(Not in pharmacies) it went viral.
—John Ashbery
It all starts off pretty innocent,
somebody sends you a pill in the
mail. The next thing you know,
you’re a hotshot with an endless
prescription pad. We love to fill
in the blanks like they’re Mad Libs,
“Tonight I’ll have the [squishy]
[starburst] that’ll have us all
[slurping] the [zeitgeist] all
[schadenfreude].” “Roughly
half of my ancestors were
German; the rest from every-
where else. Interestingly, the
German side of the family wasn’t
rough at all.” He won’t stop hocking
ptooey: everything’s “zaftig” this or
that on the autobahn, he’s endless
Mercedes and BMV only it’s “Bay Em
Vay” as if he’s got something stuck in
the middle of his throat and he wants
to get it out; he’s spat the word “fahr-
vergnügen” at least four times in the
past thirty minutes alone. He’s invited
us to a costume party and is trying like
mad to have us wondering about the
equipment he surely has downstairs in
what he keeps calling his “underworld
studio.” Is anyone fooled by any of this,
I wonder, or is it just that I’ve skittered
around a bit too close to hell for the last
half dozen or so years, as optimism got
whittled and chiseled away to reveal the
fun-loving character with the reputation
for slapping around a little bit more than
just a bunch of pretense now and again?
It used to be such torture hanging with
the sycophants. But these days it’s
about as riveting as the gaping
maw of a really long yawn.
. . .yet there it is, anyway.
