which I mean that we must look into that valley of the shadow of voluptuous cleavage wherein which, if we gently extend our hands, we will find … the heart, yes, the heart, ever beating, of sumptuous carmine velvet. This is what Nietzsche meant by amor futon.