DAVID V. MATTHEWS

Blowout Losses

Another excerpt from “The Weekly Farm Report,” a story in progress. For the first excerpt, please click here. (Note: the below text contains some political content that might cause the Laura Loomer, Jared Kushner, Kirk Cameron, Nicki Minaj, the MyPillow guy, and even you to say “Awwwwww, not cool, David, not cool.”)

■

For the next few weeks, Taylor and I spent almost every waking minute together outside of class. We’d eat meals at the dining hall. We’d study at the campus library. We’d go to free movie nights at the student union—Hollywood blockbusters, on Blu-ray (remember that format?), on a big-screen TV, with free bags of popcorn. We’d attend rugby games at the stadium; our college, on American soil, was somewhat Anglophilic, unlike us, though we did like rugby’s ruggedness and, a little facetiously, our team’s kindergartenish uniforms: black shorts, red-and-black-striped T-shirts. (Too bad the team always suffered blowout losses.) And we’d sit at our usual table at Brew Crew, drinking our usual large double-caramel cappuccinos.

“I read somewhere that the Earth used to rotate faster, what, seventy million years ago?” she told me once, mid-cappuccino. “That made the days much shorter. Maybe half an hour shorter? If we’d lived back then, we would have seen thirty minutes less of each other every day. What a tragedy.”

“Yes, but on the bright side, we would have seen a real live dinosaur or two,” I replied.

“Heh heh heh.” She paused. “I used to love dinosaurs as a kid.”

“What kind of dinosaurs?”

“Any kind, as long as they were cuuute.”

A few days later, I gave her a present, something I’d ordered online: a black hoodie with a drawing of a generic-looking dinosaur on it, bright green, with a long neck, long tail, and triangular fins down his or her back. And two black dots for eyes. And a smiley-face style mouth. A really cuuute dinosaur, in other words. Taylor loved that hoodie and wore it everywhere, especially when we’d walk around campus, holding hands, making goo-goo eyes at each other, every so often stopping to kiss for a few seconds—acting the way most first-time sweethearts have acted since time immemorial, probably.

But we didn’t go further than holding hands and kissing. We thought about going further, much further. The furthest we could go. But we were virgins. We wanted to wait for however long it took, to make sure we had a strong, substantive relationship before we gave each other that gift you can give only once, with no returns. Maybe our Catholic upbringings had influenced us more than we’d realized. Or maybe we still would have waited if we’d had different upbringings.

At least we had more time to discuss the news. As you might expect from two political science majors, these discussions could get a little deep. And a little heated. We did have some differences, after all, particularly regarding the news story of the day: Operation Epic Fury, the war that the United States and Israel had launched a month earlier against Iran, to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons, or to encourage regime change, or—

“To take the oil,” Taylor contended one afternoon at Brew Crew. “Trump himself has admitted this. He actually said, quote, ‘My favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran,’ unquote. It’s also why he had the president of Venezuela kidnapped, so we could take its oil.”

“All right,” I said. “If it is all about the oil—so what?”

“So what.”

“Yeah. The whole world runs on oil. We can’t have insane, violent nations controlling such a valuable substance, made from dead dinosaurs, by the way, heh heh,” I said, pointing at the dinosaur on Taylor’s hoodie.

Taylor didn’t laugh. “Right. Insane, violent nations, just like—”

“The United States and Israel, yeah yeah.”

“Well, if you don’t want me to call them insane and violent, then maybe they shouldn’t act all insane and violent and war-crimey.” She took a swig of her beverage. “Besides, how much has Operation Epic Fail helped us control the oil? Iran has shut off the Strait of Hormuz, and gas prices have skyrocketed. Trump’s buddies in the oil industry might not care, but—”

She took another swig of her beverage.

“Things will improve soon,” I said.

“I wish I had your self-delusion.”

“Really, Taylor? Really?”

“Sorry. I’ve been pretty stressed lately, due to everything.”

“Me too.” I reached for her hand. She permitted me to grasp it.

An Artisanal Hottie

An excerpt from “The Weekly Farm Report,” a story in progress.

■

It wasn’t until college, March Twenty Twenty-six, that I had what I considered my first serious girlfriend. I met her, Taylor, one afternoon in line at the Brew Crew coffeehouse at the student union. The moment I looked at her, my jaw actually dropped in amazement. (Well, it dropped maybe half an inch, but that still counts.)

During my almost two years at that school, I’d seen quite a few hotties, but they’d looked, well, they’d looked a little too hot for me. I don’t mean they were out of my league, though they probably were. I mean they looked unreal in an A.I. kind of way, if anyone remembers A.I.

