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Monster Stand-Up Comedy by Lee Gatlin

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Joseph Mallord William Turner

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my grandpa was a good man. and it really wasnt his fault - recreationally lying to kids is a proud family tradition - but he told me, once, that cutting a worm in half resulted in two worms.

i think he said it so i'd be more morally okay with fishing? i actually dont remember the context.

point was, he told me this, and he understimated (by a very large margin) how much i liked worms. i was a worm boy. very wormy. and after hearing that, i went home, and i dug through the garden, flipped over every rock, did everything i could to gather as many worms as i could, and then i uh.

i cut them all in half. every worm i could find. all of them. with scissors.

i then took this pile of split worms, and i put them in a box with a bit of lettuce and some water and stuff and went to bed expecting to double my worms overnight. i have math autism, so i had a vague understanding that if i did this just a few times in a row, i would eventually have a completely unreasonable amount of worms.

i was very excited to become this plane's worm emperor.

(i think i was...six?)

anyway, i did not become the inheritor of the worm crown. i instead woke up to a box of dead worms and cried. a lot. i got diagnosed with panic attacks as a teenager, but i think i had them as a kid, i just had no idea what they were. i was kind of processing that a.) i had killed what i had assumed was every single worm in my yard, and thus would have no more worms, and b). i was going to like, worm hell.

(six year babylon spent a lot of time worrying about god.)

so i kind of freaked out, and i climbed a tree, because god can only smite you if you're touching the ground (?) and i sat up there mostly inconsolable until my mom came out and asked, hey, what's up? what happened?

so i explained to her that i had killed all of the worms, forever, and was also Damned, and she took me to the compost pile, and we dug for all of five seconds and found like twenty more worms.

the compost pile was full of worms.

she then told me that a). there were more worms, and we could put them back under rocks and stuff and recolonize our yard and b). that one day, i would die, and go to heaven, and be able to talk to the worms face to face. that i'd be able to tell them all that i was very sorry, and that i killed them on accident, driven only by excessive Love, and that she was positive they would forgive me because worms have six hearts and no malice.

at that point, i think i was sixty percent tear-snot by weight, and i had no choice but to gather enough worms that i could hug them. which my mom helped with. and then after that she helped me put some worms back under each rock.

and for my epilogue: i spent a significant portion of my childhood in trees. and for many years after, even when my mom didnt know i was watching, i would catch her giving the space under the rocks a light spritz with the hose. not because she loved worms.

but because she loved me.

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grief is so crazy like what if i forget what her laugh sounds like. does she know i loved her. i miss her so much. i catch myself doing things she used to do. i wish i could call her. i miss her so much. i do a crossword puzzle. i cry while washing the dishes. does she know i loved her? my heart feels like a hummingbird. i miss her so much. what if i forget what her laugh sounds like. what if i forget.

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When it comes to artistic personification of the deadly sins, Lust is usually the ONLY ONE ever designed to be the OBJECT of the sin rather than the sinner. Greed? They tend to design some one who LOOKS greedy. Sloth? Lazy person. A lot of these design choices kinda reveal how the creator views people in general (wow you made Gluttony or Greed fat, how original, so groundbreaking) but LUST? Lust is usually just… a hot chick. Who makes OTHERS lust but she herself often isn't running around acting inappropriately horny or anything. She's just kinda there. Maybe a bit flirty but otherwise the whole intent is to make the AUDIENCE feel attraction and that's how they associate it with lust. The Greed character won't make the viewer feel greedy but by god with Lust this is all we GOT. (Before you ask, I only half-count the FMA versions of these characters since they had these names but their origins were more complicated than Being Literal Sins)

I want all or nothin' here. Make the personifications ALL like Lust, maybe! Make it so their designs are only hinting at these things but the MAIN THING they can do is make OTHERS feel these things. Greed? He's a crypto guy who can manipulate people into screwing over others for easy cash. Sloth? The dude commenting "lol who cares, no one cares, just chill" at even the most horrible tragedies in the news (We can also change this one to Apathy and throw THAT deadly sin in, I just like that concept as a sin), make Wrath a reactionary podcaster or something. Make them make OTHERS sin.

Or, go the other way, and have them all LOOK like the sinners, and include Lust IN THAT. Just design some gooner who hasn't seen a real woman in six weeks and comments on every selfie they see online judging them for not looking like an anime waifu.

COMMIT TO THE BIT, PEOPLE, this mixed-up message is WEAK

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Mount Fuji at night in Japan

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Dracula: I have crossed oceans of time to find you - you are the reincarnation of my own beloved wife!

