She's Got Bette Davis Eyes, a song by Sara Melo on Spotify
She's got Bette Davis eyes
Bette Davis Eyes - Download Latest MP3 Songs Online: Play
She’s Got Bette Davis Eyes - Transgender Forum
Songtext von Kim Carnes - Bette Davis Eyes Lyrics
"She's got Bette Davis eyes..." | DC Trends - Politics
Bette Davis Eyes — Kim Carnes | Last.fm
BETTE DAVIS EYES Chords - Kim Carnes | E-Chords
Bette Davis Eyes - Kim Carnes | Shazam
play she's got bette davis eyes
play she's got bette davis eyes - win
Iris [3/3]
I awoke to a world without women. I rolled off the bed into sore thighs and guilt, got up to emptiness that echoed the slightest noise, and left my wife’s clothes on the sheets without thinking that eventually I’d have to pack them into a plastic bag and slide them down the garbage chute. I felt magnified and hollow. In the kitchen, I used the stove top as a table because the actual table had my wife’s tablet on it, and spilled instant coffee. What I didn’t spill I drank in a few gulps, the way I used to drink ice cold milk as a boy. I stood in front of the living room window for a while before realizing I was naked, then realizing that it didn’t matter because men changed in front of each other at the pool and peed next to one another into urinals in public restrooms, and there weren’t any women to hide from, no one to offend. The world, I told myself, was now a sprawling men’s pisser, so I slammed the window open and pissed. I wanted to call someone—to tell them that my wife was dead, because that’s a duty owed by the living—but whom could I call: her sister, her parents? Her sister was dead. Her father had a dead wife and two dead daughters. There was nothing to say. Everyone knew. I called my wife’s father anyway. Was he still my father-in-law now that I was a widower? He didn’t accept the connection. Widower: a word loses all but historical meaning when there are no alternatives. If all animals were dogs, we’d purge one of those words from our vocabulary. We were all widowers. It was synonymous with man. I switched on the television and stared, crying, at a montage of photographs showing the bloody landscapes of cities, hospitals, retirement homes, schools and churches, all under the tasteless headline: “International Pop”. Would we clean it up, these remnants of the people we loved? Could we even use the same buildings, knowing what had happened in them? The illusion of practical thinking pushed my feeling of emptiness away. I missed arms wrapping around me from behind while I stared through rain streaked windows. I missed barking and a wagging tail that hit my leg whenever I was standing too close. Happiness seemed impossible. I called Bakshi because I needed confirmation that I still had a voice. “They’re the lucky ones,” he said right after I’d introduced myself. “They’re out. We’re the fools still locked in, and now we’re all alone.” For three weeks, I expected my wife to show up at the apartment door. I removed her clothes from the bed and stuffed them into a garbage bag, but kept the garbage bag in the small space between the fridge and the kitchen wall. I probably would have kept a dead body in the freezer if I had one and it fit. As a city and as a world, those were grim, disorganized weeks for us. Nobody worked. I don’t know what we did. Sat around and drank, smoked. And we called each other, often out of the blue. Every day, I received a call from someone I knew but hadn’t spoken to in years. The conversations all followed a pattern. There was no catching up and no explanation of lost time, just a question like “How are you holding up?” followed by a thoughtless answer (“Fine, I guess. And you?”) followed by an exchange of details about the women we’d lost. Mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, girlfriends, friends, cousins, aunts, teachers, students, co-workers. We talked about the colour of their hair, their senses of humour, their favourite movies. We said nothing about ourselves, choosing instead to inhabit the personas of those whom we’d loved. In the hallway, I would put on my wife’s coats but never look at myself in the mirror. I wore her winter hats in the middle of July. Facebook became a graveyard, with the gender field separating the mourners from the dead. The World Health Organization issued a communique stating that based on the available data it was reasonable to assume that all the women in the world were dead, but it called for any woman still alive to come forward immediately. The language of the communique was as sterile as the Earth. Nobody came forward. The World Wildlife Fund created an inventory of all mammalian species that listed in ascending order how long each species would exist. Humans were on the bottom. Both the World Health Organization and the World Wildlife Fund predicted that unless significant technological progress occurred in the field of fertility within the next fifty years, the last human, a theoretical boy named Philip born into a theoretical developed country on March 26, 2025, would die in 93 years. On the day of his death, Philip would be the last remaining mammal—although not necessarily animal—on Earth. No organization or government has ever officially stated that July 4, 2025, was the most destructive day in recorded history, on the morning of which, Eastern Time, four billion out of a total of eight billion people ceased to exist as anything more than memories. What killed them was neither an act of war nor an act of terrorism. Neither was it human negligence. There was no one to blame and no one to prosecute. In the western countries, where the majority of people no longer believed in any religion, we could not even call it an act of God. So we responded by calling it nothing at all. And, like nothing, our lives persisted. We ate, we slept and we adapted. After the first wave of suicides ended, we hosed off what the rain hadn’t already washed away and began to reorganize the systems on which our societies ran. It was a challenge tempered only slightly in countries where women had not made up a significant portion of the workforce. We held new elections, formed new boards of directors and slowed down the assembly lines and bus schedules to make it possible for our communities to keep running. There was less food in the supermarkets, but we also needed less food. Instead of two trains we ran one, but one sufficed. I don’t remember the day when I finally took the black garbage bag from its resting place and walked it to the chute. “How are you holding up?” a male voice would say on the street. “Fine, I guess. And you?” I’d answer. ##!! wrote a piece of Python code to predict the box office profitability of new movies, in which real actors played alongside computer-generated actresses. The code was only partially successful. Because while it did accurately predict the success of new movies in relation to one other, it failed to include the overwhelming popularity of re-releases of films from the past—films starring Bette Davis, Giulietta Masina, Meryl Streep: women who at least on screen were still flesh and blood. Theatres played retrospectives. On Amazon, books by female authors topped the charts. Sales of albums by women vocalists surged. We thirsted for another sex. I watched, read and listened like everyone else, and in between I cherished any media on which I found images or recordings of my wife. I was angry for not having made more. I looked at the same photos and watched the same clips over and over again. I memorized my wife’s Facebook timeline and tagged all her Tweets by date, theme and my own rating. When I went out, I would talk to the air as if she was walking beside me, sometimes quoting her actual words as answers to my questions and sometimes inventing my own as if she was a beloved character in an imagined novel. When people looked at me like I was crazy, I didn’t care. I wasn’t the only one. But, more importantly, my wife meant more to me than they did. I remembered times when we’d stroll through the park or down downtown sidewalks and I would be too ashamed to kiss her in the presence of strangers. Now, I would tell her that I love her in the densest crowd. I would ask her whether I should buy ketchup or mustard in the condiments aisle. She helped me pick out my clothes in the morning. She convinced me to eat healthy and exercise. In November, I was in Bakshi’s apartment for the first time, waiting for a pizza delivery boy, when one of Bakshi’s friends who was browsing Reddit told us that the Tribe of Akna was starting a Kickstarter campaign in an attempt to buy the Republic of Suriname, rename it Xibalba and close its borders for all except the enlightened. Xibalba would have no laws, Salvador Abaroa said in a message on the site. He was banging his gong as he did. Everything would be legal, and anyone who pledged $100 would receive a two-week visa to this new "Mayan Buddhist Eden". If you pledged over $10,000, you would receive citizenship. “Everything in life is destroyed by energy,” Abaroa said. “But let the energy enlighten you before it consumes your body. Xibalba is finite life unbound.” Bakshi’s phone buzzed. The pizza boy had sent an email. He couldn’t get upstairs, so Bakshi and I took the elevator to the building’s front entrance. The boy’s face was so white that I saw it as soon as the elevator doors slid open. Walking closer, I saw that he was powdered. His cheeks were also rouged, and he was wearing cranberry coloured lipstick, a Marilyn Monroe wig and a short black skirt. Compared to his face, his thin legs looked like incongruously dark popsicle sticks. Bakshi paid for the pizza and added another five dollars for the tip. The boy batted his fake eyelashes and asked if maybe he could do something to earn a little more. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I could come upstairs and clean the place up a little. You two live alone?” Bakshi passed me the two pizza boxes—They felt hot in my hands.—and dug around in his wallet. “It’s not just the two of us,” I said. The boy smiled. “That’s OK. I’ve done parties before if that’s what you’re into.” I saw the reaction on Bakshi’s face, and I saw the boy’s grotesque caricature of a woman. “There’s condoms and lube in the car,” the boy said, pointing to a sedan with a pizza spray-painted across its side parked by the curb. “My boss says I can take up to two hours but it’s not like he uses a stopwatch.” I stepped on Bakshi’s foot and shouldered him away. He was still fiddling with his wallet. “We’re not interested,” I said to the boy. He just shrugged. “Suit yourselves. If you change your mind, order another pizza and ask for Ruby.” The elevator dinged and the doors opened. As we shuffled inside, I saw Bakshi’s cheeks turn red. “I’m not actually—” he mumbled, but I didn’t let him finish. What had bothered me so much about the boy wasn’t the way he looked or acted; in fact, it wasn’t really the boy at all. He was just trying to make a buck. What bothered me was how ruthlessly we’d already begun to exploit each other. For those of us who were heterosexual, sex was a definite weakness. I missed it. I would never have it with a woman again. The closest substitute was pornography, whose price rose with its popularity, but which, at least for me, now came scented with the unpleasantness of historicity and nostalgia. Videos and photos, not to mention physical magazines, were collector’s items in the same way that we once collected coins or action figures. The richest men bought up the exclusive rights to their favourite porn stars and guarded them by law with a viciousness once reserved for the RIAA and MPAA. Perhaps exclusivity gave them a possessive satisfaction. In response, we pirated whatever we could and fought for a pornographic public domain. Although new pornography was still being produced, either with the help of the same virtual technology they used for mainstream movies or with the participation of young men in costume, it lacked the taste of the originals. It was like eating chocolate made without cocoa. The best pornography, and therefore the best sex, became the pornography of the mind. The Tribe of Akna reached its Kickstarter goal in early December. On December 20, I went to church for the first time since getting married because that was the theoretical date that my wife—along with every other woman—was supposed to have given birth. I wanted to be alone with others. Someone posted a video on TikTok from Elia Kazan’s On The Waterfront, dubbing over Marlon Brando’s speech to say: “You don’t understand. I could’a had a piece of ass. I could’a been a school board member. I could’a been a son’s daddy”. It was juvenile and heartbreaking. By Christmas, the Surinamese government was already expelling its citizens, each of whom had theoretically been given a fraction of the funds paid to the government from the Tribe of Akna’s Kickstarter pool, and Salvador Abaroa’s lawyers were petitioning for international recognition of the new state of Xibalba. Neither Canada nor the United States opened diplomatic relations, but others did. I knew people who had pledged money, and when in January they disappeared on trips, I had no doubt to where. Infamy spread in the form of stories and urban legends. There’s no need for details. People disappeared, and ethicists wrote about the ethical neutrality of murder, arguing that because we were all slated to die, leaving the Earth barren in a century, destruction was a human inevitability, and what is inevitable can never be bad, even when it comes earlier than expected—even when it comes by force. Because, as a species, we hadn’t chosen destruction for ourselves, neither should any individual member of our species be able to choose now for himself. To the ethicists of what became known as the New Inevitability School, suicide was a greater evil than murder because it implied choice and inequality. If the ship was going down, no one should be allowed to get off. A second wave of suicides coincided with the debate, leading many governments to pass laws making suicide illegal. But how do you punish someone who already wants to die? In China: by keeping him alive and selling him to Xibalba, where he becomes the physical plaything of its citizens and visa-holders. The Chinese was the first embassy to open in Xibalban Paramaribo. The men working on Kurt Schwaller’s theory of everything continued working, steadily adding new variables to their equations, complicating their calculations in the hopes that someday the variable they added would be the final one and the equation would yield an answer. “It’s pointless,” Bakshi would comment after reading about one of the small breakthroughs they periodically announced. “Even if they do manage to predict something, anything, it won’t amount to anything more than the painfully obvious. And after decades of adding and subtracting their beans, they’ll come out of their Los Alamos datalabs like groundhogs into a world blanketed by storm clouds and conclude, finally and with plenty of self-congratulations, that it’s about to fucking rain.” It rained a lot in February. It was one of the warmest Februaries in Toronto’s history. Sometimes I went for walks along the waterfront, talking to my wife, listening to Billie Holiday and trying to recall as many female faces as I could. Ones from the distant past: my mother, my grandmothers. Ones from the recent past: the woman whose life my wife saved on the way to the hospital, the Armenian woman with the film magazine and the injured son, the Jamaican woman, Bakshi’s wife. I focused on their faces, then zoomed out to see their bodies. I carried an umbrella but seldom opened it because the pounding of the raindrops against the material distorted my mental images. I saw people rush across the street holding newspapers above their heads while dogs roamed the alleyways wearing nothing at all. Of the two, it was dogs that had the shorter time left on Earth, and if they could let the rain soak their fur and drip off their bodies, I could surely let it run down my face. It was first my mother and later my wife who told me to always cover up in the rain, “because moisture causes colds,” but I was alone now and I didn’t want to be separated from the falling water by a sheet of glass anymore. I already was cold. I saw a man sit down on a bench, open his briefcase, pack rocks into it, then close it, tie it to his wrist, check his watch and start to walk into the polluted waters of Lake Ontario. Another man took out his phone and tapped his screen a few times. The man in the lake walked slowly, savouring each step. When the police arrived, sirens blaring, the water was up to his neck. I felt guilty for watching the three officers splash into the lake after him. I don’t know what happened after that because I turned my back and walked away. I hope they didn’t stop him. I hope he got to do what he wanted to do. “Screw the police.” Bakshi passed me a book. “You should read this,” he said. It was by a professor of film and media studies at a small university in Texas. There was a stage on the cover, flanked by two red curtains. The photo had been taken from the actors’ side, looking out at an audience that the stage lights made too dark to see. The title was Hiding Behind The Curtains. I flipped the book over. There was no photo of the author. “It’s a theory,” Bakshi said, “that undercuts what Abaroa and the Inevitabilists are saying. It’s a little too poetic in parts but—listen, you ever read Atlas Shrugged?” I said I hadn’t. “Well, anyway, what this guy says is that what if instead of our situation letting us do anything we want, it’s actually the opposite, a test to see how we act when we only think that we’re doomed. I mean what if the women who died in March, what if they’re just—” “Hiding behind the curtains,” I said. He bit his lower lip. “It sounds stupid when you say it like that but, as a metaphor, it has a kind of elegance, right?” I flipped through the book, reading a few sentences at random. It struck me as neo-Christian. “Isn’t this a little too spiritual for you? I thought we were all locked into one path,” I said. “I thought that, too, but lately I’ve been able to do things—things that I didn’t really want to do.” For a second I was concerned. “Nothing bad,” he said. “I mean I’ve felt like I’m locked into doing one thing, say having a drink of water, but I resist and pour myself a glass of orange juice instead.” I shook my head. “It’s hard to explain,” he said. That’s how most theories ended, I thought: reason and evidence up to a crucial point, and then it gets so personal that it’s hard to explain. You either make the jump or you don’t. “Just read it,” he said. “Please read it. You don’t have to agree with it, I just want to get your opinion, an objective opinion.” I never did read the book, and Bakshi forgot about it, too, but that day he was excited and happy, and those were rare feelings. I was simultaneously glad for him and jealous. Afterwards, we went out onto the balcony and drank Czech beer until morning. When it got cool, we put on our coats. It started to drizzle so we wore blue plastic suits like the ones they used to give you on