Taylor was also a hottie, but one with an everyday quality to her, a handmade quality—an artisanal hottie, you could say. Her curly black hair flowed down to her shoulders, in a style that, to me, didn’t look as if its creation had required blueprints or a construction permit or heavy equipment or a hundred-member work crew. Her complexion didn’t have that smooth glossy look adopted by so many women and men, so the adopters can, I don’t know, position themselves above mere mortals? Her huge dark round eyes all but escaped their sockets and embraced you—okay, more like engulfed you, since eyes don’t have arms. Her face featured, from what I can tell, very little makeup—maybe a minuscule amout of red blush and a thin layer of lip gloss.

And she worked out, judging from her tight—well, name an exterior body part of hers, and it was probably tight, but not bulked up, with a little bit of curviness thrown in.

Anyway. We’d each ordered our favorite, a large, double-caramel cappuccino; heh heh, we laughed, what a coincidence. We sat together at a table and started talking.

We found out quite a bit about each other.

For starters, we were sophomores majoring in political science. We’d always cared about current events and such, and with so much stuff happening during the current presidential administration, Trump part two, well, yeah, we both agreed, someone had to care.

Second, we hailed from Robinson Township, a fancy suburban area in Western Pee Ay, with her family living maybe two miles away from mine. We had never run into each other until now, though, due to our having attended different schools and different churches and shopping at different stores and the like. And speaking of churches—

We had grown up Catholic, but since arriving at college, we’d stopped going to church. We’d put our faith on hold, so we could explore other options for helping us develop mentally, emotionally, culturally, and any other adverb we could think of.

Also, we had parents who worked as mid-level executives at various firms at various Robinson industrial parks. My mom worked in investment finance, my dad in mortgages. Vice-versa for Taylor’s parents. We wondered, though, if our respective parents would ever have the chance to advance further career-wise, what with the idiots who always seemed to get promoted over them.

And we used to own female dogs that had two-syllable, six-letter names starting with M—Muffin (a Pomeranian) in my case, and Maisie (a Lhasa Apso) in her case. Our families had adopted the dogs as puppies. The dogs had even passed away a few years earlier from natural causes at the same age, fourteen and a half, Muffin first, then Maisie a week later. Describing what had happened to our pets still choked us up a little, even now.

Taylor and I talked about all this and much more for about an hour. By the end of that hour, we’d finished our beverages, and we’d fallen in love, not necessarily in that order.

Happy Mother’s Day, Loser

Your unremitting hatred made me the acclaimed industrial musicmaker I am today. (Well, acclaimed so far only on Screeeee!, this “noise, etc.” website run by an Indiana concert promoter I once blew.) When I was about fifteen or sixteen, I realized (after years of enduring your abuse) that I could become whatever I wanted because you’d never love me no matter what I said or did, whether I won the Nobel Prize for discovering a cure for cancer or sold cartons of your cigarettes to scuzzy junior high-school students so I could afford a bag of pot or the new Judas Priest album.

But what did I want to become? With my grades, I had no hope of attending Harvard, much less clown college. I had no interest in the Republican brainwashing crap the high school taught, anyway. I thought about blowing my way up the corporate ladder, but I remembered I hated yuppie scum back then. On the other hand, I didn’t want to slave at the sardine plant the way you did, loser.

Then came the ballcap incident. Remember that? I was sixteen, and we were living in that mobile home with the wood grain Con-Tact paper and the cat-piss smell (strange, considering we didn’t own a cat). It was night, and I was on the couch watching a Fall Guy rerun. You were in the kitchen, microwaving something that smelled garlicky. Suddenly—who knows why—you barged toward me and screamed “Where’d you put my goddamn Raiders cap?” “Nowhere,” I muttered; I didn’t even know you had a Raiders cap. “Liar! Goddamn thief!” you screamed louder. Ordinarily I would’ve screamed something back at you then left to smoke pot in the woods, but I decided to sit on the couch and keep quiet, to see how long you’d continue screaming at me. Thirty minutes later you were still at it, not hoarse at all, screaming “goddamn” this and “stupid, ungrateful slut” that, probably a record for you. I wanted to punch you in the mouth so I could shut you up, but I didn’t feel like wasting the effort on you. So I said “Don’t you have something in the microwave?” Amazingly, that shut you up; I thought you’d throw in a final “idiot” or two as a closing thought. You went back into the kitchen, and I ran outside.

That chilly night while toking up in the woods, I thought about your screeching voice, your broken-record insults packed with rage, and decided to become a…slut for real, just so I wouldn’t disappoint you in at least one area.

Five years and a million screw-partners later, I had just finished screwing this pustular air-guitarist named Austin in a welfare hotel. His face looked completely made of Braille and creeped me out; I had to punish him for offending my eyeballs (and for lasting only a minute in bed), so while he was in the bathroom pooping, I got dressed, took several records he had lying about, and left, thinking I could sell them at Spin Me Round Vintage Vinyl. Back at my apartment, I looked at them: typical metal sludge, plus one called Tension Headache from a local group I hadn’t heard before, Dry Orifice. I put on the album: no lyrics, no melody, just 30 minutes of clanging bells, chugging engines, and an unbelievable high-pitched scrape. I hated every second of this record, then realized that if anyone could make money doing this, I could; I’d endured your screaming for years, so I knew what noise was.

