[JANUARY 2020.]
Two of my high school acquaintances are secret police and have come to arrest me for mean songs I wrote about people decades ago. The taller one is playing it stern. The shorter, still blond and baby-faced, keeps glancing at me and chuckling, “You know, that was a funny song,” until a look from his partner shuts him up.
As above so below
In the Home Depot parking lot a dozen guys hunch their black jackets against the cold as they wait to be picked up for a job. In the tree above a dozen blackbirds puff against the cold and whir.
“You’re one of those people who makes a face when you go outside,” he said, “like all you want is for time to pass, and like it hurts you in passing.”
It’s goddamn GAME OF THRONES time. Here’s a map depicting the complete world of GAME OF THRONES, with an overlay showing the principal tectonic faults so you can understand why the landmasses took the shape they did. They think of everything! Check out the big strike-slip fault going up the middle; that's going to be trouble.
What happens at street level in GAME OF THRONES is, people torment other people through closed doors. Kings have been tossed into the street by their queens and are trying to barge back inside. A student holds a door shut against his teacher, who is making blandishments of the worst sort, not so much sexual as insinuating violence. Thank God there’s a phone next to the door! Thank God it’s possible to call 911 while holding the door shut!
Here come two cops. Sir, is this the individual who was disturbing you? Yes, that’s him. But when the suspect steps into the light, it’s just a street person, not the teacher. Now the teacher himself comes forward, smirking because the 911 call was the student’s last gambit and he’s scotched it with the misidentification. But the student begs the police not to go, with such desperation that finally they take both student and teacher by the elbows and set out for the station.
The teacher pulls two knitting needles out of his pocket and starts to conjure a length of glowing green yarn in midair. That he would do such a thing shows that he’s a powerful magician and obviously guilty, so the policemen pull out knitting needles of their own (there’s no other way to fight back) and summon up lengths of white yarn in response. But they’re just beat cops and can’t do much. In no time at all the teacher has woven an airborne sack which settles over the heads of the others and pulls them suffocatingly close. “I’m sorry,” the student manages to say before breath gives out, “I thought I was doing the right thing, but I’ve led us all to an agonizing death.” That’s how it goes on GAME OF THRONES.
