{"id":640,"date":"2013-03-21T10:00:53","date_gmt":"2013-03-21T18:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=640"},"modified":"2013-03-28T09:16:28","modified_gmt":"2013-03-28T17:16:28","slug":"exegesis-is-masturbation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/03\/21\/exegesis-is-masturbation\/","title":{"rendered":"Exegesis is Masturbation"},"content":{"rendered":"

fiction by Jason Edwards<\/em><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re reading this book it\u2019s probably because you are student of Guy de Mont Chalice, and want to know as much about him as possible, via further study into the life of his third cousin Gregory Shellaq. This thin, tome, then, will be an utter disappointment to you, as there is nothing more to know about the author of Grendal\u2019s Progress<\/i>, Adolescence in Constantinople<\/i>, A Queen\u2019s Reverie<\/i>, and Forgetful Minions of Flower\u2019s Last Dance<\/i>. By now you\u2019ve read Watson, you\u2019ve read Everly, you\u2019ve read Tates. If you haven\u2019t, do so. And once you have, come back to this page, and be assured: you have it all. So stop reading, put this book down at once, and go chase women or sniff daffodils or do whatever your sort of person does.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re still reading, then let me be clear: I will not in the least apologize for what you are about to encounter, the vast stretches of nothing that make up the life of Gregory Shellaq and how it relates to his more famous, certainly more erudite, and if not worthy, certainly more interesting third cousin.<\/p>\n

What is, exactly, a third cousin? Doing the math suggests that since cousins share grandparents, seconds share greats, and thirds perforce share great-greats, a designation that hardly bears bearing since even with this blasted century\u2019s medical advancements in advancing the time spent wasting away into death the fruit of the advancements nevertheless usually fail to unite an infant with even one if its father\u2019s or mother\u2019s fathers\u2019 or mothers\u2019 father\u2019s or mothers\u2019 fathers or mothers.<\/p>\n

Which is language\u2019s way of adhering to nature\u2019s nature as even while writing that last sentence I felt like an epileptic imbecile. We don\u2019t have good words for great-great-grand parentage, because great-great-grand parentage is hardly worth noting; as the only link to a third cousin, it\u2019s barely worth mentioning at all. There were people in de Mont Chalice\u2019s life much closer in blood that no one in academia has bothered with: an uncle in Pennsylvania, a niece by marriage in Romania, a half-brother who died in infancy. No one\u2019s writing books about them, either. Which is at it should be: historical criticism is bunk.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, one must paw at keyboards if one wishes to continue pawing at coeds, which as a replacement idiom for \u201cpublish or perish\u201d is far less elegant if, to be certain, however, much more accurate. And so: Gregory Shellaq. Third cousin to the only person to have won the Grand Prix de la Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Litt\u00e9raire Fantastique<\/i> three times, bank teller, time traveler.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s got you. But I must insist: it shouldn\u2019t. Yes, Gregory had a time machine, which he used for one of the most pointless endeavors imaginable. Imagine\u00a0 being in possession of a genuine time machine. It sits there in your two car garage. Your car sits in the driveway all the time, and would do even if your garage didn\u2019t have all manner of boxes and discarded bicycles and bags of old issues of France Soir<\/i> and heirloom furniture too splintery to use but too bequeathed to chuck. Because you are too lazy to carefully park your car in the garage after a long day slogging away at jobs.<\/p>\n

You already have the time machine and have sent it back in time to inspire you to build it in the first place, which, thanks to the time travelling itself, is actually the last place. You spend weekends working on it, and it goes slower than you would think, despite having itself as a model before you. It\u2019s a big round metallic thing. It\u2019s got a coned roof that points up into the rafters of your garage. It\u2019s got a door made of corrugated metal, painted red. The door has a smoky window on it. There\u2019s all manner of tubing and bundles of wire running in and out of its outer skin. Inside, for some reason, it\u2019s lined in fake animal furs. There\u2019s a computer console straight out of a 1940\u2019s version of science fiction. Think diodes, think vacuum tubes, think the sound radar screens make as the glowing green arm sweeps and occasional goes bloop.<\/p>\n

