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eating flowers indiscriminately

i have dispensed with the formality of giving my characters names. it is not necessary. if you wish the character to have a name, just give him (he is usually male) my name. even if the character is female, you may give her my name. i am androgynous. this technique will undoubtedly change literature for good, causing other authors to adopt this method, giving into the temptation to live vicariously through their characters, as they've always wanted to anyway. besides, when authors give their characters names, they usually end up sounding like the names of people none of us will ever meet: sal paradise, holden caufield, isadora duncan, etc. i want my character to be someone you can meet. also--you will probably find yourself thinking the way he (i) does (do), and enjoying it. here he is, narrating in present tense, as he always does--after all, we do LIVE in the present, don't we?

it is one of those small moments of happiness that i occasionally manage to steal during my workday--i'm standing in front of the grill, which is perfectly flat, a solid slab of silver-gold metal, at the pizza place where i work. i am enjoying the sight of the meat, despite the fact that it looks like a bunch of sweaty brown dishrags, torn and bleeding grease. i love the smell that still contains some of the feeling of the animal's life, though diluted, mixed with the smell of vegetables and other colorful things that used to live outdoors and are now reduced to items, indoor colors, tainted and grayed by the fluorescent lights. they have put me at the grill because i will never make a decent pizza. they are beginning to doubt the validity of my existence. i am thrilled at the opportunity to swirl the floppy circle of dough on my fist, but so enthusiastic that the pizza always ends as a very long stretched oval shape, reflecting my energy in it's ridiculous form. why can't the customers get used to an oval pizza? because they are creatures of habit and tradition. in other words, they are very, very boring and usually quite stupid.

the metal of the grill looks good to me in it's smoothness, and i want to take photographs of it doing all kinds of kinky things, like burning the uniform i wear on it's belly. there are other things in this otherwise grim room that look good to me, like this lovely girl with short red hair who keeps bumping into me as she passes, causing me to burn my hands on the grill, and the sting of the heat adds to my desire. i want to drag her with my burning hands into the walk-in cooler by something other than her hair, since it's too short, and bend her over the pickle bucket, opening it and her at the same time so that the briny odors of them both wash over me in my long-awaited happiness, my erection overcoming the grim cold of the refrigerator, my erection overcoming everything else as well. but my personality is dulled by the repetitive work and the forced friendliness with which i treat the customers, and my voice sounds distant and froglike when i open my mouth to say something colorful and seductive. the "boss" stares at me with the face of anything, a smashed cricket, a frozen mouse, anything but a man. he doubts my sandwich-making abilities, and i want to ask him if he believes that god created me to make sandwiches for his customers, who are pathetically predictable and order the same things every day. we have an artichoke pizza without cheese on the menu and nobody's ever tried it, but it stays on the menu like a splendid exotic invitation to a better place, and i eat the container of unused artichoke hearts when ever the "boss" isn't looking. they are delicious, thank you, and if anyone tries to stop me from eating them, i will smear their facial skin across this grill, and then calmly resume my sandwich construction, perhaps combining the skin of their cheekbones with some olive loaf and pastrami, a daring combination. i am intoxicated by the food odors, and frequently succumb to the temptation of closing my eyes, imagining that these things are all being cooked for my own enjoyment. the conversation around me is too empty to relate, so i often find myself staring at the cheeses, wondering if they make good earplugs. the radio is worse, thirty versions of the same cowardly song for eight hours, and a disc jockey with a voice like a vacuum choking on a rug. whenever i discreetly walk over to the radio and shut it off, everyone takes a few minutes to notice and then complains, even though they don't seem to take any real enjoyment in the music when it's on. they tell me it's background and i ask them where the foreground is, getting the blank looks that i've learned to expect. they tell me it's like a morgue in here without the radio and i wonder why they have to be deprived of "background" to realize that this place is a morgue. most of them go home with a sixpack, sit in front of a tv, and wait for the next day to suck out whatever's left of them. i go home and try to figure out a way to live without them, while the symphonies of debussy crash into my head, granting me visions of obscure triumph. i am running through fields of open moviegreen grass, toward the short redhead in a world where she no longer limits her conversation to the six 'o clock news. our triumph is total. we embrace with a musical undertone of violently happy penetration, though we don't know what we're celebrating, and don't need to.

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