So I attended the next Dry Orifice concert, held in some pesthole with dripping cinderblock walls. After the show I met the group’s frontman, a skinny gray 38-year-old named XQ. I screwed him several times, got into the band as a clanger (me, with no musical training, as if I needed any) and began the musical ascent that continues today when I’m not working at the sardine plant—in clerical, okay? So thanks for introducing me to noise, for inadvertently causing my success. Happy Mother’s Day, loser. Oh, and did you ever find your goddamn Raiders cap?

Originally posted on my long-defunct website, Pixel Stupor, April 22, 2002 (story revised May 2-3, 2002)

The Cheese Grater

The third excerpt from “Our Putative Couple,” a work in progress. For the first two excerpts, please click here and here.

■

October 10, 2025:

“We’ve received some concerning reports about you.”

“Concerning reports? Wow, no one has ever written any concerning reports about me before. How many of these concerning reports have you received?”

“More than one.”

“One and a half?”

“Ha ha, sure, okay, one and half. One and three-quarters if it makes you happy.”

Exactly a month earlier, via a series of posts on X (the social media platform that Livin’ la Vida Locher will call the Spot), the United States Department of Education announced it had frozen US $380 million in federal research grants for Garnetville University, due to, first, the school’s “failure to protect students on campus from anti-Semitic discrimination— all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry”; and second, the school’s “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs” that have fomented “division and hatred based on race, color, national origin, and other protected identity characteristics” and thus worsened “intellectual and civil rights conditions.” To have its funding restored, the school needed to “enter into discussions” with the government “regarding institutional reforms” the school “should implement as soon as possible to ensure a safe learning environment for all students while safeguarding viewpoint diversity.”

Olivia thought Garnetville University, her employer, should sue the Trump administration on First Amendment grounds. Instead, the school capitulated, which didn’t surprise her, considering its reliance on sweet, sweet military contracts. So bye-bye DEI. And helloooo to the school’s latest employee, on the job for a little over a week: Zoey Jennings, white, cisgender, twenty-eight, bias monitor (a new position), sitting behind a desk, with Olivia sitting across from her, in a cavernous office in the Administrative Annex, a gray two-story slab with a pebbly façade.

“You know what everyone on campus calls this building?” Olivia asks.

No response.

“The cheese grater. It looks like one?”

“Ha ha, yeah, it does,” Zoey says. “According to—”

“I created that nickname.”

“Congratulations. According to the reports I’ve received, you showed a certain film in class a couple days ago.” Zoey, reading aloud from the laptop on her desk: “Doctor Farnsworth [a 1987 British and American coproduction]?”

“Yes, I did show that,” Olivia responds.

“And you discussed the radical gender ideology it promotes?”

“Ah, yes, radical gender ideology. A fair and balanced term.”

“Did you discuss the ideology?”

“If your concerning reports say I did, then yes, I did.”

“You discussed it favorably.”

“Again, if your concerning reports say I did—I trust their veracity.”

The film opens in 1867, when a white, presumably cisgender, eighteen-year-old, orphaned, homeless London resident named Henrietta Farnsworth, who’s always had an interest in what she calls “doctorin’—sorry, doctoring,” wants to improve her socioeconomic status by earning a degree from “the most pres-tee-gee-ous educational institution in good old London town,” the Dillingham University School of Medicine, where “the cram de la crop” gets admitted “grattees—uh, gratis, yes, you drink grat teas at tea time, from the grat bush in Southern Grattonia.” However, the school does not admit women. But she applies anyway, in person, disguised as a man named Henry Farnsworth (short hair, long trousers, waistcoat, bowler hat, a smudge of dirt smeared onto her face), and she gets into the school. Over the next two decades, Henry Farnsworth graduates with honors from that school; rises to lofty heights in the medical profession, successfully performing complicated operations that adhere to the film’s PG rating by featuring not much blood and no visible viscera; adopts proper English (“The Queen could take elocution lessons from me, gratis, of course”); moves into a country manor (with loyal country servants who now provide the film’s mispronunciation-and-malaprop-related comic relief); falls in love for the first time, with the white, cisgender, much younger, much wealthier Lady Florence “Flossie” Hargreaves and vice-versa; and tells her (as forboding, somewhat loud, piano-and-synth instrumental music plays on the soundtrack) about a secret he’s never told anyone before, namely—

“Do you think taxpayer dollars should pay for spreading transgenderism at school?” Zoey asks.

Olivia chuckles.

“Do you?”