Your boss at the bank where you count out singles to old women cashing children-sent checks used to hate you, because you were so damn earnest. But lately you\u2019ve been distracted, sometimes even coming in late, and now the old boy is starting to warm up. One day, while cogitating on how to get the freon capacity matrix to synch with the chronostatis maintenance field, you accidentally give a pottering great great grandmother of 90 a stack of twenties instead of a stack of ones. She doesn\u2019t know what to do. She starts to cry. She thinks she\u2019ll be arrested. Your boss seems to enjoy her misery.<\/p>\n

He has you come into his office when your shift is over, and he offers you a drink. One of those awful liqueurs that the French were always drinking back then in the late 50s. The one made out of artichokes, maybe. He\u2019s talking about truly witheringly irrelevant quotidia, the kind that explains how the French could have invented the single greatest word in any language: ennui. That\u2019s what Sartre meant when said what hell is.<\/p>\n

You drink the foul stuff and nod as appropriate, it\u2019s obvious as hell you\u2019re not paying attention to what he\u2019s saying, because you\u2019ll have to stop by the Bricolage on the way home to pick up some aluminum strips and a few demagnetized soldering irons (you keep melting them because the jockey switches aren\u2019t balanced right and the iridium chamber isn\u2019t shielded correctly). Of course, the problem is, in 1957, there were no Bricolages yet. And then your boss says \u201cI\u2019d rob the place myself and pin it on one of you wankers if I thought I could get away with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, he says it in French, and who knows what the mid twentieth-century French bank manager ergot for \u201cwanker\u201d would be. But something he says clicks. Whatever the word is, it gives you an idea.\u00a0 Never mind the damned freon capacity matrix, or the stupid iridium chamber. The problem you\u2019ve been putting off for ages, the temporal basin primer, is the real mess. And that fat fuck\u2019s \u201cwanker\u201d has sparked something in your brain. Yes. Or oui, as it were. If you dimple the basin, create dimension n fractal spaces in each, you\u2019ll have tiny little warp coils, not an infinite number of them, but at the same time, a fractional infinity of them, which is, actual, itself, infinite. And you know it would work because as soon as you think of it, you have a memory of it having worked, of having finished the time machine and sending it back to yourself so you could finish it.<\/p>\n

What would you do then? I know what I would do. I would smash my rocks glass against the bank manager\u2019s face, run back to my teller\u2019s desk, unlock my cabinet, pull out fat stacks of cash, run back to the bleeding, belligerent, frankly shocked manager in his office, choke him with the bills, pour his disgusting Cynar all over him, set him on fire, kick him to keep him from beating out the flames. Discard my ruined shoes, leave, go home, finish the time machine, and use it to escape both capture and the disappointed, disaffected, disinfecting glare of my fat, boorish, cow of a wife, forever.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not what Gregory did. He just chuckled. He thanked his boss for the drink, and apologized again for the error with the old woman. Then he left. On his way home, the radio mentioned that his third cousin had won the Grand Prix de la Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Llitt\u00e9raire Fantastique<\/i> for the second time, for Constantinople<\/i>. He considered sending the man a congratulatory text message, but text messaging hadn\u2019t been invented yet.<\/p>\n

There was still plenty he could have done, at that point. He could have gone straight to his garage, yanked the temporal basin out the guts of the Dyson housing, and using a golf ball as a model, set to dimpling. And then given the thing a test run. Napoleon at Waterloo, perhaps. Victor Hugo\u2019s ravishing of his cousin Elisa. The birth of Christ, maybe, or even the alleged meteor strike that allegedly killed those goddamned alleged dinosaurs.<\/p>\n

But not Gregory, oh no, not him. He did finish the time machine. And he did get in it. He went back about 50 years, or so. How he knew the exact time, no one is sure, but then when it comes to time travel, somehow knowing things is de rigueur<\/i>. He landed in Issoire, outside a small house. It was night time. All was quiet. Candles lit up a window. Gregory walked to the window, peeked inside, most of his vision blocked by a burlap curtain. Or maybe muslin. Or maybe finest silk; I have no idea.<\/p>\n