Mina: I see. And we got married when exactly?

Dracula: uhhhhhhh mid 1400s I think? It's been like 500 years

Mina: cool. And then I ...died, is that right?

Dracula: it destroyed me! But you are alive now!

Mina: and then - let me make sure I'm following - then you died also?

Dracula: to arise as you see me now - immortal Lord of Darkness!

Mina: right. But, technically speaking, you did die first, right? And continue to be dead at this time? Like, medically speaking?

Dracula: I am the Great Undead who-

Mina: do you have a heartbeat?

Dracula: I no longer require such things

Mina: so I am the living wife of a dead husband, is that correct?

Dracula: in your mortal pedestrian terms - but I shall

Mina: uh huh. Let me consult my lawyer. Darling, what is the legal status of the living wife of a dead husband?

Jonathan: according to the Widows & Orphans act, the living wife of a dead husband is defined as a widow

Mina: and I think I heard somewhere that a widow is at liberty to marry again

Jonathan: according to English common law, with biblical precedent, that is correct

Mina: cool. I choose this guy.

Jonathan: (yippee)

Mina: I believe I am also entitled to half his stuff via intestate succession?

Jonathan: yes that is correct, the remainder to be equitably divided between yourself and any other heirs of his body

Mina: cool. Did we have kids?

Dracula: well no but -

Mina: great. I always wanted a Castle

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i hauve a cold

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The alphabet fades away

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The alphabet fades away

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Me too girl tf

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Day 2 in the Middle School Time Loop: you remember that last time, everyone ignored you at recess because they were talking about a TV show that you hadn’t watched. This time, you lie and say you’ve seen it. They ask you who your favorite character is, and you don’t know any of the characters, and so you’re tongue-tied. They think you’re weirder than ever, or maybe a liar, which is worse (and true).

Day 3 in the Middle School Time Loop: you tell your parents that you feel ill. They let you stay home while they’re at work. You spend the whole day watching past episodes of the TV Show.

Day 4 in the Middle School Time Loop: Recess again. The same person asks you who your favorite character is. This time, you're ready. You eagerly tell them, and supplement your reasons for liking them with solid evidence from all 4 seasons of the show. But! Tough luck: you’re now too invested. The atmosphere turns uncomfortable. They go back to ignoring you like they did on the Day 1 that you didn’t know was Day 1.

Day 5 in the Middle School Time Loop:

You decide to try a different approach and update your style. You've noticed that Ashleigh, who’s blonde and constantly surrounded by friends, always wears pink stripey sneakers. You try wearing a pink dress. Someone says it’s cute, but you know from how they say it that it isn’t the good cute.

“I thought that pink was cool,” you protest, more to the uncaring universe than to anyone in particular.

Your interlocutor shrugs. “Maybe on someone else.”

Day 6 in the Middle School Time Loop: You keep your head down, but still surprise the teachers by somehow knowing the correct answers to every spontaneous question they throw out to the class. You study the outfits of your classmates more closely. You realize that it wasn’t the color, so much as the brand that made the difference. It proves the shoes were expensive. You note down Ashleigh's sneaker brand in smudgy ink on the back of your hand, and then after school you take half a year's saved-up allowance and buy a matching pair at the mall. Your mom raises her eyebrows but doesn’t stop you.

Day 7 in the Middle School Time Loop: Today you make it to lunch before anything major goes wrong. You think that the sneakers have protected you, and stare down at them lovingly, watching the Barbie-pink plastic stripes reflect the tube lights on the ceiling as you turn your feet this way and that. But then at lunch, Ashleigh comes up, arm and arm with a friend. Her eyes are a little pink, but only a little.

“Ashleigh wanted me to tell you that she’s really hurt that you copied her sneakers,” the friend informs you, nobly, as if it would be too unpleasant for Ashleigh to have to say this herself. Her mouth is solemn but her eyes are gleeful.

“I didn’t…” You start to deny it automatically, even though it’s true. And yet, something won’t let you apologize. Doesn’t she see your imitation for what it is: the most sincere compliment you know how to bestow? This is your Hail Mary.

As you meet her eyes, you realize she does know, but this only makes her despise you more.

“I think a lot of people have these sneakers,” you stammer, in the end, and they just sniff and turn away. You go back to eating your lunch alone.

Day 8 of the Middle School Time Loop: even though you do well in every class, you must be so much more stupid than your classmates, to be missing whatever detail it is that they seem to have caught. How do they do it so quickly? Before recess, before the end of homeroom, even, they all just know. You’ve had endless chances to do this day over and yet you never seem to be able to catch up with them. Running to stand still, you’ve heard your mother say, when she’s busy at work. That’s you. Running to stand still.

