Hey Chaos!
Mom’s still steamed because of Easter. She comes back to the subject after talking about Jeff’s graduation and Rachel Maddow’s undue perkiness. “As I told you yesterday, I hate the whole idea of Easter,” she says. (She told me a few days ago.) I ask why she hates it. “The idea that one person is going to atone for all our sins and save humanity,” she says, after which we talk about Fresh Direct.
A bit later I ask the reason again. “God did not have a son,” Mom says this time. “There is one God and he didn’t have any children.” Then she backpedals and says she’s being crotchety. I tell her that everyone’s got some notion that they stick at.
Mom resumes; this time it’s a summing up. “God having a son and the son taking all the suffering of the world on himself and saving the rest of us is not my idea of a religion,” she says.
Yours, Now She Tells Us
Dear Chaos Editors: “Gee up, puppydog, because that little Chinaman wants to say uno-dos-BAM.” Line from a 24-year-old’s screenplay in 1996. The “Chinaman” is a grinning clockface with bulging teeth and a pair of tilted slashes (for the eyes). “Uno-dos” because the villain habitually mismatches language and person. “Blood, be real,” he says to a post-KGB agent in hat and trench coat. “Fershteyn,” he says to an Arab petro-boss, “this you need like a bomb up the oil refinery. Zay nit aftekonen.” The “Gee up, puppydog” is directed at a black man, the massive and efficient bodyguard of a crime boss. The villain’s gripping a device that makes the clock hands jump. Hit the right hour—boom.
The bodyguard’s so efficient because the script has some ground to make up, some racial spice to atone for. More of the villain when he’s around the Russian: “Ain’t be cheddar, playa man. My jam’s freestyle the biz. The planet, the A to Z of everybody. You dig? Cry havoc, let slip the dogs of I-don’t-give-a-fuck. Bottom line: gonna be jumping”). Not to mention the wimpy sidekick who’s named Klein, the drunken slob named Ferguson, the Zoro mask found glued to the face of a dead victim. Not quite the counterpart of the Chinaman clock, which would call for a fat-faced guy with a sombrero, but still. Balancing all this is the black bodyguard. The guy’s a marvel. Huge, therefore terrifying, but never losing control, always poised to do exactly what’s necessary and just that, nothing else. Never raises his voice, which is part of the gimmick. In the end he gets the villain (icicle through the throat). “Whoa, podner,” the villain says, voice clotted. “That’s some nasty saspari—” And he falls.
Yours, It Was My Screenplay
Attention Chaos: Girls who love their little brothers. Talk to a coworker across her desk and you see her perk up and brighten, just become happy, because the subject has turned around to her little guy. You see somebody who’s sure there’s at least one person out there who’s wonderful. I think that’s a treat.
We’re trapped in a dusty, hand-me-down world; more often than not the good stuff’s going to go missing from your life. Proper feelings, feelings a person can be proud of, usually show up in manufactured form, supplied as necessary to keep various social situations afloat. But Katherine talks about her brother and how he’d skate by on grades and then get interested in a subject after the course was over and then he’d read all the books—and she’s amused and marveling, and she just seems happy there’s someone who carries on this way.
Yours, No Big Sister in His Life
Hello Chaos!
Somebody on Twitter said, in effect, how great it is that we all dress sloppy.
Counterpoint: As I get older, I regret that everyone now dresses the way I do. It makes for a hell of a landscape.
Yours, Nylon Hoodie With Sweatpants