boat rides in Niagara Falls. When it was time to go home, I was so drunk I couldn’t see straight. I almost got into a fight, the first one of my life, because I bumped into a man on the street and told him to get the fuck out of my way. I don’t remember much more of my walk home. The only reason I remember Behind The Curtains at all is because when I woke up in the afternoon it was the first thing that my hung over brain recognized. It was lying on the floor beside the bed. Then I opened the blinds covering my bedroom window and, through my spread fingers that I’d meant to use as a shield from the first blast of daylight, I saw the pincers for the first time. They’d appeared while I was asleep. I turned on the television and checked my phone. The media and the internet were feverish, but nobody knew what the thing was, just a massive, vaguely rectangular shape blotting out a strip of the sky. NASA stated that it had received no extraterrestrial messages to coincide with the appearance. Every government claimed ignorance. The panel discussions on television only worsened my headache. Bakshi emailed me links to photos from Mumbai, Cape Town, Sydney and Mexico City, all showing the same shape; or rather one of a pair of shapes, for there were two of them, one on each side of the Earth, and they’d trapped our planet between themselves like gargantuan fingers clutching an equally gargantuan ping-pong ball. That’s why somebody came up with the term “the pincers”. It stuck. Because I’d slept in last night’s clothes I was already dressed, so I ran down the stairs and out of my apartment building to get a better look at them from the parking lot. You’re not supposed to look at the sun, but I wasn’t the only one breaking that rule. There were entire crowds with upturned faces in the streets. If the pincers, too, could see, they would perhaps be as baffled by us as we were of them: billions of tiny specks all over the surface of this ping-pong ball gathering in points on a grid, coagulating into large puddles that vanished overnight only to reassemble in the morning. In the following days, scientists scrambled to study the pincers and their potential effects on us, but they discovered nothing. The pincers did nothing. They emitted nothing, consumed nothing. They simply were. And they could not be measured or detected in any way other than by eyesight. When we shot rays at them, the rays continued on their paths unaffected, as if nothing was there. The pincers did, however, affect the sun’s rays coming towards us. They cut up our days. The sun would rise, travel over the sky, hide behind a pincer—enveloping us in a second night—before revealing itself again as a second day. But if the pincers’ physical effect on us was limited to its blockage of light, their mental effects on us were astoundingly severe. For many, this was the sign they’d been waiting for. It brought hope. It brought gloom. It broke and confirmed ideas that were hard to explain. In their ambiguity, the pincers could be anything, but in their strangeness they at least reassured us of the reality of the strange times in which we were living. Men walked away from the theory of everything, citing the pincers as the ultimate variable that proved the futility of prognostication. Others took up the calculations because if the pincers could appear, what else was out there in our future? However, ambiguity can only last for a certain period. Information narrows possibilities. On April 1, 2026, every Twitter account in the world received the following message: as you can see this message is longer than the allowed one hundred forty characters time and space are malleable you thought you had one hundred years but prepare for the plucking The sender was @. The message appeared in each user’s feed at exactly the same time and in his first language, without punctuation. Because of the date most of us thought it was a hoax, but the developers of Twitter denied this vehemently. It wasn’t until a court forced them to reveal their code, which proved that a message of that length and sent by a blank user was impossible, that our doubts ceased. ##!! took bets on what the message meant. Salvador Abaroa broadcast a response into space in a language he called Bodhi Mayan, then addressed the rest of us in English, saying that in the pincers he had identified an all-powerful prehistoric fire deity, described in an old Sanskrit text as having the resemblance of mirrored black fangs, whose appearance signified the end of time. “All of us will burn,” he said, “but paradise shall be known only to those who burn willingly.” Two days later, The Tribe of Akna announced that in one month it would seal Xibalba from the world and set fire to everything and everyone in it. For the first time, its spokesman said, an entire nation would commit suicide as one. Jonestown was but a blip. As a gesture of goodwill, he said that Xibalba was offering free immolation visas to anyone who applied within the next week. The New Inevitability School condemned the plan as “offensively unethical” and inequalitist and urged an international Xibalban boycott. Nothing came of it. When the date arrived, we watched with rapt attention on live streams and from the vantage points of circling news planes as Salvador Abaroa struck flint against steel, creating the spark that caught the char cloth, starting a fire that blossomed bright crimson and in the next weeks consumed all 163,821 square kilometres of the former Republic of Suriname and all 2,500,000 of its estimated Xibalban inhabitants. Despite concerns that the fire would spread beyond Xibalba’s borders, The Tribe of Akna had been careful. There were no accidental casualties and no unplanned property damage. No borders were crossed. Once the fire burned out, reporters competed to be first to capture the mood on the ground. Paramaribo resembled the smouldering darkness of a fire pit. It was a few days later while sitting on Bakshi’s balcony, looking up at the pincers and rereading a reproduction of @’s message—someone had spray-painted it across the wall of a building opposite Bakshi’s—that I remembered Iris. The memory was so absorbing that I didn’t notice when Bakshi slid open the balcony door and sat down beside me, but I must have been smiling because he said, “I don’t mean this the wrong way, but you look a little loony tonight. Seriously, man, you do not look sufficiently freaked out.” I’d remembered Iris before, swirling elements of her plain face, but now I also remembered her words and her theory. I turned to Bakshi, who seemed to be waiting for an answer to his question, and said, “Let’s get up on the roof of this place.” He grabbed my arm and held on tightly. “I’m not going to jump, if that’s what you mean.” It wasn’t what I meant, but I asked, “why not?” He said, “I don’t know. I know we’re fucked as a species and all that, but I figure if I’m still alive I might as well see what happens next, like in a bad movie you want to see through to the end.” I promised him that I wasn’t going to jump, either. Then I scrambled inside his apartment, grabbed my hat and jacket from the closet by the front door and put them on while speed walking down the hall, toward the fire escape. I realized I’d been spending a lot of time here. The alarm went off as soon I pushed open the door with my hip but I didn’t care. When Bakshi caught up with me, I was already outside, leaping up two stairs at a time. The metal construction was rusted. The treads wobbled. On the roof, the wind nearly blew my hat off and it was so loud I could have screamed and no one would have heard me. Holding my hat in my hands, I crouched and looked out over the twinkling city spread out in front of me. It looked alive in spite of the pincers in the sky. “Let’s do something crazy,” I yelled. Bakshi was still catching his breath behind me. “What, like this isn’t crazy enough?” The NHL may have been gone but my hat still bore the Maple Leafs logo, as quaint and obsolete by then as the Weimar Republic in the summer of 1945. “When’s the last time you played ball hockey?” I asked. Bakshi crouched beside me. “You’re acting weird. And I haven’t played ball hockey in ages.” I stood up so suddenly that Bakshi almost fell over. This time I knew I was smiling. “So call your buddies,” I said. “Tell them to bring their sticks and their gear and to meet us in front of the ACC in one hour.” Bakshi patted me on the back. Toronto shone like jewels scattered over black velvet. “The ACC’s been closed for years, buddy. I think you’re really starting to lose it.” I knew it was closed. “Lose what?” I asked. “It’s closed and we’re going to break in.” The chains broke apart like shortbread. The electricity worked. The clouds of dust made me sneeze. We used duffel bags to mark out the goals. We raced up and down the stands and bent over, wheezing at imaginary finish lines. We got into the announcer’s booth and called each other cunts through the microphone. We ran, fell and shot rubber pucks for hours. We didn’t keep score. We didn’t worry. “What about the police?” someone asked. The rest of us answered: “Screw the fucking police!” And when everybody packed up and went home, I stayed behind. “Are you sure you’re fine?” Bakshi asked. “Yeah,” I said. “Because I have to get back so that I can shower, get changed and get to work.” “Yeah, I know,” I said. “And you promise me you’ll catch a cab?” “I’m not suicidal.” He fixed his grip on his duffel bag. “I didn’t say you were. I was just checking.” “I want to see the end of the movie, too,” I said. He saluted. I watched him leave. When he was gone, my wife walked down from the nosebleeds and took a seat beside me. “There’s someone I want to tell you about,” I said. She lifted her chin like she always does when something unexpected catches her interest, and scooted closer. I put my arm across the back of her beautiful shoulders. She always liked that, even though the position drives me crazy because I tend to talk a lot with my hands. “Stuck at Leafs-Wings snorefest,” she said. “Game sucks but I love the man sitting beside me.” (January 15, 2019. Themes: hockey, love, me. Rating: 5/5). “Her name was Iris,” I said.
Iris
“What if the whole universe was a giant garden—like a hydroponics thing, like how they grow tomatoes and marijuana, so there wouldn’t need to be any soil, all the nutrients would just get injected straight into the seeds or however they do it—or, even better, space itself was the soil, you know how they talk about dark matter being this invisible and mysterious thing that exists out there and we don’t know what it does, if it actually affect anything, gravity…” She blew a cloud of pot smoke my way that made me cough and probably gave her time to think. She said, “So dark matter is like the soil, and in this space garden of course they don’t grow plants but something else.” “Galaxies?” “Eyes.” “Just eyes, or body parts in general?” I asked. “Just eyes.” The music from the party thumped. “But the eyes are our planets, like Mars is an eye, Neptune is an eye, and the Earth is an eye, maybe even the best eye.” “The best for what? Who’s growing them?” “God,” she said. I took the joint from her and took a long drag. “I didn’t know you believed in God.” “I don’t, I guess—except when I’m on dope. Anyway, you’ve got to understand me because when I say God I don’t mean like the old man with muscles and a beard. This God, the one I’m talking about, it’s more like a one-eyed monster.” “Like a cyclops?” I asked. “Yeah, like that, like a cyclops. So it’s growing these eyes in the dark matter in space—I mean right now, you and me, we’re literally sitting on one of these eyes and we’re contributing to its being grown because the nutrients the cyclops God injected into them, that’s us.” “Why does God need so many extra eyes?” “It’s not a question of having so many of them, but more about having the right one, like growing the perfect tomato.” I gave her back the joint and leaned back, looking at the stars. “Because every once in a while the cyclops God goes blind, its eye stops working—not in the same way we go blind, because the cyclops God doesn’t see reality in the same way we see reality—but more like we see through our brains and our eyes put together.” “Like x-ray vision?” I asked. “No, not like that at all,” she said. “A glass eye?” “Glass eyes are fake.” “OK,” I said, “so maybe try something else. Give me a different angle. Tell me what role we’re playing in all of this because right now it seems that we’re pretty insignificant. I mean, you said we’re nutrients but what’s the difference between, say, Mars and Earth in terms of being eyes?” She looked over at me. “Are you absolutely sure you want to hear about this?” “I am,” I said. “You don’t think it’s stupid?” “Compared to what?” “I don’t know, just stupid in general.” “I don’t.” “I like you,” she said. “Because I don’t think you’re stupid?” I asked. “That’s just a bonus. I mean more that you’re up here with me instead of being down there with everyone, and we’re talking and even though we’re not in love I know somehow we’ll never forget each other for as long as we live.” “It’s hard to forget being on the surface of a giant floating eyeball.” “You’re scared that you won’t find anyone to love,” she said suddenly, causing me to nearly choke on my own saliva. “Don’t ask me how I know—I just do. But before I go any further about the cyclops God, I want you to know that you’ll find someone to love and who’ll love you back, and whatever happens you’ll always have that because no one can take away the past.” “You’re scared of going blind,” I said. “I am going blind.” “Not yet.” “And I’m learning not to be scared because everything I see until that day will always belong to me.” “The doctors said it would be gradual,” I reminded her. “That’s horrible.” “Why?” “Because you wouldn’t want to find someone to love and then know that every day you wake up the love between you grows dimmer and dimmer, would you?” “I guess not,” I said. “Wouldn’t you much rather feel the full strength of that love up to and including in the final second before the world goes black?” “It would probably be painful to lose it all at once like that.” “Painful because you actually had something to lose. For me, I know I can’t wish away blindness, but I sure wish that the last image I ever see—in that final second before my world goes black—is the most vivid and beautiful image of all.” Because I didn’t know what to say to that, I mumbled: “I’m sorry.” “That I’m going blind?” “Yeah, and that we can’t grow eyes.” This time I looked over, and she was the one gazing at the stars. “Before, you asked if we were insignificant,” she said. “But because you’re sorry—that’s kind of why we’re the most significant of all, why Earth is better than the other planets.” “For the cyclops God?” “Yes.” “He cares about my feelings?” “Not in the way you’re probably thinking, but in a different way that’s exactly what the cyclops God cares about most because that’s what it’s looking for in an eye. All the amazing stuff we’ve ever built, all our ancient civilizations and supercomputers and cities you can see from the Moon—that’s just useless cosmetics to the cyclops God, except in how all of it has made us feel about things that aren’t us.” “I think you’re talking about morality.” “I think so, too.” “So by feeling sorry for you I’m showing compassion, and the cyclops God likes compassion?” “That’s not totally wrong but it’s a little upside down. We have this black matter garden and these planets the cyclops God has grown as potential eyes to replace its own eye once it stops working, but its own eye is like an eye and a brain mixed together. Wait—” she said. I waited. “Imagine a pair of tinted sunglasses.” I imagined green-tinted ones. “Now imagine that instead of the lenses being a certain colour, they’re a certain morality, and if you wear the glasses you see the world tinted according to that morality.” I was kind of able to imagine that. I supposed it would help show who was good and who was bad. “But the eye and the tinted glasses are the same thing in this case.” “Exactly, there’s no one without the other, and what makes the tint special is us—not that the cyclops God cares at all about individuals any more than we care about individual honey bees. That’s why he’s kind of a monster.” “Isn’t people’s morality always changing, though?” “Only up to a point. Green is green even when you have a bunch of shades of it, and a laptop screen still works fine even with a few dead pixels, right? And the more globalized and connected we get, the smoother our morality gets, but if you’re asking more about how our changing morals work when the cyclops God finally comes to take its eye, I assume it has a way to freeze our progress. To cut our roots. Then it makes some kind of final evaluation. If it’s satisfied it takes the planet and sticks it into its eye socket, and if it doesn’t like us then it lets us alone, although because we’re frozen and possibly rootless I suppose we die—maybe that’s what the other planets are, so many of them in space without any sort of life. Cold, rejected eyes.” From sunglasses to bees to monitors in three metaphors, and now we were back to space. This was getting confusing. The stars twinkled, some of them dead, too: their light still arriving at our eyes from sources that no longer existed. “That’s kind of depressing,” I said to end the silence. “What about it?” “Being bees,” I said, “that work for so long at tinting a pair of glasses just so that a cyclops God can try them on.” “I don’t think it’s any more depressing than being a tomato.” “I’ve never thought about that.” “You should. It’s beautiful, like love,” she said. “Because if you think about it, being a tomato and being a person are really quite similar. They’re both about growing and existing for the enjoyment of someone else. As a tomato you’re planted, you grow and mature and then an animal comes along and eats you. The juicier you look and the nicer you smell, the greater the chance that you’ll get plucked but also the more pleasure the animal will get from you. As a person, you’re also born and you grow up and you mature into a one of a kind personality with a one of a kind face, and then someone comes along and makes you fall in love with them and all the growing you did was really just for their enjoyment of your love.” “Except love lasts longer than chewing a tomato.” “Sometimes,” she said. “And you have to admit that two tomatoes can’t eat each other the way two people can love each other mutually.” “I admit that’s a good point,” she said. “And what happens to someone who never gets fallen in love with?” “The same thing that happens to a tomato that never gets eaten or an eye that the cyclops God never takes. They die and they rot, and they darken and harden, decomposing until they don’t look like tomatoes anymore. It’s not a nice fate. I’d rather live awhile and get eaten, to be honest.” “As a tomato or person?” “Both.” I thought for a few seconds. “That explanation works for things on Earth, but nothing actually decomposes in space.” “That’s why there are so many dead planets,” she said.