Day 9 of the Middle School Time Loop: you pretend to be sick again, and you realize that if you want to, you can pretend to be sick every day. It's easy to convince your parents: you look tired and unhappy, your eyes small within their dark circles, like some underground creature. You stop watching that TV Show that you never really wanted to watch in the first place, and instead dream your way through all your favourite childhood movies. Disney, Pixar, Studio Ghibli. You retreat into jewel-colored landscapes, where everyone is magical or beautiful or at least funny, and the heroes always win in the end.

Day 10 of the Middle School Time Loop: You notice that most of the Pixar heroes, the Disney princesses look more like Ashleigh than you. Long hair. Pale eyes. Button noses. And all of them, so thin.

Day 11 of the Middle School Time Loop: you go to school, but you don’t talk to anyone. You don’t even answer your name at roll call. Your teacher asks you if anything is wrong at school, or at home perhaps. You shake your head, but that evening you hear your father taking a call. You shrug off his worry: it’ll be forgotten tomorrow anyway.

Day 12 of the Middle School Time Loop: an unexpected development: your apathy almost seems to make your classmates like you more. When you say, truthfully, that you don’t care much for the TV Show that eternally dominates the recess chatter, some people look impressed. They ask you what you think is better. But you’re wise and don’t admit to liking anything. "Mysterious," someone says appreciatively.

At the end of recess, the girl who told you off for copying Ashleigh nudges you. “Hey. Look, Robert has an Up shirt. Kind of cute, that he’s still into that stuff, right?”

You know that it’s not the good cute.

You stare at her coldly. “The shirt just has a dog on it. It doesn't say he's from Up. So you must have liked the movie enough to remember him.”

She flushes scarlet, and hurries to catch up with Ashleigh, throwing you a dirty look. Robert glances at you gratefully but you don’t return his smile. He won’t remember that you did this for him. Anyway, you didn't, really. Do it for him, that is.

Day 13 of the Middle School Time Loop: You tell your parents you’re sick again. Today, you watch the second tier of Studio Ghibli movies, the ones that your parents always say, self-consciously, that you’ll find dull. Only Yesterday, Princess Kaguya, When Marnie Was There. You’re only a few minutes into Marnie when there’s a line that pulls you up short:

“In this world, there’s an invisible magic circle. There’s inside and outside. These people are inside. And I’m outside.”

The shock of recognition that surges through you is so profound that you almost cry, and then, when the movie's over, you do cry. Ugly sobs that make you sound like a toddler throwing a tantrum at the mall, that make your head pound with a dehydration headache. But behind the tears, there's relief. There it is, the truth that you were searching for, through all these do-overs. There’s an invisible magic circle. Of course there is.

But here’s the thing about circles: the inside is small. The outside is scary, and lonely, but it’s huge: huger than you could ever have imagined before you turned around and looked.

When your dad gets home, he asks if you’re feeling better. “Much,” you say, and it’s true.

Day ?? of the Middle School Time Loop: Sometimes you go to school, but ditch class and go to the library or the playground and do your own thing even if teachers yell at you. Sometimes you wander around the neighborhood. Sometimes you ask your parents crazy things, like to take you to work with them, or to the beach, or to DisneyWorld. Sometimes they say no. A surprising amount of times, they say yes. You wonder if maybe they’re trapped in a time loop too.

Sometimes you sit quietly in other classrooms than the one you’re meant to be in, until they shoo you out or even send you to the principal. (He finds you baffling. You feel a deep, slightly mournful affection for him, like you would for an very old and tired dog). It’s surprising, the amount of different things that are getting taught in one school in one day. It takes you a long time to work your way through them all.

You watch a frog getting dissected a few times before you start to feel bad and don’t go back to that classroom again. Your favorite class to crash is art, because the teacher always clocks that you’re not meant to be there but smiles and lets you stay anyway. When you meet her eyes, it feels like you’re sharing a secret.

Day One-Hundred And Something of the Middle School ...Wait.

At some point, time started moving again, and you didn’t even realize it.

For so long, the reprimands you received about your future seemed so empty, so laughable. There was no future. Only a more- or less-bearable present. But now, your classmates remember the unhinged things that you do; now, your teachers’ and parents’ worries about the future have the full juggernaut weight of reality behind them.