“Sure, sure, whatever.”

“You’ve certainly praised in class what you call ‘gender-affirming care for young people.’ ”

“That I have.”

“So you don’t mind child genital mutilation?”

“You mean gender-affirming surgery? Trans kids rarely have that type of surgery.”

Zoey chuckles. “Sure, whatever.”

“Do you think they should have cosmetic surgery instead? Lots and lots and lots of cosmetic surgery?”

“Onto a different topic.”

“You don’t mind if twelve-year-old girls—”

“What do you think about Israel?”

“What do I think about Israel.” Olivia, scratching her right temple with her right forefinger: “Hmm.” She stops scratching. “Well, speaking as a Jew—and you do know about my Jewishness, right? Of course you do. The government knows everything. Well, Republican governments do. Anyway, speaking as a Jew, I have to say”—pause—“ohhhh, Israel, I love ya, but”—shorter pause—“I think we need some time apart.”

“Ha ha ha, yeah, you love Israel, sure.”

“But I do.” Olivia, languidly pumping her fist: “Go, go, Israel. Go, go, Israel. Yaaaay, Israel.”

Profane Psychic Love

Two drawings from DVM’s college days, one drawing not from his college days:

Psychic Draws Faces of the Dead, December 3, 1985

The Sacred and the Profane, 1987

The Anthropometric Data Women Love, 2006-2011

The Sacred and the Profane

The Sacred and the Profane, 1987. Pencil, charcoal, pastel, and maybe watercolor on paper, 22″ x 28″.

Capital-Q Quirky

Another excerpt from “Our Putative Couple,” a work in progress. For the first excerpt, please click here.

■

At a dark wooden table in downtown Garnetville’s trendiest bar, Bouquets, whose drinks all had floral names and steep prices:

“I broke up with Brody yesterday,” Cassie says.

“You did?” Olivia says.

“Uh-huh. We got along well enough, but sometimes—sometimes, if you don’t watch out, you can fall down the well and drown.”

Cassie sips her rhododendron (2 ounces [60 milliliters] dry vermouth, 1 ounce [30 milliliters] red herbal liqueur, 3 dashes absinthe, garnish with an orange twist—US $28.00 total but pretty dang great).

“Also,” she continues, “I think he kept trying to push me down that well.” She adopts a slightly gravelly voice: “ ‘Yes, look a li’l bit deeper, Cass, you’ll see our future together, where you prostrate yourself before me twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week, just for the heck of it—ah, yes, the heck-related reason, the best reason for prostrating.’ ”

Olivia laughs while reaching for her delphinium (1½ ounces [45 milliliters] white wine, ½ ounce [15 milliliters] lime juice, ½ ounce [15 milliliters] orange liqueur, ¼ ounce [7½ milliliters] blueberry syrup, garnish with skewered blueberries—also US $28.00 total, also dang great, the dangest, in fact).

■

During Brody and Cassie’s first date, in which they stroll around the Garnetville University campus, Cassie tells him (as she does with every guy during the first date, to make a capital-Q Quirky first impression and thus maintain her brand) about her “bio-dad,” Dr. Reed Flanagan, white, cisgender, unmarried, a media and cultural studies professor at that school, who, in 1985 at age forty-six, not long after Cassie’s birth, had a brief romance with one of his graduate assistants, Sydney Bartholomew, a white, cisgender, unmarried woman half his age, the first time he’d ever “boinked a student during his sixteen years there.” A few weeks after the relationship “had cratered,” she paid a surprise visit to his campus office, where she told him “he might as well hear” from her and “not from the ol’ grapevine” that, first, “he’d knocked her up”; and second, “she planned to have an abortion, a legal abortion, back when every state still permitted women to have reproductive rights, excuse the editorializing.” As it turned out, he supported her decision. He supported it so much, he insisted on paying for the procedure. No, he “vehemently insisted.” He actually used that adverb. How could she refuse? “Perhaps she would have used the V-word if he hadn’t offered to pay.” Anyhow, he “forked out three hundred bucks, a bargain back then.” Then he resigned before he could face disciplinary proceedings for his “inappropriate relationship.” He spent the last nineteen years of his educational career teaching media and cultural studies at the only place that would hire him: “a much smaller and more intellectually undemanding school,” Trebain College, in Trebain, Iowa. He still resides in “that minuscule town,” from which he sends Cassie “epic e-mails extolling the Midwest” and suggesting she move there. No thanks—she’d rather continue living near Pittsburgh, “essentially one big Superfund site,” than “suffer through the most stultifying boredom ever conceived of by demonic geniuses who speak with a twang, eeeee-yup.” Anyway, as it turns out, before leaving for Iowa, he “knocked up another woman,” Cassie’s mother’s sister, “during that rarest of occurrences, a one-night stand.” The result: Cassie’s “nephew-slash-half-brother Zane,” who receives the same e-mails from their father, “cat memes included,” as she does.