Virtual Drag Race All Stars 4: Episode 2- The Snatch Game Of Love
Yana Yak goes for circus spectacle; going to backbends and all kinds of contorinst tricks at show, all the whilst delivering a fun, energetic lip sync that starts at a 100, and sticks that way... but Priya starts a little bit slow. She's cutesy, she's fun, she's campy... and as the chorus hits, she takes off her hat to reveal a blow up doll. Blowing, Blowing and blowing the doll, the judges and Queens all laugh all the while Priya lip syncs. Then, everyone realises- it's a blow up of Saint St Frostfur... to which Priya takes out a knife and begins to stab the doll, all the while she smiles. She's... just grateful. Everyone dies of laughter. Priya... how did you fit that in your hat? Priya winks. You're a winner baby! Priya Tigress: "Now, I'm not surprised of course. Are you?" Priya smirks. Well done Yana, you're safe. Yana Yak: "Priya's a threat.. A big one. I need to watch out for her... or work out how to one up her." Priya Tigress... you've won $10,000. Will the bottom Queens step forward. Priya. Which one of the bottom 2... have you chosen to give the chop? "Now, each of these two are talented. At this point, it would not be possible to be... making a right choice, because that is... subjective, of course. I made a decision on the basis of one point. Who deserves redemption? Dyna- she's fierce, she's proven herself. But Aura... needs to step it up. So... Dyna, i've chosen to eliminate you." Priya looks at Dyna. Dyna... begins to cry. "Oh, it'll be okay..." Aura awkwardly comforts Dyna. Aura: "My plan worked. It paid off..." Aura grins. "Hell yes." As it is written, so it shall be done. Dyna Might, you're a Super Queen, and you will always be an All Star. Now, Sashay Away... "Thank you so much." Dyna tears up again. "It's... been good to come back and show myself." "We love you Dyna!" Alejandra yells. Dyna Might: "Maybe I should've fought more! But it's okay. I hope all my fans watching know it is okay to get knocked down... just get up again." Dyna smiles. Lipstick Message: "Don't just be an All Star- Be a SUPER MONARCH!" ~ https://preview.redd.it/xc8j6lmvrbi51.png?width=900&format=png&auto=webp&s=98719a555f37516b77e95360106c983e1e2384fc The All Stars enter the werkroom. "Poor thing..." Priya wipes the mirror. "So..." Cheyenne eyes Priya. "You made an... interesting decision." "I felt like Aura had a lot to prove." Priya nods slowly. "Yana... who did you pick?" Cheyenne: "Priya's quick to deflect. Normally has a lot to talk about... and was very quick to buckpass. Someone's trying to fly under the radar." "But wait." Cheyenne looks at Priya. "What was the basis. Because, to be honest.." Cheyenne turns to Aura. "I don't see apologetic." "That was years ago, Cheyenne." Aura sighs. "Not an excuse." Alejandra eyes Aura. Aura exhales. "Ugh...." "It's just a testament to your character. I don't think it's healthy to be here." Cheyenne crosses her arms. "I have to agree." Slayla shrugs. "Not the energy I want you to bringing. I do wish Dyna was here." "Hmm." Aura responds. "I chose Aura." Yana looks around. "For.. similar reasons." "But... this is a chance for you to prove yourself now, Aura." Sofonda says. "Clearly- the other's don't think much of you. I don't know you well. But... I'm willing to learn." "Thank you." Aura smiles. "I just... want to get a chance to prove myself." "Time to de-drag..." Slayla stands up. Slayla and Cheyenne de-drag together. "We should play this game well." Cheyenne whispers to Slayla. "Of course. We need to prove ourselves. And watch out for the threats.." Slayla's eye moves to Priya, chatting with Aura. "I think we need a unified front." Cheyenne says. "An Alliance, you say?" Slayla cocks an eyebrow. "If you want to call it that." Cheyenne smirks. Cheyenne: "I'm going to fight for this. I've placed high... and whilst I did that on my original season, I don't plan to do just... high again. I plan to win." ~ The next day, Yana chats with Seondeok. "How are you feeling after last night?" Yana looks at Seon. Seon sigh. "I'm... okay. It was a bit of a knock, but... I've prepared so much, I can't let it get to be at this point." "That's the mentality you need to have." Yana nods. "And after last season... the Korean Twink Community is struggling, and needs a winner." Seon giggles. YOU'VE GOT RU-MAIL! Welcome to Drag Race... where you can be anybody. ANYBODY, OKCURR? "OKURRRRR." Kandyce responds. HELLO HELLO HELLO! My All Stars... for this week's maxi challenge, we're going for a STAPLE. It's time for the Snatch Game of Love! Each of you will put your impersonation skills to the test in your best character impersonations! Sofonda Cox: "As someone who WON the snatch game on her season.." Sofonda smiles. "Waiting for Applause..." An applause sound effect starts. "THIS IS A SIGN!" She grins. ~ Alejandra chats with Kandyce as they get ready. "So, you didn't actually get to do the Snatch Game on your season, did you?" Kandyce turns to Alejandra. "It was one of my biggest regrets. I- Do Gaga. I know how to do a hilarious, funny performance..." Alejandra smiles. "So i'm extremely excited?" "Where did you find the love for Gaga?" Kandyce says to Alejandra. "I..." Alejandra laughs. "I found love for dance, first." "A soul sister you are." Kandyce smiles. "I love to dance." "I picked it up as a child in Puerto Rico... found a passion for it. I was targeted for being a feminine child, but when I danced... it all went away. Then, I found a love for the classic pop Diva's- the Diana Rosses, the Janet's..." "Every second you speak, you excite me more sis." Kandyce smiles. "I had a very similar story myself..." "Then I found- I watched Gaga. First Video, Bad Romance. Glamour. Art. Dance. It was everything I wanted.. and I fell in love with impersonation and the art of Gaga. It makes me so happy and it brought me here." Alejandra's face glitters. "When we get out of here... we're going on a dance tour." Kandyce grins. "Along with Slayla..." Slayla eyes Alejandra and Kandyce. "I hear you talking.." "Sure did." Kandyce grins. "You two, get your butts here and do your makeup with me and Cheyenne." Slayla smirks. "Let's talk." ~ The All Stars Compete in the Snatch Game of Love!
[For Sale] Updated List With Nearly 500 $4 LPs!! Classic Rock, Hard Rock, Southern Rock, Pop, Prog, Psych, Jazz, Soul, Folk, Country, Soundtracks, New Age..
Back by popular demand, and thanks to everyone who purchased from me last weekend and helped me clear up some much needed space. Newly updated list with tons of goodies and nearly 500 titles to choose from! Once again, everything listed below is $4 apiece. LPs are a combination of original US presses, early reissues and the occasional foreign press - no modern reissues here. Shipping is a flat rate of $5 for as many LPs as I can fit into a single mailer (usually 6-8 LPs, depending on gatefolds, 2LPs, box sets, etc.). If you want a bunch I'm happy to work something out! Payments through PayPal only please. All items ship via USPS media mail with tracking. Minimum purchase of 3 LPs prior to shipping All items grade at VG/VG or better unless otherwise noted Here's the list! Rock/Pop/Etc. Lee Aaron – Metal Queen Aerosmith - Get Your Wings (Cover VG-) America - Holiday Angel - On Earth As It Is In Heaven Adam Ant - Strip April Wine - The Nature Of The Beast April Wine - First Glance The B-52's - Mesopotamia Bachman-Turner Overdrive - Not Fragile Bachman-Turner Overdrive - S/T Bachman-Turner Overdrive - Bachman-Turner Overdrive II Bad Company - Run With The Pack John Baldry - It Ain't Easy Be Bop Deluxe - The Best of and The Rest Of 2LP Jeff Beck With The Jan Hammer Group - Live Bee Gees - Idea Pat Benetar - Precious Time Pat Benetar - Tropico Pat Benetar - Seven The Hard Way Pat Benetar - Crimes Of Passion Pat Benetar - In The Heat Of The Night Billion Dollar Babies - Battle Axe Bloomfield/KoopeStills - Super Session Blue Oyster Cult - Agents Of Fortune (Cover VG-) Blue Oyster Cult - On Your Feet Or On Your Knees Blues Brothers - Briefcase Full Of Blues Tommy Bolin - Teaser Boston - Don’t Look Back Jackson Browne - Running On Empty Jackson Browne - For Everyman Jackson Browne - Hold Out The Jon Butcher Axis - Along The Axis Cheap Trick - Standing On The Edge Cher - S/T 2LP Chicago - VI The Dave Clark Five - Weekend In London The Dave Clark Five - Best Of Climax Blues Band - FM/Live Climax Blues Band - Lucky For Some Climax Blues Band - Gold Plated Cold Blood - Sisyphus Cold Blood - Cold Blood (Vinyl VG-) Cold Blood - Thriller (Cover VG-) Cold Blood - First Taste Of Sin Phil Collins - Face Value Chi Coltrane – Chi Coltrane Ry Cooder - Paradise And Lunch Ry Cooder - Into The Purple Valley Ry Cooder - The Border Ry Cooder - Bop Till You Drop Country Joe And The Fish - I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Elvis Costello And The Attractions - Best Of Jim Croce - Greatest Hits Culture Club - Colour By Numbers Jackie DeShannon – Laurel Canyon Thomas Dolby - The Flat Earth Donovan - Mellow Yellow (Vinyl VG-) The Doobie Brothers - The Captain And Me The Doobie Brothers - One Step Closer The Doobie Brothers - Toulouse Street The Doobie Brothers - Stampede Ian Dury & The Blockheads - Laughter John Entwistle - Whistle Rhymes John Entwistle's Ox - Mad Dog John Entwistle's Rigor Mortis Sets In - S/T Melissa Etheridge - Brave And Crazy Melissa Etheridge - S/T The Everly Brothers - The Golden Hits Of Marianne Faithfull – Marianne Faithfull Fanny - Rock n Roll Survivors Fastway - All Fired Up The Fixx - Walkabout The Fixx - Phantoms Flash And The Pan - Headlines Foghat - Night Shift Foghat - Live Foghat - Energized John Fogerty - S/T (CCR) John Fogerty - Eye Of The Zombie Lita Ford - Gotta Let Go 12" Foreigner - Head Games Frank Chickens – We Are Frank Chickens Rory Gallagher – Calling Card Art Garfunkel - Watermark Judy Garland – Judy Garland The J. Geils Band - S/T The J. Geils Band - Sanctuary The J. Geils Band - Bloodshot (Red vinyl, Cover G+) The J. Geils Band - Freeze Frame Godley & Creme - The Histroy Mix Volume 1 Grand Funk - Phoenix Grand Funk Railroad - Survival Grand Funk Railroad - We're An American Band (Gold vinyl) Grand Funk Railroad - Shinin' On Grand Funk Railroad - Live Album Grand Funk Railroad - Caught In The Act Grand Funk Railroad - Grand Funk El Grupo Sexo - Mom's Home The Guess Who - The Best Of George Harrison - S/T George Harrison - Somewhere In England Debbie Harry - KooKoo Heart - Magazine Heart - Bebe Le Strange Buddy Holly - For The First Time Anywhere Honk – The Original Sound Track from Five Summer Stories Hot Tuna - Burgers Hot Tuna - Yellow Fever The Human League - Dare The Human League - Fascination! Humble Pie - Smokin' It's A Beautiful Day – Choice Quality Stuff / Anytime James Gang - Rides Again Jan & Dean - Anthology Album Jan & Dean - Golden Hits Jethro Tull - Bursting Out - Live Jethro Tull - Aqualung Jefferson Airplane - Volunteers Jefferson Airplane - Bless Its Pointed Little Head Jefferson Starship/Paul Kantner - Blows Against The Empire Jefferson Starship - Dragon Fly Jefferson Starship - Spitfire Jefferson Starship - Red Octopus Billy Joel - The Nylon Curtain Elton John - Victim Of Love Elton John - Friends Elton John - Empty Sky Elton John - Don't Shoot Me I'm Only The Piano Player Elton John - Honky Chateau Elton John - Greatest Hits Rickie Lee Jones – Rickie Lee Jones Rickie Lee Jones - Flying Cowboys Janis Joplin - Greatest Hits Jorma Kaukonen & Vital Parts - Barbeque King KGB – KGB Carole King - Welcome Home Carole King - Tapestry Carole King - One To One The Knack - ...But The Little Girls Understand Huey Lewis And The News - Sports Lone Justice - Lone Justice Lone Justice - Shelter Manfred Mann's Earth Band - Get Your Rocks Off Manfred Mann's Earth Band - S/T Manfred Mann's Earth Band - Angel Station Don McLean - American Pie Christine McVie – The Legendary Christine Perfect Album Men At Work - Business As Usual Men At Work - Cargo Lee Michaels - S/T Lee Michaels – Barrel Bette Midler - S/T Steve Miller Band - Number 5 Steve Miller Band - Your Saving Grace Steve Miller Band - Fly Like An Eagle Steve Miller Band - Book Of Dreams Missing Persons - Rhyme & Reason Missing Persons - Spring Session M Molly Hatchet - Flirtin' With Disaster Montrose - Montrose Montrose - Warner Bros Presents Gary Moore - Corridors Of Power Mott The Hoople - Mott Mott The Hoople - The Hoople Mountain - Nantucket Sleighride Elliot Murphy - Aquashow Graham Nash - Wild Tales Nazareth - Hair Of The Dog (VG-) Nena - 99 Luftballoons Laura Nyro – Nested Laura Nyro - The First Songs Ric Ocasek - Beatitude Roy Orbison - More Greatest Hits Roy Orbison - The Orbison Way The Pirates - Out Of Their Skulls Precious Metal – That Kind Of Girl Elvis Presley - Elvis’ Golden Records Elvis Presley - Golden Records Volume 3 Elvis Presley - Kissin Cousins Elvis Presley - Elvis Country Elvis Presley - Blue Hawaii (Cover VG-) The Pretenders - Pretenders The Pretenders - Pretenders II Suzi Quatro - Greatest Hits Suzi Quatro - Quatro Suzi Quatro - If You Knew Suzi Suzi Quatro - Suzi Quatro Suzi Quatro - Suzi... And Other Four Letter Words Suzi Quatro - Main Attraction Sui Quatro - Rock Hard Quicksilver Messenger Service - Shady Grove Rainbow - Straight Between The Eyes Rainbow - Jealous Lover EP Gerry Rafferty - Can I Have My Money Back? Gerry Rafferty - North And South Rare Earth - One World REO Speedwagon - Hi Infidelity R.E.M. - Fall On Me 12” Todd Rundgren - Back To The Bars Todd Rundgren - A Wizard/A True Star Todd Rundgren’s Utopia - Another Live Todd Rundgren's Utopia - Ra The Rutles – The Rutles Bobby Rydell – We Got Love Mitch Ryder - Naked But Not Dead Carlos Santana – Blues For Salvador Santana - Moonflower (Slight warp doesn't affect play) Joe Satriani - Dreaming #11 Boz Scaggs - The Boz Scaggs Sampler Scorpions - Blackout (Cover VG-) Paul Simon - Hearts And Bones Simon & Garfunkel - Bookends Simon & Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water Simon & Garfunkel - S/T Simply Red - Picture Book Frank Sinatra - Trilogy 3LP Siren – All Is Forgiven Slade - Sladest Grace Slick And Paul Kantner - Sunfighter Patti Smith - People Have The Power 12" The Smithereens - Especially For You Spirit - The Best Of Ringo Starr - Ringo Steppenwolf - The Second Steppenwolf - Early Steppenwolf Steppenwolf - Monster Cat Stevens - Back To Earth Cat Stevens - Foreigner Cat Stevens - Greatest Hits Cat Stevens - Catch Bull At Four Stephen Stills - S/T Al Stewart - Year Of The Cat Stoneground - Stoneground The Surfaris - Hit City 64 Tangier - Four Winds James Taylor - Mud Slide Slim James Taylor - Never Die Young Ten Years After – Watt George Thorogood And The Destroyers - Maverick Pete Townshend - Who Came First Pete Townshend - Deep End Live! Pete Townshend-Ronnie Lane - Rough Mix Robin Trower - Bridge Of Sighs Robin Trower - For Earth Below The Tubes - What Do You Want From Live The Turtles - Turtle Soup The Turtles - More Golden Hits Tommy Tutone - Tommy Tutone-2 Dwight Twilley - Wild Dogs U2 - I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For 12" Uriah Heep - Abominog Uriah Heep - Wonderworld Uriah Heep - Innocent Victim Uriah Heep - Fallen Angel Various – The Best Of The Radio Tokyo Tapes Various – Castle Donnington: Monsters Of Rock (Rainbow, Scorpions, April Wine + more) Wings - Band On The Run The Edgar Winter Group – They Only Come Out At Night Neil Young - Sample And Hold 12" The Youngbloods - The Best Of Zebra - Zebra Prog Rock/Etc. Jon Anderson – Olias Of Sunhillow Camel - The Snow Goose Keith Emerson - Nighthawks OST Keith Emerson with The Nice - S/T Keith Emerson & The Nice - Attention! Emerson Lake & Palmer - Brain Salad Surgery Emerson Lake & Palmer - In Concert Emerson Lake & Palmer - Welcome Back My Friends.. FM - City Of Fear FM - Black Noise Steve Hackett – Please Don't Touch! Kansas - Kansas Kansas - Masque Kansas - Song For America Kansas - Point Of Know Return Kansas - Vinyl Confessions Kansas - Audio Visions Kansas - Leftoverture Kansas - Monolith Kayak - Royal Red Bouncer Man - Slow Motion Marillion - Brief Encounter The Moody Blues - Seventh Sojourn The Moody Blues - A Question Of Balance The Moody Blues - The Present The Moody Blues - To Our Childrens Children Patrick Moraz - The Story Of i Patrick Moraz - S/T Patrick Moraz - Human Interface Nektar - Magic Is A Child Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells The Alan Parsons Project - I Robot Renaissance - Azure d'or Sky - Sky 2LP Sky – Sky 3 Andy Summers & Robert Fripp - Bewitched Andy Summers & Robert Fripp - I Advance Masked Thee Image - Thee Image Rick Wakeman - Criminal Record Yes - Going For The One Zon - Astral Projector Jazz Airto - Virgin Land (Cover G+) Nestor Amaral And His Continentals - Brazil Ammons/Lux Lewis/Johnson - Boogie Woogie Louis Armstrong - Greatest Hits Louis Armstrong - S/T Louis Armstrong - The Louis Armstrong Saga Louis Armstrong - Hello, Louis! Brian Auger's Oblivion Express – Happiness Heartaches Gato Barbieri - El Pampero Warren Barker And Frank Comstock – TV Guide Top Television Themes David Benoit - This Side Up Earl Bostic - 14 Hits Charlie Byrd - Direct Disc Recording Barbara Carroll - Plays The Best Of George & Ira Gershwin Barbara Carroll - Satin Doll Stanley Clarke - Journey To Love Stanley Clarke - Children Of Forever Stanley Clarke - School Days Stanley Clarke - Rocks, Pebbles And Sand Stanley Clarke - If This Bass Could Only Talk Nat King Cole - Love Is A Many Splendored Thing Nat King Cole - The Best Of Nat King Cole - The Greatest of Vol 1&2 2LP Jackie Coon - Jazzin' Around Chick Corea - My Spanish Heart Chick Corea - Delphi 1 Sammy Davis Jr & Buddy Rich - The Sounds of '66 Deodato - Prelude Duke Ellington - Pretty Woman Wilton Felder - Inherit The Wind Lionel Hampton Orchestra - The Stereophonic Sound Of Lionel Hampton Lionel