He waited, glancing at his watch now and again, which of course had stopped working. The time machine\u2019s effect on regular, mundane chronography was predictable: it broke clocks. Behind him, said time machine loomed in the dark, tall pointed cone roof, round body swallowing moonlight, occasional wink of orange or red from the window, steam limply squirting from beneath it. And when he was ready, Gregory turned and walked and burst into the hut.<\/p>\n

He caught a fat man with knickers round his ankles mounted on his emaciated wife, there in their one-room hovel. The man immediately jumped off, and the wife jumped up in front of him, covering herself only barely, nearly reluctantly. Gregory wasted no time, turning and running back to his machine before the consequence of his actions could catch up with him and it (he needn\u2019t worry- his being there to witness that he\u2019d witnessed what he done was assurance what he\u2019d done couldn\u2019t be undone by his having done it). He leapt into his machine, forgot to secure the door, set the damned thing for home, and was both bewildered and relieved that the door\u2019s being open didn\u2019t make a damn bit of difference.<\/p>\n

And by now I\u2019m sure you\u2019ll have guessed what Gregory had done. He\u2019d interrupted his boss\u2019s parent In flagrante delicto, and in doing so changed the one-in-300-million chance that that particular sperm would reach the egg and make the boss in the first place. You didn\u2019t need to kill Hitler\u2019s great great grandfather to keep Hitler form being born, just give the man reason to wank-off one extra time before mounting der fuehrer\u2019s<\/i> erstwhile great great grandmother. (People can be so damned violent in their fantasy solutions, can\u2019t they? With a time machine, a wank can replace a gun in almost any historical scenario you might imagine).<\/p>\n

The paradoxes that resulted from Gregory\u2019s folly are obvious. Different boss at the bank, so Gregory\u2019s job life was much different. Boss was less of an asshole. Took no joy in the tears that fell from that old woman\u2019s eyes when Gregory gave her too much money. Because\u00a0 the boss was a different person altogether. Which means he didn\u2019t invite Gregory back for a cynar on ice. Which means he didn\u2019t say the word that inspired Gregory\u2019s eureka. The temporal basin never got dimpled.<\/p>\n

Back and forward through time, the paradoxes flexed, then relaxed, were absorbed by fate and inevitability, until all impossibility was accounted for, and only one immutable law of physics had to be changed. A very small one, it turns out. Apparently, it used to be the case that the color red was associated with sadness in the human brain, and not the color blue. Thanks to Gregory Shellaq, and his Worst Waste of a Perfectly Good Time Machine Ever, that tiny law was reasserted back in the big bang, having an infinitesimal effect on the way star stuff star-stuffed and thus how we beings made of the same hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen developed from motes of dust into walking talking feeling fucking humans beating drums to make bears dance.<\/p>\n

But there has to be a balance, there has to be a way for time\u2019s arrow to be reversible, just in case, joke\u2019s on us, there is a God, and he wants to rewind the VCR and watch the funny parts again. Enter Gregory Shellaq\u2019s third cousin, Guy de Mont Chalice, author of Pembroke\u2019s Whistle<\/i>, and the highly overrated When Kierkegaard Roared<\/i>. For years, absolutely no one has debated why, in the middle section of Flower\u2019s<\/i>, a minor character gazes at a red carnation and is filled with utter despair. As symbols go, it\u2019s a tiny, easily overlooked hiccup in an otherwise mediocre passage.<\/p>\n

But now you know why the carnation is red and not blue . It\u2019s Gregory Shellaq\u2019s fault. My understanding is that, every single time a time machine is invented, this sort of thing happens. And I sincerely do not care. I am utterly and completely indifferent to any of this shit. And I hope you are too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

fiction by Jason Edwards If you\u2019re reading this book it\u2019s probably because you are student of Guy de Mont Chalice, and want to know as much about him as possible, via further study into the life of his third cousin Gregory Shellaq. This thin, tome, then, will be an utter disappointment to you, as there … <\/p>\n

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