Pause.

“Do you like oatmeal?” Brody asks.

Pause.

“Cooked oatmeal?” Cassie replies.

“Uh-huh.”

“Yes, I like cooked oatmeal, but only with brown sugar.”

“I like oatmeal, too, but in my case, only with fruit cocktail, the type in heavy syrup with artificially-colored cherries. It makes the oatmeal taste like—Santa’s helpers.”

“You into cannibalism?”

“Candy cane-iballism. Sorry.”

“Why apologize?”

■

By her mid-teenage years, Olivia decides to devote her life to literature (the more classic the literature, the better), as a way to rebel against her parents. Her father, Grant Purcell (a white cisgender man who received a master’s of business administration [1978] from the Alden Business School, and who serves as the CEO [chief executive officer] of Shining Beacon, one of Pennsylvania’s largest insurance companies), reads only two types of books: ghostwritten memoirs (in hardback) from white, presumably cisgender, male American tycoons, about the tycoons’ inexorable rise to fame and how anyone can succeed just like them; and action-adventure novels (in paperback) about white, presumably cisgender, male American police officers, private detectives, secret agents, and mercenaries who battle—and always triumph over, usually lethally—Eastern-Bloc Communists, Middle-Eastern terrorists, Central-American narcoterrorists, African-American gang members, treasonous bleeding-heart white liberal American politicians, and other violent, savage, grotesque, human-adjacent foes. By comparison, her mother, Ruth Purcell (a white cisgender woman who received a bachelor of science in entrepreneurship [1983] from Lockridge University, and who runs her own business, New Performance Consulting, Incorporated), never reads any books, at least in her daughter’s presence. That doesn’t necessarily mean Mrs. Purcell never reads any books at all, just that, on a typical evening at the family’s near-mansion, while Grant sits alone in his charcoal recliner in the den (the room he calls his “sanctum sanctorum”), savoring every page of, say, My First Billion Dollars (Give or Take a Nickel), or Ghost Squad: Takedown in Tehran, Ruth sits on the teal couch in the living room (the room she calls “the living room”), watching, almost always with a rudimentary smile, a rented VHS tape of a popular mainstream hit movie of any genre, showtime always starting exactly at eight. Sometimes she watches an entire franchise from the beginning, one entry a night; on July 28, 2003, the eighteen-year-old Olivia joins her mother for the first time in doing just that, watching Extreme Weather (1994); followed the next night by Extreme Weather 2 (1996); then Extreme Weather 3 (1999); then the final one in the series, the straight-to-video Extreme Weather: Tsunami (2001), all on rented DVDs (the Purcells had replaced their VHS player with a DVD player by this point), and all of these movies featuring white, cisgender male protagonists and their much younger, white, cisgender female love interests fleeing from cheesy-looking, computer-generated dangers that include rainstorms, snowstorms, sandstorms, hailstorms, and genetically-modified wolves with foot-long fangs.

Olivia had never seen any Extreme Weather movie, due to her aversion to lowest common denominator entertainment product; however, wanting for some unfathomable reason to experience more than a few milliseconds of quality mother-daughter time before leaving for college in a few weeks, Olivia, for four nights running, slowly walks to the couch (sometimes shuffling her feet as noisily as possible upon the hardwood floor, to warn every inhabitant of the Western Hemisphere of her approach); sits down next to Ruth at 7:59:58; and watches her press the remote control’s PLAY button. The two Purcells stare straight ahead at the screen for the movie’s duration (including the entire closing credits), neither mother nor daughter saying anything. Afterwards, Olivia mutters “G’night,” Ruth says “Good night,” and Olivia walks (or noisily shuffles) off to bed.

But during the fourth night, after the final Extreme Weather had ended and Ruth had pressed the remote’s OPEN/CLOSE button to eject the disc:

“God, Mom, how could you stand watching that sexist garbage?”

“Sexist garbage?”

“Amber [the white, cisgender female love interest] whines like a little kid for the entire movie. She can’t do anything. She needs a man to save her. She never gets stronger or more independent. And when she runs from that humongous wave, of course she has to say”—Olivia adopts a squeaky voice—“ ‘Ohhh noooo, I broke a nail! Sob sob sob!’ ”

“In other words, you prefer feminist propaganda.”

“If you mean movies that don’t dehumanize women, then, yes, I prefer feminist propaganda.”

Ruth pauses.

“Can’t you just enjoy a movie for once?” she asks.

“I dunno. Anything can happen, I guess. Good night, Mom.”

To Recalibrate

A toned-down excerpt from “Our Putative Couple,” a work in progress.