Hampton - Lionel Stan Getz - Another World 2LP Dave Grusin – A Jazz Version Of The Broadway Hit Subways Are For Sleeping (VG-) John Handy - Carnival John Handy - Hard Work Wayne Henderson - Big Daddy's Place Jon Hendricks & Company – Love Paul Horn - Inside Paul Horn - Inside The Great Pyramid Lena Horne/Harry Belafonte - Porgy And Bess Keith Jarrett - The Koln Concert Keith Jarrett - Facing You Bunk Johnson / Lu Watters – Bunk & Lu John Klemmer - Touch MFSL Peggy Lee - Is That All There Is? George Lewis And His New Orleans All Stars - S/T Mahavishnu Orchestra With The London Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas – Apocalypse Herbie Mann - Reggae Mark-Almond - Mark-Almond Pat Metheny - 80/81 Red Mitchell - Red Mitchell (VG-) Jelly Roll Morton - Archive Of Jazz Turk Murphy's Jazz Band - San Francisco Jazz Turk Murphy's San Francisco Jazz - Vol 1 Turk Murphy's Jazz Band - San Francisco Memories The Music Company - Rubber Soul Jazz (Jazz renditions of The Beatles' Rubber Soul!) André Previn, Gerry Mulligan, Carmen McRae – Performing Music From The Subterraneans - Original Sound Track Album (Cover VG-) George Russell & The Living Time Orchestra - The African Game Mongo Santamaria - Red Hot Bud Shank - I Hear Music Don Shirley Trio - In Concert Spyro Gyra - Breakout Art Tatum - Piano Magic Ralph Towner & Gary Burton - Match Book Sarah Vaughan - Duke Ellington Song Book Two Grover Washington Jr - Come Morning Grover Washington Jr - Inside Moves Lou Watters' Yerba Buena Jazz Band - S/T Jay White - Street Scene Soul/R&B/Funk/Blues Roy Buchanan - Roy Buchanan Bus Boys - Minimum Wage Rock & Roll The Crusaders - Scratch Godfrey Daniel – Take A Sad Song... Dobie Gray - Drift Away Issac Hayes - Black Moses (Slight warp, doesn't affect play) The Jacksons - Triumph Eddie Kendricks - S/T Gladys Knight & The Pips - Everybody Needs Love Mtume – Juicy Fruit Nature's Divine - In The Beginning Ohio Players - Contradiction Papa John Creach – Filthy! The Persuasions - Comin' At Ya Esther Phillips – Confessin' The Blues Lea Roberts - Lady Lea Diana Ross - Lady Sings The Blues 2LP The Siegel-Schwall Band - S/T Silver Convention - Save Me Silver Convention - S/T O.C. Smith – Hickory Holler Revisited Donna Summer - A Love Trilogy Donna Summer - She Works Hard For The Money Donna Summer - Donna Summer Donna Summer - The Wanderer Donna Summer - Bad Girls Johnnie Taylor - Super Taylor The Temptations - A Song For You The Temptations - Christmas Card Luther Vandross - Never Too Much War - Deliver The Word Bobby Womack - Lookin' For A Love Again Folk/Country/Southern Rock A Goodly Company Of Dulcimer Artists – Pastime With Good Company - Dulcimer Music For The Christmas Season Area Code 615 - S/T Joan Baez - Recently Joan Baez - Farewell, Angelina Joan Baez - S/T Richard Betts – Highway Call Black Oak Arkansas - High On The Hog Black Oak Arkansas - Keep The Faith J.D. Blackfoot - Southbound And Gone Johnny Cash - Now There Was A Song! Patsy Cline - Golden Hits Patsy Cline - A Portrait Of Malcolm Dalglish & Grey Larsen – The First Of Autumn The Charlie Daniels Band - Whiskey John Denver - Aerie John Denver - Autograph John Denver - Whose Garden Was This John Denver - Spirit John Denver - Windsong John Denver - Farewell Andromeda Jonathan Edwards - S/T Joe Ely - Honky Tonk Masquerade Joe Ely - Musta Notta Gotta Lotta John Fahey - Christmas Guitar Volume One Lowell George - Thanks I'll Eat It Here Norman Greenbaum - Petaluma Norman Greenbaum With Dr. West's Medicine Show And Junk Band Arlo Guthrie - Alice’s Restaurant Arlo Guthrie - S/T Arlo Guthrie - Amigo Emmylou Harris - Evangeline Emmylou Harris - Elite Hotel Emmylou Harris - Quarter Moon In A Ten Cent Town Emmylou Harris - Thirteen Burl Ives - More Folksongs By 10" Waylon Jennings – Waylon Greatest Hits Leo Kottke - Ice Water Leo Kottke - Leo Kottke Leo Kottke - Burnt Lips Leo Kottke - The Best 2LP Sleepy LaBeef - The Bull's Night Out Sleepy LaBeef - It Ain't What You Eat It's The Way How You Chew It k.d. lang – The Making Of Shadowland Peter Lang - Back To The Wall Mother Earth - Living With The Animals Willie Nelson - Pretty Paper The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - All The Good Times The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - The Rest Of The Dream The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - Ricochet The Outlaws - Outlaws Dolly Parton - All I Can Do Dolly Parton - Heartbreaker Jim Post – Slow To 20 Mason Proffit – Wanted Redwing - Redwing The Roches – Keep On Doing Kenny Rogers And The First Edition – Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town Linda Ronstadt & The Stone Poneys - Stoney End Linda Ronstadt - Hand Sown Home Grown Linda Ronstadt - S/T Linda Ronstadt - Different Drum Linda Ronstadt - Silk Purse Linda Ronstadt - Heart Like A Wheel Tom Rush - Tom Rush John Stewart - California Bloodlines The Stone Poneys Feat. Linda Ronstadt - S/T Various - White Mansions - A Tale From The American Civil War 1861-1865 (Jessi Coulter, Waylon Jennings, John Dillon, Steve Cash) Various - The Legend Of Jesse James (Levon Helm, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Charlie Daniels) Wet Willie - The Wetter The Better Hank Williams - 24 Greatest Hits 2LP Hank Williams Sr - Live At The Grand Ole Opry Hank Williams, Sr. & Hank Williams, Jr. – Father & Son Jesse Colin Young – The Soul Of A City Boy Jesse Colin Young - Love On The Wing Jesse Colin Young - Light Shine Jesse Colin Young - Songbird Jesse Colin Young - Song For Juli ZZ Top - Fandango New Age/Ambient Steven Halpern - Georgia Kelly - Ancient Echoes Steven Halpern - Prelude Latin Vincente Fernandez - Mi Amigo El Tordillo Sabicas - Gypsy Flamenco Valses Mexicanos - Mariachi Vargas De Tecalitlan Soundtracks Close Encounters Of The Third Kind Dirty Dancing In Concert Earthquake Goldfinger Light Of Day Lisztomania On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Pete's Dragon - Disney The Razor’s Edge The Rocky Horror Show The Rocky Horror Picture Show - Audience Par-Tic-I-Pation Shogun Silent Running Superman (Cover VG-) Times Square To Sir, With Love The London Symphony Orchestra And Chambre Choir – Tommy / As Performed By The London Symphony Orchestra And Chambre Choir With Guest Soloists Boxset Miscellaneous Bach, Wendy Carlos – Switched-On Brandenburgs (The Complete Concertos) Bonzo Dog Band – Beast Of The Bonzos Tom Lehrer - Songs By Tom Lehrer Bob Marley & The Wailers - Rastaman Vibration (Cover G+) Bob Marley - Chances Are Kinichi Nakanoshima - Koto And Flute Dylan Thomas – Dylan Thomas Reading A Child's Christmas In Wales And Five Poems Vol.1 Tomita – Snowflakes Are Dancing Tomita - Firebird Tomita - The Planets Tomita - Pictures At An Exhibition Yellow Magic Orchestra - Multiples
I awoke to a world without women. I rolled off the bed into sore thighs and guilt, got up to emptiness that echoed the slightest noise, and left my wife’s clothes on the sheets without thinking that eventually I’d have to pack them into a plastic bag and slide them down the garbage chute. I felt magnified and hollow. In the kitchen, I used the stove top as a table because the actual table had my wife’s tablet on it, and spilled instant coffee. What I didn’t spill I drank in a few gulps, the way I used to drink ice cold milk as a boy. I stood in front of the living room window for a while before realizing I was naked, then realizing that it didn’t matter because men changed in front of each other at the pool and peed next to one another into urinals in public restrooms, and there weren’t any women to hide from, no one to offend. The world, I told myself, was now a sprawling men’s pisser, so I slammed the window open and pissed. I wanted to call someone—to tell them that my wife was dead, because that’s a duty owed by the living—but whom could I call: her sister, her parents? Her sister was dead. Her father had a dead wife and two dead daughters. There was nothing to say. Everyone knew. I called my wife’s father anyway. Was he still my father-in-law now that I was a widower? He didn’t accept the connection. Widower: a word loses all but historical meaning when there are no alternatives. If all animals were dogs, we’d purge one of those words from our vocabulary. We were all widowers. It was synonymous with man. I switched on the television and stared, crying, at a montage of photographs showing the bloody landscapes of cities, hospitals, retirement homes, schools and churches, all under the tasteless headline: “International Pop”. Would we clean it up, these remnants of the people we loved? Could we even use the same buildings, knowing what had happened in them? The illusion of practical thinking pushed my feeling of emptiness away. I missed arms wrapping around me from behind while I stared through rain streaked windows. I missed barking and a wagging tail that hit my leg whenever I was standing too close. Happiness seemed impossible. I called Bakshi because I needed confirmation that I still had a voice. “They’re the lucky ones,” he said right after I’d introduced myself. “They’re out. We’re the fools still locked in, and now we’re all alone.” For three weeks, I expected my wife to show up at the apartment door. I removed her clothes from the bed and stuffed them into a garbage bag, but kept the garbage bag in the small space between the fridge and the kitchen wall. I probably would have kept a dead body in the freezer if I had one and it fit. As a city and as a world, those were grim, disorganized weeks for us. Nobody worked. I don’t know what we did. Sat around and drank, smoked. And we called each other, often out of the blue. Every day, I received a call from someone I knew but hadn’t spoken to in years. The conversations all followed a pattern. There was no catching up and no explanation of lost time, just a question like “How are you holding up?” followed by a thoughtless answer (“Fine, I guess. And you?”) followed by an exchange of details about the women we’d lost. Mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, girlfriends, friends, cousins, aunts, teachers, students, co-workers. We talked about the colour of their hair, their senses of humour, their favourite movies. We said nothing about ourselves, choosing instead to inhabit the personas of those whom we’d loved. In the hallway, I would put on my wife’s coats but never look at myself in the mirror. I wore her winter hats in the middle of July. Facebook became a graveyard, with the gender field separating the mourners from the dead. The World Health Organization issued a communique stating that based on the available data it was reasonable to assume that all the women in the world were dead, but it called for any woman still alive to come forward immediately. The language of the communique was as sterile as the Earth. Nobody came forward. The World Wildlife Fund created an inventory of all mammalian species that listed in ascending order how long each species would exist. Humans were on the bottom. Both the World Health Organization and the World Wildlife Fund predicted that unless significant technological progress occurred in the field of fertility within the next fifty years, the last human, a theoretical boy named Philip born into a theoretical developed country on March 26, 2025, would die in 93 years. On the day of his death, Philip would be the last remaining mammal—although not necessarily animal—on Earth. No organization or government has ever officially stated that July 4, 2025, was the most destructive day in recorded history, on the morning of which, Eastern Time, four billion out of a total of eight billion people ceased to exist as anything more than memories. What killed them was neither an act of war nor an act of terrorism. Neither was it human negligence. There was no one to blame and no one to prosecute. In the western countries, where the majority of people no longer believed in any religion, we could not even call it an act of God. So we responded by calling it nothing at all. And, like nothing, our lives persisted. We ate, we slept and we adapted. After the first wave of suicides ended, we hosed off what the rain hadn’t already washed away and began to reorganize the systems on which our societies ran. It was a challenge tempered only slightly in countries where women had not made up a significant portion of the workforce. We held new elections, formed new boards of directors and slowed down the assembly lines and bus schedules to make it possible for our communities to keep running. There was less food in the supermarkets, but we also needed less food. Instead of two trains we ran one, but one sufficed. I don’t remember the day when I finally took the black garbage bag from its resting place and walked it to the chute. “How are you holding up?” a male voice would say on the street. “Fine, I guess. And you?” I’d answer. ##!! wrote a piece of Python code to predict the box office profitability of new movies, in which real actors played alongside computer-generated actresses. The code was only partially successful. Because while it did accurately predict the success of new movies in relation to one other, it failed to include the overwhelming popularity of re-releases of films from the past—films starring Bette Davis, Giulietta Masina, Meryl Streep: women who at least on screen were still flesh and blood. Theatres played retrospectives. On Amazon, books by female authors topped the charts. Sales of albums by women vocalists surged. We thirsted for another sex. I watched, read and listened like everyone else, and in between I cherished any media on which I found images or recordings of my wife. I was angry for not having made more. I looked at the same photos and watched the same clips over and over again. I memorized my wife’s Facebook timeline and tagged all her Tweets by date, theme and my own rating. When I went out, I would talk to the air as if she was walking beside me, sometimes quoting her actual words as answers to my questions and sometimes inventing my own as if she was a beloved character in an imagined novel. When people looked at me like I was crazy, I didn’t care. I wasn’t the only one. But, more importantly, my wife meant more to me than they did. I remembered times when we’d stroll through the park or down downtown sidewalks and I would be too ashamed to kiss her in the presence of strangers. Now, I would tell her that I love her in the densest crowd. I would ask her whether I should buy ketchup or mustard in the condiments aisle. She helped me pick out my clothes in the morning. She convinced me to eat healthy and exercise. In November, I was in Bakshi’s apartment for the first time, waiting for a pizza delivery boy, when one of Bakshi’s friends who was browsing Reddit told us that the Tribe of Akna was starting a Kickstarter campaign in an attempt to buy the Republic of Suriname, rename it Xibalba and close its borders for all except the enlightened. Xibalba would have no laws, Salvador Abaroa said in a message on the site. He was banging his gong as he did. Everything would be legal, and anyone who pledged $100 would receive a two-week visa to this new "Mayan Buddhist Eden". If you pledged over $10,000, you would receive citizenship. “Everything in life is destroyed by energy,” Abaroa said. “But let the energy enlighten you before it consumes your body. Xibalba is finite life unbound.” Bakshi’s phone buzzed. The pizza boy had sent an email. He couldn’t get upstairs, so Bakshi and I took the elevator to the building’s front entrance. The boy’s face was so white that I saw it as soon as the elevator doors slid open. Walking closer, I saw that he was powdered. His cheeks were also rouged, and he was wearing cranberry coloured lipstick, a Marilyn Monroe wig and a short black skirt. Compared to his face, his thin legs looked like incongruously dark popsicle sticks. Bakshi paid for the pizza and added another five dollars for the tip. The boy batted his fake eyelashes and asked if maybe he could do something to earn a little more. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I could come upstairs and clean the place up a little. You two live alone?” Bakshi passed me the two pizza boxes—They felt hot in my hands.