Several years ago I was crossing some railroad tracks when I spotted a youngster fast asleep between the rails.He was sleeping so soundly that I did not bother to wake him, even though several coal freights passed through town each hour.Did I do the right thing? --Slightly Curious
Dear Samaritan,
You not only did the right thing but the sensible thing as well.Children so often misbehave when they are awoken from a nap prematurely; the resultant mayhem and hi jinx would no doubt have caused you much grief.I once left a sleeping newborn tied to the bottom of a threshing machine for this reason, and while the results of that decision were far from picturesque, to say the least, I’m sure things worked out much better in your situation.It is a little-known fact that locomotives can stop almost at will, and--if the engineer in question was as observant as his arduous task requires--he spied your young sleepyhead with plenty of time to stop before greasing his wheels with him.
My hipster neighbors recently began using clear plastic trash bags. Is it ethical to examine their weekly trash for letters, receipts or other materials of an anti-American or otherwise conspiratorial nature and judge them accordingly? -Seeking Consultation Regarding Every Williamsburg Yupster
Dear Megan,
Your dilemma is one that plagues me daily. Of course you should not only perform a cursory examination of their trash but stab it open with any available sharp instrument. Deftly cut a long incision across the width of the bag; listen to the bag softly gasp as you release the air within. Watch the garbage pour from the hole onto the sidewalk as you smear your guilty hands in it. Take some of the oozing refuse--the fair trade coffee grinds, the leftover organic sauces--and use it to write your neighbors a note on their windows and doors. A kind reminder such as "Stop Hexing Me" or "I Know You're Watching Me in My Sleep." Remove any mail or letters from the bag and read them at your leisure. They were written about you anyway, so why not? After reading them three times burn them in the toilet with charcoal lighter fluid and a blowtorch, or with your mind. It goes without saying that as hipsters most of the contents of their trash will contain items of an Anti-American nature. As we all know, Whole Foods is a thinly-veiled front for the Taliban, who uses the proceeds to stone anyone even considering using irony. So yes, you will find such materials, but more importantly these items need to be tested in the lab I've constructed in my lower colon to see if they are magic, or at least if they possess magic dangerous to you. Stop bathing in their trash immediately and send it all to me in a big red box wrapped with electrical wire, flares and eight rolls of duct tape. In the meantime prevent your neighbors from further misdeeds by relieving yourself in their mailbox, or, as a timesaver, by setting their house on fire and seeing if you can knit a sweater out of the flames.
Copyright 2010 Max Jukes/Brian Edward Hack. No quotation or reproduction of this material without permission from the author. Illustration copyright 2010 by max jukes/brian edward hack.
Last week I accidentally walked in on my fifteen-year-old son masturbating to my wedding album. As you might expect we are both embarrassed and it is becoming more and more awkward the longer we pretend it never happened. What can I say to alleviate his worries and let him know that masturbation is a normal part of adolescence? -Worried About David
Dear Mrs. Weaver,
Since the early nineteenth century, when young boys first began masturbating to seed catalogs and the drawings on the front of burlap feed sacks, interlopers such as you have unwittingly interrupted what otherwise would have been a peaceful "yank of the plank," as it was called in those days before cleverer euphemisms were invented. Masturbation was greatly enhanced after the arrival of the daguerreotype in 1839, although the long exposure time almost but guaranteed that the act would be completed by the time the photograph was developed, mounted and stuffed down one's trousers. Later experiments in masturbatory stereoscopy necessitated the creation of a two-handed, and later, thankfully, a one-handed stereographic viewer; one lad's diary entry from 1858 reported that seeing three-dimensional images of nude statuary made him "quiver so violently that the horse in the adjacent stall released himself, although I am quite unawares of how so much of the milky brine landed on my face and person." This leads us to your current situation. Your son David Weaver needs to know, as do all of his tenth-grade classmates at R. Budd Dwyer High School, that masturbating is essential for proper nutrition and health. In fact, in the mid-1950s it was frequently taught as part of the Home Economics curriculum, as a supplement to those long tedious hours baking and cleaning house. You might begin to repair your relationship with David by spending a few days with him perusing your wedding album. Ask him which photographs he most enjoyed, and then ask him why. Have these images tattooed on his chest by a competent tattoo artist, or a neighbor.
Copyright 2010 Max Jukes/Brian Edward Hack. No quotation or reproduction of this material without permission from the author. Illustration copyright 2010 by max jukes/brian edward hack.