■

One drizzly Friday afternoon several weeks before the 2024 United States presidential election, twenty minutes and seventeen seconds into our putative couple’s first visit, either together or separately, to the airport development district’s newest cultural venue, the Kinnick Museum of American Folk Art, the abovementioned couple starts staring at an anonymous painting, Peaceable Kingdom (circa 1860s, oil on canvas, 36.5 inches by 48 inches [92.7 centimeters by 121.9 centimeters], collection of BXR Funds International), that shows a dog, a cat, a hen, a rooster, an eagle, a bluebird, a turkey, a lion, a lamb, a cow, a bull, a bear, and a giraffe all standing in a field and grinning queasily at the viewer. “I don’t know about you, but I love the color scheme,” Brody Waters, our putative couple’s cisgender white male component, age forty-two, a poet/creative writing instructor at Swensen College, says about the work’s dingy, gritty pastels. “It reminds me of depressed cotton candy. No, actually, it reminds me of depressed cotton-polyester blend candy. Artists back in the olden days loved tints and hues and whatever that didn’t require ironing.”

“I like the colors too,” says Cassie Flanagan, our putative couple’s cisgender white female component, age thirty-nine, a trend forecasting analyst at Mattercomp, “but do you know what I like a little more? How the creatures all have dilated eyes. A super new dispensary must have opened in the neighborhood.”

“Yeah. Bambi needs some wacky tobacky, stat. Who wouldn’t, if you lived in a Disney cartoon?”

She chuckles.

Our putative couple continues staring at the painting.

■

An hour, twenty-seven minutes, and forty-three seconds later, they stand outside the museum.

“What a rewarding cultural experience,” Cassie says.

“Yes indeed. I never thought scrimshaw could cause such a frisson of excitement in me,” Brody says, loudly pronouncing that French word as “freeee-sooohn.”

“Ooh la la.”

Pause.

“So you want to attend that concert tomorrow?” he asks.

“No thanks,” she answers.

“How about a movie?”

“Nope.”

“What would you like to do?”

“Uhhh—actually, I’d like to spend the day by myself tomorrow. To recalibrate?”

“To recalibrate?”

“Yup.”

“Recalibrate from what?”

“From everything.”

“All right.” He pauses. “How about Sunday?”

No response.

“Monday? Tuesday? Any day?”

No response.

“Exactly how much time do you need to recalibrate?”

“I don’t know. I’ll call you, okay?”

Longer pause.

“If you recalibrate too much, you’ll go blind,” he says.

She chuckles.

Brief pause.

“So, uh, I guess I should go now,” she says.

“You want a ride?” he asks.

“Thanks, but I’ll walk. I need a good walk.”

“So do I. Maybe I’ll have one someday.”

She chuckles.

Another brief pause.

“Well, uh, bye,” she says.

“Bye,” he says.

They walk off in opposite directions.

■

Two years later, Brody has his first novel published, Livin’ la Vida Locher (304 pages, paperback, Quarto House Press, US $21.99 [Canada $30.00]), whose title paraphrases “Livin’ la Vida Loca,” the 1999 hit by Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin. The novel deals with a white, cisgender, forty-six-year-old man named Larry Locher, a cultural studies instructor at Gunderson University, who has a brief affair with one of his graduate assistants, Jazmín Torres, a transgender legal immigrant half his age from somewhere unspecified in Central America. As a result of what the novel’s free indirect narrator calls the “hashtaggers (more like trash-haggers—those pests don’t deserve a wittier label)” and the “cancel crowd who’ve cancelled growing the hell up,” Locher loses his job; and his white, cisgender, thirty-nine-year-old wife, Connie Dean-Locher, a trend forecasting analyst at Mastercorp Technology “who pretty much PMSes twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week,” divorces him, taking fifty percent of everything; and Jazmín, who more than once told him “Steeck jour beeg white deeck eenside me, pronto!”, writes Honor Roll, a best-selling, thinly-fictionalized novel about the affair, whereas he cannot get started on his thinly-fictionalized, affair-related novel, What REALLY Happened, because “his ex-wife and his ex-mistress must have sucked the life out of him but not through that certain beeg appendage of his, unfortunately”; and “one of the world’s most popular streaming services, Mango Deluxe,” adapts Jazmín’s novel into a limited series, that service’s most popular offering ever, inspiring “a million memes on the young people’s favorite social media platform, DingDing (and judging from those memes, the young people’s brains must have shrunk in the wash, as that renowned social critic, Gage Cutter [from Cutter’s Law, a 1994 American action movie], would put it)”; and Jazmín and Connie start a romantic relationship, announcing their status via the latter’s account on “that platform for formerly young people, Sunnyday,” via a close-up, sepia-filtered photo of them kissing, with the caption RELATIONSHIP STATUS: TAKEN ✓; and worst of all in Locher’s opinion (or maybe best of all, considering the readers’ proclivities), he can get aroused only when “self-abusing” to fantasies of those two women “humping up a storm.”