—and dug around in his wallet. “It’s not just the two of us,” I said. The boy smiled. “That’s OK. I’ve done parties before if that’s what you’re into.” I saw the reaction on Bakshi’s face, and I saw the boy’s grotesque caricature of a woman. “There’s condoms and lube in the car,” the boy said, pointing to a sedan with a pizza spray-painted across its side parked by the curb. “My boss says I can take up to two hours but it’s not like he uses a stopwatch.” I stepped on Bakshi’s foot and shouldered him away. He was still fiddling with his wallet. “We’re not interested,” I said to the boy. He just shrugged. “Suit yourselves. If you change your mind, order another pizza and ask for Ruby.” The elevator dinged and the doors opened. As we shuffled inside, I saw Bakshi’s cheeks turn red. “I’m not actually—” he mumbled, but I didn’t let him finish. What had bothered me so much about the boy wasn’t the way he looked or acted; in fact, it wasn’t really the boy at all. He was just trying to make a buck. What bothered me was how ruthlessly we’d already begun to exploit each other. For those of us who were heterosexual, sex was a definite weakness. I missed it. I would never have it with a woman again. The closest substitute was pornography, whose price rose with its popularity, but which, at least for me, now came scented with the unpleasantness of historicity and nostalgia. Videos and photos, not to mention physical magazines, were collector’s items in the same way that we once collected coins or action figures. The richest men bought up the exclusive rights to their favourite porn stars and guarded them by law with a viciousness once reserved for the RIAA and MPAA. Perhaps exclusivity gave them a possessive satisfaction. In response, we pirated whatever we could and fought for a pornographic public domain. Although new pornography was still being produced, either with the help of the same virtual technology they used for mainstream movies or with the participation of young men in costume, it lacked the taste of the originals. It was like eating chocolate made without cocoa. The best pornography, and therefore the best sex, became the pornography of the mind. The Tribe of Akna reached its Kickstarter goal in early December. On December 20, I went to church for the first time since getting married because that was the theoretical date that my wife—along with every other woman—was supposed to have given birth. I wanted to be alone with others. Someone posted a video on TikTok from Elia Kazan’s On The Waterfront, dubbing over Marlon Brando’s speech to say: “You don’t understand. I could’a had a piece of ass. I could’a been a school board member. I could’a been a son’s daddy”. It was juvenile and heartbreaking. By Christmas, the Surinamese government was already expelling its citizens, each of whom had theoretically been given a fraction of the funds paid to the government from the Tribe of Akna’s Kickstarter pool, and Salvador Abaroa’s lawyers were petitioning for international recognition of the new state of Xibalba. Neither Canada nor the United States opened diplomatic relations, but others did. I knew people who had pledged money, and when in January they disappeared on trips, I had no doubt to where. Infamy spread in the form of stories and urban legends. There’s no need for details. People disappeared, and ethicists wrote about the ethical neutrality of murder, arguing that because we were all slated to die, leaving the Earth barren in a century, destruction was a human inevitability, and what is inevitable can never be bad, even when it comes earlier than expected—even when it comes by force. Because, as a species, we hadn’t chosen destruction for ourselves, neither should any individual member of our species be able to choose now for himself. To the ethicists of what became known as the New Inevitability School, suicide was a greater evil than murder because it implied choice and inequality. If the ship was going down, no one should be allowed to get off. A second wave of suicides coincided with the debate, leading many governments to pass laws making suicide illegal. But how do you punish someone who already wants to die? In China: by keeping him alive and selling him to Xibalba, where he becomes the physical plaything of its citizens and visa-holders. The Chinese was the first embassy to open in Xibalban Paramaribo. The men working on Kurt Schwaller’s theory of everything continued working, steadily adding new variables to their equations, complicating their calculations in the hopes that someday the variable they added would be the final one and the equation would yield an answer. “It’s pointless,” Bakshi would comment after reading about one of the small breakthroughs they periodically announced. “Even if they do manage to predict something, anything, it won’t amount to anything more than the painfully obvious. And after decades of adding and subtracting their beans, they’ll come out of their Los Alamos datalabs like groundhogs into a world blanketed by storm clouds and conclude, finally and with plenty of self-congratulations, that it’s about to fucking rain.” It rained a lot in February. It was one of the warmest Februaries in Toronto’s history. Sometimes I went for walks along the waterfront, talking to my wife, listening to Billie Holiday and trying to recall as many female faces as I could. Ones from the distant past: my mother, my grandmothers. Ones from the recent past: the woman whose life my wife saved on the way to the hospital, the Armenian woman with the film magazine and the injured son, the Jamaican woman, Bakshi’s wife. I focused on their faces, then zoomed out to see their bodies. I carried an umbrella but seldom opened it because the pounding of the raindrops against the material distorted my mental images. I saw people rush across the street holding newspapers above their heads while dogs roamed the alleyways wearing nothing at all. Of the two, it was dogs that had the shorter time left on Earth, and if they could let the rain soak their fur and drip off their bodies, I could surely let it run down my face. It was first my mother and later my wife who told me to always cover up in the rain, “because moisture causes colds,” but I was alone now and I didn’t want to be separated from the falling water by a sheet of glass anymore. I already was cold. I saw a man sit down on a bench, open his briefcase, pack rocks into it, then close it, tie it to his wrist, check his watch and start to walk into the polluted waters of Lake Ontario. Another man took out his phone and tapped his screen a few times. The man in the lake walked slowly, savouring each step. When the police arrived, sirens blaring, the water was up to his neck. I felt guilty for watching the three officers splash into the lake after him. I don’t know what happened after that because I turned my back and walked away. I hope they didn’t stop him. I hope he got to do what he wanted to do. “Screw the police.” Bakshi passed me a book. “You should read this,” he said. It was by a professor of film and media studies at a small university in Texas. There was a stage on the cover, flanked by two red curtains. The photo had been taken from the actors’ side, looking out at an audience that the stage lights made too dark to see. The title was Hiding Behind The Curtains. I flipped the book over. There was no photo of the author. “It’s a theory,” Bakshi said, “that undercuts what Abaroa and the Inevitabilists are saying. It’s a little too poetic in parts but—listen, you ever read Atlas Shrugged?” I said I hadn’t. “Well, anyway, what this guy says is that what if instead of our situation letting us do anything we want, it’s actually the opposite, a test to see how we act when we only think that we’re doomed. I mean what if the women who died in March, what if they’re just—” “Hiding behind the curtains,” I said. He bit his lower lip. “It sounds stupid when you say it like that but, as a metaphor, it has a kind of elegance, right?” I flipped through the book, reading a few sentences at random. It struck me as neo-Christian. “Isn’t this a little too spiritual for you? I thought we were all locked into one path,” I said. “I thought that, too, but lately I’ve been able to do things—things that I didn’t really want to do.” For a second I was concerned. “Nothing bad,” he said. “I mean I’ve felt like I’m locked into doing one thing, say having a drink of water, but I resist and pour myself a glass of orange juice instead.” I shook my head. “It’s hard to explain,” he said. That’s how most theories ended, I thought: reason and evidence up to a crucial point, and then it gets so personal that it’s hard to explain. You either make the jump or you don’t. “Just read it,” he said. “Please read it. You don’t have to agree with it, I just want to get your opinion, an objective opinion.” I never did read the book, and Bakshi forgot about it, too, but that day he was excited and happy, and those were rare feelings. I was simultaneously glad for him and jealous. Afterwards, we went out onto the balcony and drank Czech beer until morning. When it got cool, we put on our coats. It started to drizzle so we wore blue plastic suits like the ones they used to give you on boat rides in Niagara Falls. When it was time to go home, I was so drunk I couldn’t see straight. I almost got into a fight, the first one of my life, because I bumped into a man on the street and told him to get the fuck out of my way. I don’t remember much more of my walk home. The only reason I remember Behind The Curtains at all is because when I woke up in the afternoon it was the first thing that my hung over brain recognized. It was lying on the floor beside the bed. Then I opened the blinds covering my bedroom window and, through my spread fingers that I’d meant to use as a shield from the first blast of daylight, I saw the pincers for the first time. They’d appeared while I was asleep. I turned on the television and checked my phone. The media and the internet were feverish, but nobody knew what the thing was, just a massive, vaguely rectangular shape blotting out a strip of the sky. NASA stated that it had received no extraterrestrial messages to coincide with the appearance. Every government claimed ignorance. The panel discussions on television only worsened my headache. Bakshi emailed me links to photos from Mumbai, Cape Town, Sydney and Mexico City, all showing the same shape; or rather one of a pair of shapes, for there were two of them, one on each side of the Earth, and they’d trapped our planet between themselves like gargantuan fingers clutching an equally gargantuan ping-pong ball. That’s why somebody came up with the term “the pincers”. It stuck. Because I’d slept in last night’s clothes I was already dressed, so I ran down the stairs and out of my apartment building to get a better look at them from the parking lot. You’re not supposed to look at the sun, but I wasn’t the only one breaking that rule. There were entire crowds with upturned faces in the streets. If the pincers, too, could see, they would perhaps be as baffled by us as we were of them: billions of tiny specks all over the surface of this ping-pong ball gathering in points on a grid, coagulating into large puddles that vanished overnight only to reassemble in the morning. In the following days, scientists scrambled to study the pincers and their potential effects on us, but they discovered nothing. The pincers did nothing. They emitted nothing, consumed nothing. They simply were. And they could not be measured or detected in any way other than by eyesight. When we shot rays at them, the rays continued on their paths unaffected, as if nothing was there. The pincers did, however, affect the sun’s rays coming towards us. They cut up our days. The sun would rise, travel over the sky, hide behind a pincer—enveloping us in a second night—before revealing itself again as a second day. But if the pincers’ physical effect on us was limited to its blockage of light, their mental effects on us were astoundingly severe. For many, this was the sign they’d been waiting for. It brought hope. It brought gloom. It broke and confirmed ideas that were hard to explain. In their ambiguity, the pincers could be anything, but in their strangeness they at least reassured us of the reality of the strange times in which we were living. Men walked away from the theory of everything, citing the pincers as the ultimate variable that proved the futility of prognostication. Others took up the calculations because if the pincers could appear, what else was out there in our future? However, ambiguity can only last for a certain period. Information narrows possibilities. On April 1, 2026, every Twitter account in the world received the following message: as you can see this message is longer than the allowed one hundred forty characters time and space are malleable you thought you had one hundred years but prepare for the plucking The sender was @. The message appeared in each user’s feed at exactly the same time and in his first language, without punctuation. Because of the date most of us thought it was a hoax, but the developers of Twitter denied this vehemently. It wasn’t until a court forced them to reveal their code, which proved that a message of that length and sent by a blank user was impossible, that our doubts ceased. ##!! took bets on what the message meant. Salvador Abaroa broadcast a response into space in a language he called Bodhi Mayan, then addressed the rest of us in English, saying that in the pincers he had identified an all-powerful prehistoric fire deity, described in an old Sanskrit text as having the resemblance of mirrored black fangs, whose appearance signified the end of time. “All of us will burn,” he said, “but paradise shall be known only to those who burn willingly.” Two days later, The Tribe of Akna announced that in one month it would seal Xibalba from the world and set fire to everything and everyone in it. For the first time, its spokesman said, an entire nation would commit suicide as one. Jonestown was but a blip. As a gesture of goodwill, he said that Xibalba was offering free immolation visas to anyone who applied within the next week. The New Inevitability School condemned the plan as “offensively unethical” and inequalitist and urged an international Xibalban boycott. Nothing came of it. When the date arrived, we watched with rapt attention on live streams and from the vantage points of circling news planes as Salvador Abaroa struck flint against steel, creating the spark that caught the char cloth, starting a fire that blossomed bright crimson and in the next weeks consumed all 163,821 square kilometres of the former Republic of Suriname and all 2,500,000 of its estimated Xibalban inhabitants. Despite concerns that the fire would spread beyond Xibalba’s borders, The Tribe of Akna had been careful. There were no accidental casualties and no unplanned property damage. No borders were crossed. Once the fire burned out, reporters competed to be first to capture the mood on the ground. Paramaribo resembled the smouldering darkness of a fire pit. It was a few days later while sitting on Bakshi’s balcony, looking up at the pincers and rereading a reproduction of @’s message—someone had spray-painted it across the wall of a building opposite Bakshi’s—that I remembered Iris. The memory was so absorbing that I didn’t notice when Bakshi slid open the balcony door and sat down beside me, but I must have been smiling because he said, “I don’t mean this the wrong way, but you look a little loony tonight. Seriously, man, you do not look sufficiently freaked out.” I’d remembered Iris before, swirling elements of her plain face, but now I also remembered her words and her theory. I turned to Bakshi, who seemed to be waiting for an answer to his question, and said, “Let’s get up on the roof of this place.” He grabbed my arm and held on tightly. “I’m not going to jump, if that’s what you mean.” It wasn’t what I meant, but I asked, “why not?” He said, “I don’t know. I know we’re fucked as a species and all that, but I figure if I’m still alive I might as well see what happens next, like in a bad movie you want to see through to the end.” I promised him that I wasn’t going to jump, either. Then I scrambled inside his apartment, grabbed my hat and jacket from the closet by the front door and put them on while speed walking down the hall, toward the fire escape. I realized I’d been spending a lot of time here. The alarm went off as soon I pushed open the door with my hip but I didn’t care. When Bakshi caught up with me, I was already outside, leaping up two stairs at a time. The metal construction was rusted. The treads wobbled. On the roof, the wind nearly blew my hat off and it was so loud I could have screamed and no one would have heard me. Holding my hat in my hands, I crouched and looked out over the twinkling city spread out in front of me. It looked alive in spite of the pincers in the sky. “Let’s do something crazy,” I yelled. Bakshi was still catching his breath behind me. “What, like this isn’t crazy enough?” The NHL may have been gone but my hat still bore the Maple Leafs logo, as quaint and obsolete by then as the Weimar Republic in the summer of 1945. “When’s the last time you played ball hockey?” I asked. Bakshi crouched beside me. “You’re acting weird. And I haven’t played ball hockey in ages.” I stood up so suddenly that Bakshi almost fell over. This time I knew I was smiling. “So call your buddies,” I said. “Tell them to bring their sticks and their gear and to meet us in front of the ACC in one hour.” Bakshi patted me on the back. Toronto shone like jewels scattered over black velvet. “The ACC’s been closed for years, buddy. I think you’re really starting to lose it.” I knew it was closed. “Lose what?” I asked. “It’s closed and we’re going to break in.” The chains broke apart like shortbread. The electricity worked. The clouds of dust made me sneeze. We used duffel bags to mark out the goals. We raced up and down the stands and bent over, wheezing at imaginary finish lines. We got into the announcer’s booth and called each other cunts through the microphone. We ran, fell and shot rubber pucks for hours. We didn’t keep score. We didn’t worry. “What about the police?” someone asked. The rest of us answered: “Screw the fucking police!” And when everybody packed up and went home, I stayed behind. “Are you sure you’re fine?” Bakshi asked. “Yeah,” I said. “Because I have to get back so that I can shower, get changed and get to work.” “Yeah, I know,” I said. “And you promise me you’ll catch a cab?” “I’m not suicidal.” He fixed his grip on his duffel bag. “I didn’t say you were. I was just checking.” “I want to see the end of the movie, too,” I said. He saluted. I watched him leave. When he was gone, my wife walked down from the nosebleeds and took a seat beside me. “There’s someone I want to tell you about,” I said. She lifted her chin like she always does when something unexpected catches her interest, and scooted closer. I put my arm across the back of her beautiful shoulders. She always liked that, even though the position drives me crazy because I tend to talk a lot with my hands. “Stuck at Leafs-Wings snorefest,” she said. “Game sucks but I love the man sitting beside me.” (January 15, 2019. Themes: hockey, love, me. Rating: 5/5). “Her name was Iris,” I said.