The atoms pulse and hover and fade as I turn away, then focus and form into the familiar upon my return. In my absence they can be themselves: solids relax into blurry whirls of possibility; liquids bend and unravel at their leisure, scattering themselves into marbles of gossamer; even the air assumes hues and shapes that slither along the tenuous matter in which I believe. I believe in the cloaks of objects, and in the consensus constructed around them. Because I believe, you believe, and because we believe, they believe, and they believe because those before them believed. The painters and the poets aspired to lose their faith, and pierce the gauze upon the world to reveal its truths; their tools conspired against them, being in on the ruse from the outset. Even the mind, unseen and unknowable, is particularly unreliable in penetrating material truths. It harbors great secrets. Out of kindness or contempt it refuses to offer a glimpse of what lies beneath. The mind gives form, gives names, gives expectations and veils the buzzing hovering of matter. This enemy within is unflinching. If I stop believing, will objects dissolve into themselves as they are without the deceitful filters of eye and mind? Am I to have faith in what I cannot see, or faith in what I can?
Copyright 2010 Max Jukes/Brian Edward Hack. No quotation or reproduction of this material without permission from the author. Illustration copyright 2010 by max jukes/brian edward hack.
Lange Eylandt Limericks, Concerning Setauket and Neighboring Environs, for the Full and Rapid Release of Ribaldry
An amazing young man from Syosset
Arrived with the force of a faucet.
Yet the briny cascade
left his lovers dismayed,
for they frequently drowned trying to cross it.
There once was a man from Setauket
who kept his wife's pic in a locket.
When girls would ask, "who
is that woman?" he knew
it was time that he run out and hock it.
A well-endowed man from Setauket
Would blush when the ladies would mock it.
"We can see that it's long,
but isn't it wrong
to keep it unleashed when you walk it?"
There once was a girl from West Islip
known as the "Ten Dollar Vice Grip"
Slip it in for a five,
But to pull out alive
Cost you five dollars more, plus a nice tip.
Copyright 2010 max jukes/brian edward hack. No quotation or reproduction of this material without express written permission of the author.
Copyright 2010 max jukes/brian edward hack. No quotation or reproduction of this material without express written permission of the author. Photograph copyright 2010 max jukes/brian edward hack.
they had surrendered the shudders and moans of private devotion to the dog-eared victors of words, books of words, and words of books and that was as it should have been. Tongues were tethered to well-weathered spines and scarce was the day that they sought other, far more warmer and wetter venues to explore; yet the nights were nuzzled with velveteen, high above the princely sounds below. When they came to the last page, she had finished first. Or perhaps she saw the ending coming and began perusing the shelves for a more satisfying read. For when he looked up she had climbed down, down into the heat of the Big D, where other books and other words burned mesquite-slow and lingered longer in her memory. Amidst more dim and distant digs his pages foxed and fell from their brittle binding, spilling, spitting, spewing down the littered lanes. As the days piled into months and heaped into years his hopes were wrung out and hung out and left to fray in the wind like the white flag of a war where news of the treaty had never reached the trenches. Letters and desires went unanswered, unopened. But one afternoon, in the nook of a dark and narrow nave, he dipped his fingers into the font and found the faith to ask for someone, anyone, to help him bind his scarred and scattered pages.
Copyright 2010 max jukes/brian edward hack. No quotation or reproduction of this material without express written permission of the author.
she said before our tongues and our lives entwined. Usually women would say that sort of thing to me as an easy out, a Governor's-phonecall-at-the-last-moment-before-they-flip-the-switch way of getting themselves out of my futon and into anything or anyone else. These sorts of phrases were uttered to evaporate whatever negotiations may have been underway between my mind and the various other freelance ambassadors of my body. Or else they would move my hands from wherever they were to wherever they wanted, and say something like, "Don't expect anything. What's left of my soul went down on the Andrea Doria." Then I would grumble and shuffle off, stumbling half-drunk in the diamond grass at dawn until I unfurled myself upon the unpopulated tundra of my mattress, resigned to spilling rivers of my own longing. But here, but now, with the Donner Party running its course across my upper lip I could only surmise that someone had finally succumbed to the hunger to feed upon the breadcrumbs of my not-so-distant denouement.
Copyright 2006 max jukes/brian edward hack. No quotation or reproduction of this material without express written permission of the author. Photograph copyright 2006 max jukes/brian edward hack.
Max Jukes is the last of a long line of Jukes, most if not all of whom unwittingly did their part to foul the murky puddle that was their gene pool. He prefers the company of blind mutes, although he finds them far too inquisitive and gregarious.
See also: http://maxjukes.com