Livin’ la Vida Locher receives laudatory reviews both online and in that retro medium, print.

“Waters proves adept at sculpting prose.”—Thomas Woo, pitchingwoo.com
“At last, a one-stop source for political incorrectness.”—dripnose2008, litfreek.com
“This ripped-from-the-headlines novel not only rips up the headlines, it might also rip you a new one.”—Addison Andrews, The Neater Reader

However, Olivia Purcell, in her weekly wordgasm.com column, Purcellular, calls Livin’ la Vida Locher “the worst release yet from that legend in his own mind, the poetaster Brody Waters[,]” who “has really, truly outdone himself this time in the cringe department while adding heaping helpings of MAGA-capped bigotry”; he “obnoxiously” wants readers to sympathize with the white male protagonist, “an aging Gen-Xer who quotes pop culture from the 1990s while going up against deranged, all-powerful enemies: feminists, brown people, immigrants, gays, lesbians, the transgender, Democrats, and—most heinous of all—anyone who quotes pop culture from past the year 2000.” She concedes this novel “has one redeeming quality: the almost-clever names Waters gives his off-brand equivalents of Apple Plus, TikTok, Bluesky, Pornhub, Grindr, et cetera.” But “that still can’t salvage a book even Chad Chaddington would find malodorous. (Though Waters refers to ninety trillion ’90s TV characters, he doesn’t mention his probable role model, Chad, once. To quote a popular hit song from that decade, how bizarre [a reference to “How Bizarre,” a 1995 single from the New Zealand group OMC].)”

Brody can usually shrug off negative reviews. At least they provide a change from the nonstop adoration he receives, not that he hates nonstop adoration, heh heh heh heh heh. But this hatchet job—

He knows Olivia Purcell, white, cisgender, thirty-eight, a presence in airport development district literary circles. He’s run into her over the years at readings, art openings, chamber-music concerts, and other cultural events. “Hey,” she says with a vacuous smile. “Hey,” he replies similarly. They exchange small talk for no more than half a minute, say “Bye” (sometimes he says “Ta-ta”), and part company; otherwise, they have zero contact, though he does hate-read her column every week, to find out what she’s praised or (far more often) what she’s premenstrually eviscerated. She has horrible taste, preferring virtue-signaling pabulum over more intelligent, more challenging fare. Typical book critic—she wouldn’t recognize good writing even if it did the Achy Breaky dance on her face. (He’ll have to remember that line for a future project.)

But perhaps that airhead he’d dated for maybe five seconds a few years ago, Cassie, uh, Cassie Flanagan, had something to do with that review. Both women had attended the same vaguely prestigious school, Garnetville University, together two decades earlier and (at least when he knew Cassie) still kept in touch, having friended each other on Facebook and even occasionally hanging out in person. Cassie might have told her that an insensitive, un-woke poet she’d dated for maybe five milliseconds a few millennia ago had released his first novel; perhaps Cassie had given her a copy. Thanks, Cass.

Flash Fiction #130 (Exactly 130 Words): Ghostposter

For previous installments of the ALWAYS WITH LOVE saga, please click (in this order) here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. These two sentences don’t count toward the 130-word limit.

■

In 2025, I was Senior Advisor on Gender Policy for the Trump administration. I worked in a fancy-schmancy office in DC, writing papers on how our country could promote the biological reality of two and only two sexes. I’ve always opposed gender extremism, before “gender extremism” was even a thing.

Anywho, Stewart Pringle, the White House Social-Media Director, he visited me at work one day. He told me the President had lots to do, what with fighting the migrant invasion and wokeness and DEI, so—would I like to help out by writing the President’s posts on Truth Social? “It’s like you two share a brain,” Stewart said. “I can’t imagine anyone else who’d make a better ghostposter, so to speak. Plus you’d have personal access to him.”

Personal access.

Please Don’t Clap

Another excerpt from my eternally-upcoming novel, Normal Tastes. (For previous excerpts, please click here, here, and here.)

●

The fountain outside Kornwald’s Department Store spumes upward to about twelve feet. Jill drops a penny into the fountain’s circular reservoir and watches that coin sink to the bottom.

“What do you think the mall does with all the money that people put in there?” she asks.

“Keep it for themselves,” Alan says.

A few dozen pennies cover the bottom, along with some nickels, some dimes, a few quarters, and several arcade tokens.

“Well, I think they donate it to charity,” Jill says.

“Do you think Bigfoot exists too?”

“Some people are nice, Alan.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

The fountain spumes downward.

Alan can stand the Garnetville Mall a little better, now that he has a girlfriend. Holding hands, they walk away from the fountain and through the corridor, sticking to the right, passing Five Star Video, and Everfun Toys, and the Haunted Halloween Store. Soon they approach Wynkoop Organs. Standing near the entrance, they watch the obviously middle-aged white guy who works there—combover, bifocals, maroon suit.