Iris
“What if the whole universe was a giant garden—like a hydroponics thing, like how they grow tomatoes and marijuana, so there wouldn’t need to be any soil, all the nutrients would just get injected straight into the seeds or however they do it—or, even better, space itself was the soil, you know how they talk about dark matter being this invisible and mysterious thing that exists out there and we don’t know what it does, if it actually affect anything, gravity…” She blew a cloud of pot smoke my way that made me cough and probably gave her time to think. She said, “So dark matter is like the soil, and in this space garden of course they don’t grow plants but something else.” “Galaxies?” “Eyes.” “Just eyes, or body parts in general?” I asked. “Just eyes.” The music from the party thumped. “But the eyes are our planets, like Mars is an eye, Neptune is an eye, and the Earth is an eye, maybe even the best eye.” “The best for what? Who’s growing them?” “God,” she said. I took the joint from her and took a long drag. “I didn’t know you believed in God.” “I don’t, I guess—except when I’m on dope. Anyway, you’ve got to understand me because when I say God I don’t mean like the old man with muscles and a beard. This God, the one I’m talking about, it’s more like a one-eyed monster.” “Like a cyclops?” I asked. “Yeah, like that, like a cyclops. So it’s growing these eyes in the dark matter in space—I mean right now, you and me, we’re literally sitting on one of these eyes and we’re contributing to its being grown because the nutrients the cyclops God injected into them, that’s us.” “Why does God need so many extra eyes?” “It’s not a question of having so many of them, but more about having the right one, like growing the perfect tomato.” I gave her back the joint and leaned back, looking at the stars. “Because every once in a while the cyclops God goes blind, its eye stops working—not in the same way we go blind, because the cyclops God doesn’t see reality in the same way we see reality—but more like we see through our brains and our eyes put together.” “Like x-ray vision?” I asked. “No, not like that at all,” she said. “A glass eye?” “Glass eyes are fake.” “OK,” I said, “so maybe try something else. Give me a different angle. Tell me what role we’re playing in all of this because right now it seems that we’re pretty insignificant. I mean, you said we’re nutrients but what’s the difference between, say, Mars and Earth in terms of being eyes?” She looked over at me. “Are you absolutely sure you want to hear about this?” “I am,” I said. “You don’t think it’s stupid?” “Compared to what?” “I don’t know, just stupid in general.” “I don’t.” “I like you,” she said. “Because I don’t think you’re stupid?” I asked. “That’s just a bonus. I mean more that you’re up here with me instead of being down there with everyone, and we’re talking and even though we’re not in love I know somehow we’ll never forget each other for as long as we live.” “It’s hard to forget being on the surface of a giant floating eyeball.” “You’re scared that you won’t find anyone to love,” she said suddenly, causing me to nearly choke on my own saliva. “Don’t ask me how I know—I just do. But before I go any further about the cyclops God, I want you to know that you’ll find someone to love and who’ll love you back, and whatever happens you’ll always have that because no one can take away the past.” “You’re scared of going blind,” I said. “I am going blind.” “Not yet.” “And I’m learning not to be scared because everything I see until that day will always belong to me.” “The doctors said it would be gradual,” I reminded her. “That’s horrible.” “Why?” “Because you wouldn’t want to find someone to love and then know that every day you wake up the love between you grows dimmer and dimmer, would you?” “I guess not,” I said. “Wouldn’t you much rather feel the full strength of that love up to and including in the final second before the world goes black?” “It would probably be painful to lose it all at once like that.” “Painful because you actually had something to lose. For me, I know I can’t wish away blindness, but I sure wish that the last image I ever see—in that final second before my world goes black—is the most vivid and beautiful image of all.” Because I didn’t know what to say to that, I mumbled: “I’m sorry.” “That I’m going blind?” “Yeah, and that we can’t grow eyes.” This time I looked over, and she was the one gazing at the stars. “Before, you asked if we were insignificant,” she said. “But because you’re sorry—that’s kind of why we’re the most significant of all, why Earth is better than the other planets.” “For the cyclops God?” “Yes.” “He cares about my feelings?” “Not in the way you’re probably thinking, but in a different way that’s exactly what the cyclops God cares about most because that’s what it’s looking for in an eye. All the amazing stuff we’ve ever built, all our ancient civilizations and supercomputers and cities you can see from the Moon—that’s just useless cosmetics to the cyclops God, except in how all of it has made us feel about things that aren’t us.” “I think you’re talking about morality.” “I think so, too.” “So by feeling sorry for you I’m showing compassion, and the cyclops God likes compassion?” “That’s not totally wrong but it’s a little upside down. We have this black matter garden and these planets the cyclops God has grown as potential eyes to replace its own eye once it stops working, but its own eye is like an eye and a brain mixed together. Wait—” she said. I waited. “Imagine a pair of tinted sunglasses.” I imagined green-tinted ones. “Now imagine that instead of the lenses being a certain colour, they’re a certain morality, and if you wear the glasses you see the world tinted according to that morality.” I was kind of able to imagine that. I supposed it would help show who was good and who was bad. “But the eye and the tinted glasses are the same thing in this case.” “Exactly, there’s no one without the other, and what makes the tint special is us—not that the cyclops God cares at all about individuals any more than we care about individual honey bees. That’s why he’s kind of a monster.” “Isn’t people’s morality always changing, though?” “Only up to a point. Green is green even when you have a bunch of shades of it, and a laptop screen still works fine even with a few dead pixels, right? And the more globalized and connected we get, the smoother our morality gets, but if you’re asking more about how our changing morals work when the cyclops God finally comes to take its eye, I assume it has a way to freeze our progress. To cut our roots. Then it makes some kind of final evaluation. If it’s satisfied it takes the planet and sticks it into its eye socket, and if it doesn’t like us then it lets us alone, although because we’re frozen and possibly rootless I suppose we die—maybe that’s what the other planets are, so many of them in space without any sort of life. Cold, rejected eyes.” From sunglasses to bees to monitors in three metaphors, and now we were back to space. This was getting confusing. The stars twinkled, some of them dead, too: their light still arriving at our eyes from sources that no longer existed. “That’s kind of depressing,” I said to end the silence. “What about it?” “Being bees,” I said, “that work for so long at tinting a pair of glasses just so that a cyclops God can try them on.” “I don’t think it’s any more depressing than being a tomato.” “I’ve never thought about that.” “You should. It’s beautiful, like love,” she said. “Because if you think about it, being a tomato and being a person are really quite similar. They’re both about growing and existing for the enjoyment of someone else. As a tomato you’re planted, you grow and mature and then an animal comes along and eats you. The juicier you look and the nicer you smell, the greater the chance that you’ll get plucked but also the more pleasure the animal will get from you. As a person, you’re also born and you grow up and you mature into a one of a kind personality with a one of a kind face, and then someone comes along and makes you fall in love with them and all the growing you did was really just for their enjoyment of your love.” “Except love lasts longer than chewing a tomato.” “Sometimes,” she said. “And you have to admit that two tomatoes can’t eat each other the way two people can love each other mutually.” “I admit that’s a good point,” she said. “And what happens to someone who never gets fallen in love with?” “The same thing that happens to a tomato that never gets eaten or an eye that the cyclops God never takes. They die and they rot, and they darken and harden, decomposing until they don’t look like tomatoes anymore. It’s not a nice fate. I’d rather live awhile and get eaten, to be honest.” “As a tomato or person?” “Both.” I thought for a few seconds. “That explanation works for things on Earth, but nothing actually decomposes in space.” “That’s why there are so many dead planets,” she said.
