I started parenting myself, now all I do is dribble up and down the street until the lamps come on while hiding my own belt.
First Approximation
Part of me expects to be selected on a playground. Jealousy is when she appears to pick another. To kick as me only farther. Consider what is best for the rolling red ball.
Game Older
If I am good where other men are not, my goodness is invisible. If I am corrosive where other men are corrosive, I am familiar.
Qualified
In conflict seek to convince. If you seek to understand you will fall short when you should have loved. If you convince when you should have loved, no one is the wiser. If you love when you should have convinced, you are the sucker. If you love when you should have understood, a monastic or mother.
Confusionism
Compete with the originators of the misshapen baby. To win the misshapen baby you must accept it as it lays, yet outdo its original conception. It must be, in your arms, the most perfect, customizable baby.
Foster Carry
Children are better raised by teams. Teams necessitate roles. Roles, norms. To get rid of norms obliterate roles; to obliterate roles negate teams; to dispense with teams obsolete childhood.
Reassignments
The unisex bathrooms at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. At a T-intersection you once had to hang a left to the men’s, a right to the women’s. You still hang right or left, but at both terminuses of the cross there is a symbol of a man, a vertical line, a symbol of a woman. The symbol of a man is a man because it is streamlined. The woman wears an isosceles skirt. Urinals in both rooms installed. In stalls. The men will use the urinals in the stalls, the women the toilets in the stalls, then both men and women will use the side-by-side sinks to wash before departing safely, separately.
On occasion, a married man and single woman may connect at the sinks having admired the tenor of one another’s streams, the baritone of one another’s splashes. Eyes meet in the continuous mirror (or appear to—what meets are the married man’s retina and the reflection of the single woman’s eyes, and the single woman’s retina and the reflection of the married man’s eyes—the effect is the same, that of one’s eyes being thrown a few feet ahead and caught by the retina standing aside the source eyes from the same vantage as the source eyes viewing the front of themselves from behind), the squeak of liquid soap dispensers vaguely headboard-esque, the smell of male and female insides boiling frogs.
The female of the feces is slower to pass the colon into unisex waters, owing to the distance that which becomes it has to travel. Distance translates to surface area, to nutrient absorption—just in case an additional body grows within a body, which sometimes happens, though never to the married man. It happens to the single woman so thoroughly that for accuracy the married man becomes simply man (final theatergoing experience for a while), and the single woman becomes, rather complicatedly, mom.
Timing Was Everything
What really happened after the play was that men went left and women went right, and on the right accreted a line. No men were observed in the line, which would have been a red neon flag given the game theory, but, more notably, no women were observed peeling off to the left despite the clear path to freedom.
More Force May Be Needed
Oh shit, what planet did I just land on?🤗
Off to read more of your stuff, thank you!
A super enjoyable read, Jason. It’s always so interesting to read how you perceive and describe the world.
Below are two parts I really liked:
“Part of me expects to be selected on a playground. Jealousy is when she appears to pick another.”
“On occasion, a married man and single woman may connect at the sinks having admired the tenor of one another’s streams, the baritone of one another’s splashes. Eyes meet in the continuous mirror...”