“What a stud,” Alan whispers.

Jill laughs.

The Stud sits down at a deluxe organ, dark gleaming walnut that looks genuine and features a two-tiered keyboard with almost enough knobs and buttons and faders to fill a professional recording studio, the type of studio that rock stars use when not playing in concert or making videos or snorting cocaine off stripper tits. He exhales, stretches his shoulders, cracks his knuckles, places some sheet music in front of him, opens it, adjusts a few knobs, and commences playing something jaunty.

“Hey, that’s ‘Tell Her about It,’ ” Jill says, referring to the recent hit by the American singer Billy Joel.

“Yup,” Alan says.

A few onlookers gather around them.

“You know, I’ve suddenly realized something,” Jill says. “If I were Billy Joel’s daughter, my name would be Jill Joel.”

Alan despises this song, a fucking Fifties tribute about how you need to kiss your girl’s ass so she doesn’t leave you.

And yet, as the Stud continues playing—

“I like this version,” Jill says.

“Me too,” Alan says. “I like it better than the original.”

“Why?”

“I dunno. It sounds more…heartfelt?”

“Yeah, it does.”

“Plus this guy’s a snazzier dresser.”

The performance ends. Everyone except Alan applauds.

“Please don’t clap,” he tells her. “We’re not at a concert.”

“That’s what you think,” she says, still applauding. The Stud smiles at his audience and salutes it.

●

“What do you wanna do tomorrow?” Alan asks her. They’re sitting across from each other at a blazing-orange plastic table near Aunt Rita’s Pretzels.

“Could we visit the Carnegie Museum?” Jill says, pronouncing the founder’s surname the way most Pittsburghers do, as Car-nay-gie.

“Why?”

“I feel like looking at the paintings and sculptures and all that stuff.”

Alan bites into his pretzel, chews, and swallows. “Right.”

“And you don’t?”

“Not really.”

“Why not?”

“ ’Cause looking at art makes me wanna—”

Alan closes his eyes, lowers his head, and pretends to snore.

“Very funny,” Jill says. “So what would you rather do?”

“I dunno. Hang out at your place?”

“Again?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s…well…it’s like you never want to go out with me.”

“I go out with you.”

“Yes, but you never seem that excited about it.”

“Do you want me to dance a jig or something?”

“No, but—”

“But what?”

“I don’t know.” Jill nibbles at her pretzel. “You could have clapped after that man played the organ.”

“I didn’t feel like clapping.”

“You liked his performance.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t feel like clapping.”

“Okay, you didn’t feel like it. But I did. And you tried to stop me.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Yes you did. You said ‘Please don’t clap.’ ”

“That was a request.”

“It sounded like an order.”

“What difference does it make? You clapped anyway.”

Alan finishes eating his pretzel. Maybe he—

“Do I embarrass you?” Jill asks, sounding angry for the first time around him.

“Excuse me?”

“Do I embarrass you?”

“What the hell kind of question is that?”

“An important one. Do I embarrass you, except when you want to have sex with me?”

“Jill—”

“Is that why you’ve never introduced me to your friends?”

“No, it’s ’cause I don’t think you have much in common with them.”

“I’ve introduced you to my friends.”

Yeah, friends straight from the barnyard—dogs, pigs, and cows. “Okay, the next time I hold a tea party for the guys, I’ll invite you. Ha ha.”

Maybe he shouldn’t have laughed.

“Do you even like me?” Jill asks.

“What?”

“Do you even like me? Have you ever liked me?”

“Cut it out, Jill.”

She looks as if she’d just seen Middle-Eastern terrorists, or Central-American terrorists, or actually any kind of terrorists, blow her family to bits.

“Oh, all right.” He starts clapping rapidly. “Hooray. Hooray for the organ player. Hooray for Billy Joel. Hooray for your friends. Hooray for you. Hooooray.” He stops clapping. “Happy now, goddammit?”

“Yes, happier than I’ve ever been in my entire life,” Jill says in a tremulous voice. “I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

“Ha ha.”

“I’m serious, Alan. I’ve felt this way for some time.” And here come the tears. “You don’t like me or respect me.”

He considers his options. Should he take that song’s advice and kiss her ass, while apologizing profusely and begging her to take him back? Or should—

“Are you on the rag?” he asks.

Really, how else could he have answered? He has a pair of balls.

“Goodbye,” Jill says, standing up.

“Yeah, yeah. Can I have the rest of your pretzel?”

She walks away sobbing.

“Call me when you decide to stop acting like a fucking idiot,” he shouts. Some fat bitch lumbering past his table, a couple fat kids in tow, gives him an offended look. Mind you own goddamn business, lady. And do some aerobics, why don’tcha, he thinks as he chomps into Jill’s pretzel.