SRF Heavy Industries

A spoonful of my brains in the cotton candy machine
Creutzfeldt-Jakob prions, sweetened-to-taste and caramelized
Twirled around a paper cone handle
A time bomb with a twenty-year fuse
A teaspoon of good ideas, poorly folded
Transmissible only by eating your father’s brains
And cotton candy
Stop picking on your sister
And apologize for throwing up on your stepmother
And promise you’ll do all of your spelling homework
And I’ll stop beating you with the buckle-end
Maybe
And buy you this disease on a stick
That will completely cure you of everything
Before you turn thirty
Maybe you’ll have children before you go
And I’ll teach you to make cotton candy
Taste better with nothing but
The power of your mind.

[*]

I once read a Richard Bach book.

There’s a confession.

Okay, maybe I read a couple of them. Johnathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah and maybe a couple more.

But the stupid confession is regarding Illusions. And here’s how it goes.

In the book, there’s this thing, basically a magic spell, where the messiah-guy is trying to tell the narrator-guy how to fulfill his own wishes with some kind of New Age visualization technique. It goes like you imagine the thing that you want, surrounded by a brilliant glow, and this will magnetize you to it, and it should come barreling down on you out of the future like a ton of bricks.

I’m not telling you what it is I imagined surrounded by a brilliant glow. I’m just not. But I will tell you that since that day, what has been barreling down on me out of the future like a ton of bricks has been magnets. I must have found literally hundreds of magnets in the twenty years since then. I am magnetized for magnets.

Found another one today. A round one, taped to the inside of the bottom of some box like the type you might get an inexpensive necklace or bracelet in, under a pad of cotton.

Go ahead and laugh now. I know you want to.

[*]