I awoke to a world without women. I rolled off the bed into sore thighs and guilt, got up to emptiness that echoed the slightest noise, and left my wife’s clothes on the sheets without thinking that eventually I’d have to pack them into a plastic bag and slide them down the garbage chute. I felt magnified and hollow. In the kitchen, I used the stove top as a table because the actual table had my wife’s tablet on it, and spilled instant coffee. What I didn’t spill I drank in a few gulps, the way I used to drink ice cold milk as a boy. I stood in front of the living room window for a while before realizing I was naked, then realizing that it didn’t matter because men changed in front of each other at the pool and peed next to one another into urinals in public restrooms, and there weren’t any women to hide from, no one to offend. The world, I told myself, was now a sprawling men’s pisser, so I slammed the window open and pissed. I wanted to call someone—to tell them that my wife was dead, because that’s a duty owed by the living—but whom could I call: her sister, her parents? Her sister was dead. Her father had a dead wife and two dead daughters. There was nothing to say. Everyone knew. I called my wife’s father anyway. Was he still my father-in-law now that I was a widower? He didn’t accept the connection. Widower: a word loses all but historical meaning when there are no alternatives. If all animals were dogs, we’d purge one of those words from our vocabulary. We were all widowers. It was synonymous with man. I switched on the television and stared, crying, at a montage of photographs showing the bloody landscapes of cities, hospitals, retirement homes, schools and churches, all under the tasteless headline: “International Pop”. Would we clean it up, these remnants of the people we loved? Could we even use the same buildings, knowing what had happened in them? The illusion of practical thinking pushed my feeling of emptiness away. I missed arms wrapping around me from behind while I stared through rain streaked windows. I missed barking and a wagging tail that hit my leg whenever I was standing too close. Happiness seemed impossible. I called Bakshi because I needed confirmation that I still had a voice. “They’re the lucky ones,” he said right after I’d introduced myself. “They’re out. We’re the fools still locked in, and now we’re all alone.” For three weeks, I expected my wife to show up at the apartment door. I removed her clothes from the bed and stuffed them into a garbage bag, but kept the garbage bag in the small space between the fridge and the kitchen wall. I probably would have kept a dead body in the freezer if I had one and it fit. As a city and as a world, those were grim, disorganized weeks for us. Nobody worked. I don’t know what we did. Sat around and drank, smoked. And we called each other, often out of the blue. Every day, I received a call from someone I knew but hadn’t spoken to in years. The conversations all followed a pattern. There was no catching up and no explanation of lost time, just a question like “How are you holding up?” followed by a thoughtless answer (“Fine, I guess. And you?”) followed by an exchange of details about the women we’d lost. Mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, girlfriends, friends, cousins, aunts, teachers, students, co-workers. We talked about the colour of their hair, their senses of humour, their favourite movies. We said nothing about ourselves, choosing instead to inhabit the personas of those whom we’d loved. In the hallway, I would put on my wife’s coats but never look at myself in the mirror. I wore her winter hats in the middle of July. Facebook became a graveyard, with the gender field separating the mourners from the dead. The World Health Organization issued a communique stating that based on the available data it was reasonable to assume that all the women in the world were dead, but it called for any woman still alive to come forward immediately. The language of the communique was as sterile as the Earth. Nobody came forward. The World Wildlife Fund created an inventory of all mammalian species that listed in ascending order how long each species would exist. Humans were on the bottom. Both the World Health Organization and the World Wildlife Fund predicted that unless significant technological progress occurred in the field of fertility within the next fifty years, the last human, a theoretical boy named Philip born into a theoretical developed country on March 26, 2025, would die in 93 years. On the day of his death, Philip would be the last remaining mammal—although not necessarily animal—on Earth. No organization or government has ever officially stated that July 4, 2025, was the most destructive day in recorded history, on the morning of which, Eastern Time, four billion out of a total of eight billion people ceased to exist as anything more than memories. What killed them was neither an act of war nor an act of terrorism. Neither was it human negligence. There was no one to blame and no one to prosecute. In the western countries, where the majority of people no longer believed in any religion, we could not even call it an act of God. So we responded by calling it nothing at all. And, like nothing, our lives persisted. We ate, we slept and we adapted. After the first wave of suicides ended, we hosed off what the rain hadn’t already washed away and began to reorganize the systems on which our societies ran. It was a challenge tempered only slightly in countries where women had not made up a significant portion of the workforce. We held new elections, formed new boards of directors and slowed down the assembly lines and bus schedules to make it possible for our communities to keep running. There was less food in the supermarkets, but we also needed less food. Instead of two trains we ran one, but one sufficed. I don’t remember the day when I finally took the black garbage bag from its resting place and walked it to the chute. “How are you holding up?” a male voice would say on the street. “Fine, I guess. And you?” I’d answer. ##!! wrote a piece of Python code to predict the box office profitability of new movies, in which real actors played alongside computer-generated actresses. The code was only partially successful. Because while it did accurately predict the success of new movies in relation to one other, it failed to include the overwhelming popularity of re-releases of films from the past—films starring Bette Davis, Giulietta Masina, Meryl Streep: women who at least on screen were still flesh and blood. Theatres played retrospectives. On Amazon, books by female authors topped the charts. Sales of albums by women vocalists surged. We thirsted for another sex. I watched, read and listened like everyone else, and in between I cherished any media on which I found images or recordings of my wife. I was angry for not having made more. I looked at the same photos and watched the same clips over and over again. I memorized my wife’s Facebook timeline and tagged all her Tweets by date, theme and my own rating. When I went out, I would talk to the air as if she was walking beside me, sometimes quoting her actual words as answers to my questions and sometimes inventing my own as if she was a beloved character in an imagined novel. When people looked at me like I was crazy, I didn’t care. I wasn’t the only one. But, more importantly, my wife meant more to me than they did. I remembered times when we’d stroll through the park or down downtown sidewalks and I would be too ashamed to kiss her in the presence of strangers. Now, I would tell her that I love her in the densest crowd. I would ask her whether I should buy ketchup or mustard in the condiments aisle. She helped me pick out my clothes in the morning. She convinced me to eat healthy and exercise. In November, I was in Bakshi’s apartment for the first time, waiting for a pizza delivery boy, when one of Bakshi’s friends who was browsing Reddit told us that the Tribe of Akna was starting a Kickstarter campaign in an attempt to buy the Republic of Suriname, rename it Xibalba and close its borders for all except the enlightened. Xibalba would have no laws, Salvador Abaroa said in a message on the site. He was banging his gong as he did. Everything would be legal, and anyone who pledged $100 would receive a two-week visa to this new "Mayan Buddhist Eden". If you pledged over $10,000, you would receive citizenship. “Everything in life is destroyed by energy,” Abaroa said. “But let the energy enlighten you before it consumes your body. Xibalba is finite life unbound.” Bakshi’s phone buzzed. The pizza boy had sent an email. He couldn’t get upstairs, so Bakshi and I took the elevator to the building’s front entrance. The boy’s face was so white that I saw it as soon as the elevator doors slid open. Walking closer, I saw that he was powdered. His cheeks were also rouged, and he was wearing cranberry coloured lipstick, a Marilyn Monroe wig and a short black skirt. Compared to his face, his thin legs looked like incongruously dark popsicle sticks. Bakshi paid for the pizza and added another five dollars for the tip. The boy batted his fake eyelashes and asked if maybe he could do something to earn a little more. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I could come upstairs and clean the place up a little. You two live alone?” Bakshi passed me the two pizza boxes—They felt hot in my hands.—and dug around in his wallet. “It’s not just the two of us,” I said. The boy smiled. “That’s OK. I’ve done parties before if that’s what you’re into.” I saw the reaction on Bakshi’s face, and I saw the boy’s grotesque caricature of a woman. “There’s condoms and lube in the car,” the boy said, pointing to a sedan with a pizza spray-painted across its side parked by the curb. “My boss says I can take up to two hours but it’s not like he uses a stopwatch.” I stepped on Bakshi’s foot and shouldered him away. He was still fiddling with his wallet. “We’re not interested,” I said to the boy. He just shrugged. “Suit yourselves. If you change your mind, order another pizza and ask for Ruby.” The elevator dinged and the doors opened. As we shuffled inside, I saw Bakshi’s cheeks turn red. “I’m not actually—” he mumbled, but I didn’t let him finish. What had bothered me so much about the boy wasn’t the way he looked or acted; in fact, it wasn’t really the boy at all. He was just trying to make a buck. What bothered me was how ruthlessly we’d already begun to exploit each other. For those of us who were heterosexual, sex was a definite weakness. I missed it. I would never have it with a woman again. The closest substitute was pornography, whose price rose with its popularity, but which, at least for me, now came scented with the unpleasantness of historicity and nostalgia. Videos and photos, not to mention physical magazines, were collector’s items in the same way that we once collected coins or action figures. The richest men bought up the exclusive rights to their favourite porn stars and guarded them by law with a viciousness once reserved for the RIAA and MPAA. Perhaps exclusivity gave them a possessive satisfaction. In response, we pirated whatever we could and fought for a pornographic public domain. Although new pornography was still being produced, either with the help of the same virtual technology they used for mainstream movies or with the participation of young men in costume, it lacked the taste of the originals. It was like eating chocolate made without cocoa. The best pornography, and therefore the best sex, became the pornography of the mind. The Tribe of Akna reached its Kickstarter goal in early December. On December 20, I went to church for the first time since getting married because that was the theoretical date that my wife—along with every other woman—was supposed to have given birth. I wanted to be alone with others. Someone posted a video on TikTok from Elia Kazan’s On The Waterfront, dubbing over Marlon Brando’s speech to say: “You don’t understand. I could’a had a piece of ass. I could’a been a school board member. I could’a been a son’s daddy”. It was juvenile and heartbreaking. By Christmas, the Surinamese government was already expelling its citizens, each of whom had theoretically been given a fraction of the funds paid to the government from the Tribe of Akna’s Kickstarter pool, and Salvador Abaroa’s lawyers were petitioning for international recognition of the new state of Xibalba. Neither Canada nor the United States opened diplomatic relations, but others did. I knew people who had pledged money, and when in January they disappeared on trips, I had no doubt to where. Infamy spread in the form of stories and urban legends. There’s no need for details. People disappeared, and ethicists wrote about the ethical neutrality of murder, arguing that because we were all slated to die, leaving the Earth barren in a century, destruction was a human inevitability, and what is inevitable can never be bad, even when it comes earlier than expected—even when it comes by force. Because, as a species, we hadn’t chosen destruction for ourselves, neither should any individual member of our species be able to choose now for himself. To the ethicists of what became known as the New Inevitability School, suicide was a greater evil than murder because it implied choice and inequality. If the ship was going down, no one should be allowed to get off. A second wave of suicides coincided with the debate, leading many governments to pass laws making suicide illegal. But how do you punish someone who already wants to die? In China: by keeping him alive and selling him to Xibalba, where he becomes the physical plaything of its citizens and visa-holders. The Chinese was the first embassy to open in Xibalban Paramaribo. The men working on Kurt Schwaller’s theory of everything continued working, steadily adding new variables to their equations, complicating their calculations in the hopes that someday the variable they added would be the final one and the equation would yield an answer. “It’s pointless,” Bakshi would comment after reading about one of the small breakthroughs they periodically announced. “Even if they do manage to predict something, anything, it won’t amount to anything more than the painfully obvious. And after decades of adding and subtracting their beans, they’ll come out of their Los Alamos datalabs like groundhogs into a world blanketed by storm clouds and conclude, finally and with plenty of self-congratulations, that it’s about to fucking rain.” It rained a lot in February. It was one of the warmest Februaries in Toronto’s history. Sometimes I went for walks along the waterfront, talking to my wife, listening to Billie Holiday and trying to recall as many female faces as I could. Ones from the distant past: my mother, my grandmothers. Ones from the recent past: the woman whose life my wife saved on the way to the hospital, the Armenian woman with the film magazine and the injured son, the Jamaican woman, Bakshi’s wife. I focused on their faces, then zoomed out to see their bodies. I carried an umbrella but seldom opened it because the pounding of the raindrops against the material distorted my mental images. I saw people rush across the street holding newspapers above their heads while dogs roamed the alleyways wearing nothing at all. Of the two, it was dogs that had the shorter time left on Earth, and if they could let the rain soak their fur and drip off their bodies, I could surely let it run down my face. It was first my mother and later my wife who told me to always cover up in the rain, “because moisture causes colds,” but I was alone now and I didn’t want to be separated from the falling water by a sheet of glass anymore. I already was cold. I saw a man sit down on a bench, open his briefcase, pack rocks into it, then close it, tie it to his wrist, check his watch and start to walk into the polluted waters of Lake Ontario. Another man took out his phone and tapped his screen a few times. The man in the lake walked slowly, savouring each step. When the police arrived, sirens blaring, the water was up to his neck. I felt guilty for watching the three officers splash into the lake after him. I don’t know what happened after that because I turned my back and walked away. I hope they didn’t stop him. I hope he got to do what he wanted to do. “Screw the police.” Bakshi passed me a book. “You should read this,” he said. It was by a professor of film and media studies at a small university in Texas. There was a stage on the cover, flanked by two red curtains. The photo had been taken from the actors’ side, looking out at an audience that the stage lights made too dark to see. The title was Hiding Behind The Curtains. I flipped the book over. There was no photo of the author. “It’s a theory,” Bakshi said, “that undercuts what Abaroa and the Inevitabilists are saying. It’s a little too poetic in parts but—listen, you ever read Atlas Shrugged?” I said I hadn’t. “Well, anyway, what this guy says is that what if instead of our situation letting us do anything we want, it’s actually the opposite, a test to see how we act when we only think that we’re doomed. I mean what if the women who died in March, what if they’re just—” “Hiding behind the curtains,” I said. He bit his lower lip. “It sounds stupid when you say it like that but, as a metaphor, it has a kind of elegance, right?” I flipped through the book, reading a few sentences at random. It struck me as neo-Christian. “Isn’t this a little too spiritual for you? I thought we were all locked into one path,” I said. “I thought that, too, but lately I’ve been able to do things—things that I didn’t really want to do.” For a second I was concerned. “Nothing bad,” he said. “I mean I’ve felt like I’m locked into doing one thing, say having a drink of water, but I resist and pour myself a glass of orange juice instead.” I shook my head. “It’s hard to explain,” he said. That’s how most theories ended, I thought: reason and evidence up to a crucial point, and then it gets so personal that it’s hard to explain. You either make the jump or you don’t. “Just read it,” he said. “Please read it. You don’t have to agree with it, I just want to get your opinion, an objective opinion.” I never did read the book, and Bakshi forgot about it, too, but that day he was excited and happy, and those were rare feelings. I was simultaneously glad for him and jealous. Afterwards, we went out onto the balcony and drank Czech beer until morning. When it got cool, we put on our coats. It started to drizzle so we wore blue plastic suits like the ones they used to give you on boat rides in Niagara Falls. When it was time to go home, I was so drunk I couldn’t see straight. I almost got into a fight, the first one of my life, because I bumped into a man on the street and told him to get the fuck out of my way. I don’t remember much more of my walk home. The only reason I remember Behind The Curtains at all is because when I woke up in the afternoon it was the first thing that my hung over brain recognized. It was lying on the floor beside the bed. Then I opened the blinds covering my bedroom window and, through my spread fingers that I’d meant to use as a shield from the first blast of daylight, I saw the pincers for the first time. They’d appeared while I was asleep. I turned on the television and checked my phone. The media and the internet were feverish, but nobody knew what the thing was, just a massive, vaguely rectangular shape blotting out a strip of the sky. NASA stated that it had received no extraterrestrial messages to coincide with the appearance. Every government claimed ignorance. The panel discussions on television only worsened my headache. Bakshi emailed me links to photos from Mumbai, Cape Town, Sydney and Mexico City, all showing the same shape; or rather one of a pair of shapes, for there were two of them, one on each side of the Earth, and they’d trapped our planet between themselves like gargantuan fingers clutching an equally gargantuan ping-pong ball. That’s why somebody came up with the term “the pincers”. It stuck. Because I’d slept in last night’s clothes I was already dressed, so I ran down the stairs and out of my apartment building to get a better look at them from the parking lot. You’re not supposed to look at the sun, but I wasn’t the only one breaking that rule. There were entire crowds with upturned faces in the streets. If the pincers, too, could see, they would perhaps be as baffled by us as we were of them: billions of tiny specks all over the surface of this ping-pong ball gathering in points on a grid, coagulating into large puddles that vanished overnight only to reassemble in the morning. In the following days, scientists scrambled to study the pincers and their potential effects on us, but they discovered nothing. The pincers did nothing. They emitted nothing, consumed nothing. They simply were. And they could not be measured or detected in any way other than by eyesight. When we shot rays at them, the rays continued on their paths unaffected, as if nothing was there. The pincers did, however, affect the sun’s rays coming towards us. They cut up our days. The sun would rise, travel over the sky, hide behind a pincer—enveloping us in a second night—before revealing itself again as a second day. But if the pincers’ physical effect on us was limited to its blockage of light, their mental effects on us were astoundingly severe. For many, this was the sign they’d been waiting for. It brought hope. It brought gloom. It broke and confirmed ideas that were hard to explain. In their ambiguity, the pincers could be anything, but in their strangeness they at least reassured us of the reality of the strange times in which we were living. Men walked away from the theory of everything, citing the pincers as the ultimate variable that proved the futility of prognostication. Others took up the calculations because if the pincers could appear, what else was out there in our future? However, ambiguity can only last for a certain period. Information narrows possibilities. On April 1, 2026, every Twitter account in the world received the following message: as you can see this message is longer than the allowed one hundred forty characters time and space are malleable you thought you had one hundred years but prepare for the plucking The sender was @. The message appeared in each user’s feed at exactly the same time and in his first language, without punctuation. Because of the date most of us thought it was a hoax, but the developers of Twitter denied this vehemently. It wasn’t until a court forced them to reveal their code, which proved that a message of that length and sent by a blank user was impossible, that our doubts ceased. ##!! took bets on what the message meant. Salvador Abaroa broadcast a response into space in a language he called Bodhi Mayan, then addressed the rest of us in English, saying that in the pincers he had identified an all-powerful prehistoric fire deity, described in an old Sanskrit text as having the resemblance of mirrored black fangs, whose appearance signified the end of time. “All of us will burn,” he said, “but paradise shall be known only to those who burn willingly.” Two days later, The Tribe of Akna announced that in one month it would seal Xibalba from the world and set fire to everything and everyone in it. For the first time, its spokesman said, an entire nation would commit suicide as one. Jonestown was but a blip. As a gesture of goodwill, he said that Xibalba was offering free immolation visas to anyone who applied within the next week. The New Inevitability School condemned the plan as “offensively unethical” and inequalitist and urged an international Xibalban boycott. Nothing came of it. When the date arrived, we watched with rapt attention on live streams and from the vantage points of circling news planes as Salvador Abaroa struck flint against steel, creating the spark that caught the char cloth, starting a fire that blossomed bright crimson and in the next weeks consumed all 163,821 square kilometres of the former Republic of Suriname and all 2,500,000 of its estimated Xibalban inhabitants. Despite concerns that the fire would spread beyond Xibalba’s borders, The Tribe of Akna had been careful. There were no accidental casualties and no unplanned property damage. No borders were crossed. Once the fire burned out, reporters competed to be first to capture the mood on the ground. Paramaribo resembled the smouldering darkness of a fire pit. It was a few days later while sitting on Bakshi’s balcony, looking up at the pincers and rereading a reproduction of @’s message—someone had spray-painted it across the wall of a building opposite Bakshi’s—that I remembered Iris. The memory was so absorbing that I didn’t notice when Bakshi slid open the balcony door and sat down beside me, but I must have been smiling because he said, “I don’t mean this the wrong way, but you look a little loony tonight. Seriously, man, you do not look sufficiently freaked out.” I’d remembered Iris before, swirling elements of her plain face, but now I also remembered her words and her theory. I turned to Bakshi, who seemed to be waiting for an answer to his question, and said, “Let’s get up on the roof of this place.” He grabbed my arm and held on tightly. “I’m not going to jump, if that’s what you mean.” It wasn’t what I meant, but I asked, “why not?” He said, “I don’t know. I know we’re fucked as a species and all that, but I figure if I’m still alive I might as well see what happens next, like in a bad movie you want to see through to the end.” I promised him that I wasn’t going to jump, either. Then I scrambled inside his apartment, grabbed my hat and jacket from the closet by the front door and put them on while speed walking down the hall, toward the fire escape. I realized I’d been spending a lot of time here. The alarm went off as soon I pushed open the door with my hip but I didn’t care. When Bakshi caught up with me, I was already outside, leaping up two stairs at a time. The metal construction was rusted. The treads wobbled. On the roof, the wind nearly blew my hat off and it was so loud I could have screamed and no one would have heard me. Holding my hat in my hands, I crouched and looked out over the twinkling city spread out in front of me. It looked alive in spite of the pincers in the sky. “Let’s do something crazy,” I yelled. Bakshi was still catching his breath behind me. “What, like this isn’t crazy enough?” The NHL may have been gone but my hat still bore the Maple Leafs logo, as quaint and obsolete by then as the Weimar Republic in the summer of 1945. “When’s the last time you played ball hockey?” I asked. Bakshi crouched beside me. “You’re acting weird. And I haven’t played ball hockey in ages.” I stood up so suddenly that Bakshi almost fell over. This time I knew I was smiling. “So call your buddies,” I said. “Tell them to bring their sticks and their gear and to meet us in front of the ACC in one hour.” Bakshi patted me on the back. Toronto shone like jewels scattered over black velvet. “The ACC’s been closed for years, buddy. I think you’re really starting to lose it.” I knew it was closed. “Lose what?” I asked. “It’s closed and we’re going to break in.” The chains broke apart like shortbread. The electricity worked. The clouds of dust made me sneeze. We used duffel bags to mark out the goals. We raced up and down the stands and bent over, wheezing at imaginary finish lines. We got into the announcer’s booth and called each other cunts through the microphone. We ran, fell and shot rubber pucks for hours. We didn’t keep score. We didn’t worry. “What about the police?” someone asked. The rest of us answered: “Screw the fucking police!” And when everybody packed up and went home, I stayed behind. “Are you sure you’re fine?” Bakshi asked. “Yeah,” I said. “Because I have to get back so that I can shower, get changed and get to work.” “Yeah, I know,” I said. “And you promise me you’ll catch a cab?” “I’m not suicidal.” He fixed his grip on his duffel bag. “I didn’t say you were. I was just checking.” “I want to see the end of the movie, too,” I said. He saluted. I watched him leave. When he was gone, my wife walked down from the nosebleeds and took a seat beside me. “There’s someone I want to tell you about,” I said. She lifted her chin like she always does when something unexpected catches her interest, and scooted closer. I put my arm across the back of her beautiful shoulders. She always liked that, even though the position drives me crazy because I tend to talk a lot with my hands. “Stuck at Leafs-Wings snorefest,” she said. “Game sucks but I love the man sitting beside me.” (January 15, 2019. Themes: hockey, love, me. Rating: 5/5). “Her name was Iris,” I said.