You thought that you’d be more terrified. For so long, you’ve dreaded this forward momentum. No loading screen, no mini-games, just one single, awful, pulsating life. But things are different now. Time’s moving again, and here you are, so far outside the invisible magic circle that you’re not even sure that you'd be able to see it any more. You can still feel its power, but faintly, like the pull between two magnets when they're an arm's length apart. Easy to ignore.

“Are you ready?” Robert says, catching your eye over the kitchen table. He comes here first thing so you can get the bus together. At some point, during the time loop, you started to seek him out. He was outside the circle, too, you realized. But even more importantly, not once, on any of those grimly looping days, did you see him try and push someone else out to make a space for himself. In this crab bucket, that’s something that counts for a lot.

“Our final day of middle school,” he sighs, half to himself. “Never thought I’d see it.”

"Me either," you reply, getting up to put on your talismanic pink sneakers. They’re scuffed and dirty after years of wear, and certainly Ashley would never be caught dead in them these days. Maybe that’s what you should have told her, all those loops ago: that no imitation, let alone one as unskilled as yours, can ever be perfect, and that indeed the very imperfection renders it an original work in its own right. Time and thought and human care transforms even the most diligent copy into something else entirely.

But you’ve been through enough time loops to know that that sort of explanation wouldn’t go over very well.

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The thing about having and clearly expressing healthy boundaries is that it makes your partner feel safe, too. I grew up around people who wouldn't clearly express what they wanted or didn't want me to do, only quietly tolerated whatever I was doing that they didn't like, until they wouldn't, and then snapped at me for having obliviously annoyed them this entire time. I got tested for autism several times for never learning how to read minds.

My boyfriend has learned to express boundaries for intimacy in his sleep. Literally. He sleeps with just a sheet for a blanket during the summer due to the heat, and if I'm awake when he isn't, I can request cuddles by gently trying to tug the blanket from him, to crawl under it for skin-to-skin contact. If he wants me there, he lets me, and he'll roll over and wrap around me as gentle but inevitable as sweet summer rain. And if he doesn't, I won't push.

This one time I was the big spoon, and he gently pulled away and drew the blanket over his back like the curtain of a theatre stage. Show's over, done cuddling, my cue to turn over to my own side of the bed. And this morning, when I woke up before him, I tried to tug his blanket just a little just to see if it's cuddle time. And he gripped the blanket corner in his fist comically fast. Like shup. No cuddles. And I'm glad he does that - I don't want to be there if he doesn't want me there.

Love isn't about sacrificing your own happiness for the sake of someone else's. It's about not being able to be happy yourself unless your loved ones are happy too.

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So I hate facetime but have two small nephews who live very far away and wanted them to know who I was. So when second nephew was born, I started sending first nephew (4 years old) a postcard every week.

The content wasn't anything special. I made cookies, I saw this flower, my cats did this. He likes trucks and machinery so I scoured redbubble for anything related to machinery and got a giant batch of machine postcards. Whenever I traveled, I'd hunt down a postcard for him.

My second nephew turned four this year, and I started sending him postcards as well. Both of them like Pokemon now, so mostly it's been double Pokemon postcards every week. I don't hear much from them, or my sister, so I just generally hope they're enjoyed and try to remember to mail them before Sunday.

However. This week my mom informed me second nephew likes the postcards SO MUCH he brings them into daycare to show around. And when I shared that with my sister, she told me not only does he bring them into daycare, he sleeps with them at naptime.

The only higher honor would be for her to tell me he's eating them.

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i never learned attachment, not properly. i do what i can to be a good friend to those i float around but i have never felt substantial, as if i could reach out to touch another beyond giving them chills and perhaps an unexplained sense of sudden dread, but i as well remained intangible and i liked it that way. my first friend was a boy in kindergarten but he was taking after his step-father and i would suddenly find myself in choke holds, being sent home with black eyes and a bloody nose. when our mothers said "no more" it broke my heart and then we moved. and then we moved. and then we moved. and then.. the popular speculation is my mother detached from me early, when i was three years old and diagnosed with cancer, in case she were to lose me, and (un)fortunately i survived to keep growing older but she had already let me go. sure, there are those i call friends, but if one day they decided to turn into a ghost themselves, i wouldn't be too hung up about it, what business does a spectre have to be upset about losing something they couldn't touch in the first place. except sometimes, some one appears in my path that i find i cannot pass through, they stop me somehow, as if they consider me solid, think me real. and all i can say is that i hope you don't disappear.

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Do You Love the Colour of the Sky? (Or: This Must be the Place)

(I apologize for the resolution in advance. Still troubleshooting.)