Iris
“What if the whole universe was a giant garden—like a hydroponics thing, like how they grow tomatoes and marijuana, so there wouldn’t need to be any soil, all the nutrients would just get injected straight into the seeds or however they do it—or, even better, space itself was the soil, you know how they talk about dark matter being this invisible and mysterious thing that exists out there and we don’t know what it does, if it actually affect anything, gravity…” She blew a cloud of pot smoke my way that made me cough and probably gave her time to think. She said, “So dark matter is like the soil, and in this space garden of course they don’t grow plants but something else.” “Galaxies?” “Eyes.” “Just eyes, or body parts in general?” I asked. “Just eyes.” The music from the party thumped. “But the eyes are our planets, like Mars is an eye, Neptune is an eye, and the Earth is an eye, maybe even the best eye.” “The best for what? Who’s growing them?” “God,” she said. I took the joint from her and took a long drag. “I didn’t know you believed in God.” “I don’t, I guess—except when I’m on dope. Anyway, you’ve got to understand me because when I say God I don’t mean like the old man with muscles and a beard. This God, the one I’m talking about, it’s more like a one-eyed monster.” “Like a cyclops?” I asked. “Yeah, like that, like a cyclops. So it’s growing these eyes in the dark matter in space—I mean right now, you and me, we’re literally sitting on one of these eyes and we’re contributing to its being grown because the nutrients the cyclops God injected into them, that’s us.” “Why does God need so many extra eyes?” “It’s not a question of having so many of them, but more about having the right one, like growing the perfect tomato.” I gave her back the joint and leaned back, looking at the stars. “Because every once in a while the cyclops God goes blind, its eye stops working—not in the same way we go blind, because the cyclops God doesn’t see reality in the same way we see reality—but more like we see through our brains and our eyes put together.” “Like x-ray vision?” I asked. “No, not like that at all,” she said. “A glass eye?” “Glass eyes are fake.” “OK,” I said, “so maybe try something else. Give me a different angle. Tell me what role we’re playing in all of this because right now it seems that we’re pretty insignificant. I mean, you said we’re nutrients but what’s the difference between, say, Mars and Earth in terms of being eyes?” She looked over at me. “Are you absolutely sure you want to hear about this?” “I am,” I said. “You don’t think it’s stupid?” “Compared to what?” “I don’t know, just stupid in general.” “I don’t.” “I like you,” she said. “Because I don’t think you’re stupid?” I asked. “That’s just a bonus. I mean more that you’re up here with me instead of being down there with everyone, and we’re talking and even though we’re not in love I know somehow we’ll never forget each other for as long as we live.” “It’s hard to forget being on the surface of a giant floating eyeball.” “You’re scared that you won’t find anyone to love,” she said suddenly, causing me to nearly choke on my own saliva. “Don’t ask me how I know—I just do. But before I go any further about the cyclops God, I want you to know that you’ll find someone to love and who’ll love you back, and whatever happens you’ll always have that because no one can take away the past.” “You’re scared of going blind,” I said. “I am going blind.” “Not yet.” “And I’m learning not to be scared because everything I see until that day will always belong to me.” “The doctors said it would be gradual,” I reminded her. “That’s horrible.” “Why?” “Because you wouldn’t want to find someone to love and then know that every day you wake up the love between you grows dimmer and dimmer, would you?” “I guess not,” I said. “Wouldn’t you much rather feel the full strength of that love up to and including in the final second before the world goes black?” “It would probably be painful to lose it all at once like that.” “Painful because you actually had something to lose. For me, I know I can’t wish away blindness, but I sure wish that the last image I ever see—in that final second before my world goes black—is the most vivid and beautiful image of all.” Because I didn’t know what to say to that, I mumbled: “I’m sorry.” “That I’m going blind?” “Yeah, and that we can’t grow eyes.” This time I looked over, and she was the one gazing at the stars. “Before, you asked if we were insignificant,” she said. “But because you’re sorry—that’s kind of why we’re the most significant of all, why Earth is better than the other planets.” “For the cyclops God?” “Yes.” “He cares about my feelings?” “Not in the way you’re probably thinking, but in a different way that’s exactly what the cyclops God cares about most because that’s what it’s looking for in an eye. All the amazing stuff we’ve ever built, all our ancient civilizations and supercomputers and cities you can see from the Moon—that’s just useless cosmetics to the cyclops God, except in how all of it has made us feel about things that aren’t us.” “I think you’re talking about morality.” “I think so, too.” “So by feeling sorry for you I’m showing compassion, and the cyclops God likes compassion?” “That’s not totally wrong but it’s a little upside down. We have this black matter garden and these planets the cyclops God has grown as potential eyes to replace its own eye once it stops working, but its own eye is like an eye and a brain mixed together. Wait—” she said. I waited. “Imagine a pair of tinted sunglasses.” I imagined green-tinted ones. “Now imagine that instead of the lenses being a certain colour, they’re a certain morality, and if you wear the glasses you see the world tinted according to that morality.” I was kind of able to imagine that. I supposed it would help show who was good and who was bad. “But the eye and the tinted glasses are the same thing in this case.” “Exactly, there’s no one without the other, and what makes the tint special is us—not that the cyclops God cares at all about individuals any more than we care about individual honey bees. That’s why he’s kind of a monster.” “Isn’t people’s morality always changing, though?” “Only up to a point. Green is green even when you have a bunch of shades of it, and a laptop screen still works fine even with a few dead pixels, right? And the more globalized and connected we get, the smoother our morality gets, but if you’re asking more about how our changing morals work when the cyclops God finally comes to take its eye, I assume it has a way to freeze our progress. To cut our roots. Then it makes some kind of final evaluation. If it’s satisfied it takes the planet and sticks it into its eye socket, and if it doesn’t like us then it lets us alone, although because we’re frozen and possibly rootless I suppose we die—maybe that’s what the other planets are, so many of them in space without any sort of life. Cold, rejected eyes.” From sunglasses to bees to monitors in three metaphors, and now we were back to space. This was getting confusing. The stars twinkled, some of them dead, too: their light still arriving at our eyes from sources that no longer existed. “That’s kind of depressing,” I said to end the silence. “What about it?” “Being bees,” I said, “that work for so long at tinting a pair of glasses just so that a cyclops God can try them on.” “I don’t think it’s any more depressing than being a tomato.” “I’ve never thought about that.” “You should. It’s beautiful, like love,” she said. “Because if you think about it, being a tomato and being a person are really quite similar. They’re both about growing and existing for the enjoyment of someone else. As a tomato you’re planted, you grow and mature and then an animal comes along and eats you. The juicier you look and the nicer you smell, the greater the chance that you’ll get plucked but also the more pleasure the animal will get from you. As a person, you’re also born and you grow up and you mature into a one of a kind personality with a one of a kind face, and then someone comes along and makes you fall in love with them and all the growing you did was really just for their enjoyment of your love.” “Except love lasts longer than chewing a tomato.” “Sometimes,” she said. “And you have to admit that two tomatoes can’t eat each other the way two people can love each other mutually.” “I admit that’s a good point,” she said. “And what happens to someone who never gets fallen in love with?” “The same thing that happens to a tomato that never gets eaten or an eye that the cyclops God never takes. They die and they rot, and they darken and harden, decomposing until they don’t look like tomatoes anymore. It’s not a nice fate. I’d rather live awhile and get eaten, to be honest.” “As a tomato or person?” “Both.” I thought for a few seconds. “That explanation works for things on Earth, but nothing actually decomposes in space.” “That’s why there are so many dead planets,” she said.
Welcome to the discussion boards of DC Trends! This section is BRAND NEW and will be lots of fun. Sign up for free and start posting your own news links, memes, and more. Play album Mistaken Identity. Kim Carnes. 231,010 listeners. 278 more albums featuring this track Lyrics. Her hair is Harlow gold Her lips sweet surprise Her hands are never cold She's got Bette Davis eyes She'll turn the music on you You won't have to … View full lyrics Jennifer Harris from Grand Blanc, Mi whenever I watch a Bette Davis Movie,I have this song in my head. Barry from Sauquoit, Ny On May 16th, 1981 "Bette Davis Eyes" by Kim Carnes reached #1 & stayed there for five weeks, then "Stars on 45" became #1 for one week. But "Bette Davis Eyes" reclaimed the #1 position and held it for four more weeks!!! She's Got Bette Davis Eyes, a song by Sara Melo on Spotify. We and our partners use cookies to personalize your experience, to show you ads based on your interests, and for measurement and analytics purposes. By using our website and our services, Play on Spotify The eyes have it in this month's column from The Artist D. Our resident style maven discusses eye makeup in all it's variations. You can go from passable to drag queen in just a few strokes of the shadow applicator. Take these tips on eyes from The Artist D and be fab whatever your look. Dm C She'll take a tumble on you, Dm C F Dm C roll you like you were dice, F Dm C until you come out blue, F she's got Bette Davis eyes. Dm F Bb She'll expose you, when she snows you, hope you're pleased with the crumbs she F throws you, Dm F Bb F she's ferocious and she knows just, what it takes to make a pro blush, Bb Dm C Bb9 Dm C all the Title: Bette Davis Eyes by Kim Carnes. 1960s fashion 1970s fashion Bette Davis Bette Davis Eyes Feud: Bette and Joan Joan Crawford Kim Carnes opshops vintage Get link Her hair is Harlow gold Her lips sweet surprise Her hands are never cold She's got Bette Davis eyes She'll turn the music on you You won't have to think twice She's pure as New York snow She's got Bette Davis eyes And she'll tease you She'll unease you All the better just to please you She's precocious And she knows just what it takes to make a pro blush She's got Greta Garbo stand-off sighs She's got Bette Davis eyes. She'll turn the music on you. You won't have to think twice. She's pure as New York snow. She got Bette Davis eyes. And she'll tease you. She'll unease you. All the better just to please you. She's precocious, and she knows just. What it takes to make a pro blush. She got Greta Garbo's standoff sighs. She's got Bette She got Bette Davis eyes She'll take a tumble on you Roll you like you were dice Until you come out blue She's got Bette Davis eyes She'll expose you, when she snows you Off your feet with the crumbs she throws you She's ferocious and she knows just What it takes to make a pro blush All the boys think she's a spy, she's got Bette Davis eyes
Gwyneth Paltrow singing bette davis eyes - duets.please rate this video. Provided to YouTube by Universal Music GroupBette Davis Eyes · Kim CarnesMistaken Identity℗ 1981 Capitol Records, LLCReleased on: 1981-01-01Producer, Studio ... Her hair is hollow goldher lips a sweet surpriseHer hands are never coldshe's got Bette Davis eyes.She'll turn her music on youyou won't have to think twiceS... "Bette Davis Eyes" is a song written and composed by Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon, and made popular by American singer Kim Carnes. DeShannon recorded it ... Click below for a FREE download of a colorfully illustrated 132 page e-book on the Zionist-engineered INTENTIONAL destruction of Western civilization. Click ... About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators ... Kim Carnes' distinctively raspy, throaty voice graced one of the biggest hits of the '80s, the Grammy-winning smash "Bette Davis Eyes," which spent nine week... Her hair is Harlow goldHer lips are sweet surpriseHer hands are never coldShe got Bette Davis eyesShe'll turn the music on youYou won't have to think twiceSh... First video, attempted to try as I couldn't find a CD live cover version from Taylor on YouTube. Anyway, enjoy. Copyright not intended, all rights go to BMR ... Music video by Kim Carnes performing Bette Davis Eyes.