Whippit Can Jamboree and The Atomization of the Western Canon

I lift the can of keyboard duster to my lips. The mountains have been pretty much invisible for a week beneath the clouds. My head feels like it’s somehow crustacean, cracking in half with a scraping, crunching sound of Crushed exoskeleton, or a crusty, slimy booger wrested from a Hairless nostril. I pull the trigger of the duster.

What the fuck was I doing showing up at that house party trying to win back some nice gal I’d treated as a side piece for six months and after flaking out mightily had returned to haunt her at a time she was probably trying to forget the mistake we’d been? I’d stumbled into the party seeking her red hair, that hair that hinted at a certain domain of creamy body, created a GIF-like desire circuit having to do with innocence/tarnishing thereof. But everyone in those shadowy hallways of that unreal house seemed to have red hair, red like the blood I wanted to pour from my fucking ear at the bottom of a cliff I couldn’t see because of the clouds. Her name was Ruby, for fuck’s sake. Wasn’t it? Or am I just making this shit up?

We see anonymous narrators of medieval exile poems cite guarding their feelings as noble and necessary. The compressed oxygen release of the keyboard duster feels pleasant against the teeth, swallowed into the lungs, numbs the ragged gash between mind and body. Things bifurcate and subdivide. Goitre is a condition that causes swelling of the throat. It can develop in both citizens and poets, with the latter sub-condition called “green goitre.”

I’d seen a dusting documentary on cable tv. About this kind of goth, I guess, chick who was addicted to machine dusters. I learned about inhaling keyboard cleaner from that doc. The goth gal seemed super cute, but in photos from before her recovery her teeth were black and she had a dark-stroked complexion from her obsessive-compulsive aerosol disorder.

I squeeze the trigger of the keyboard cleaner. There are redemptive metaphors in the river. The colour of menstrual blood is the most beautiful colour, as it exists between red and pink in a toilet bowl spectrum of passionate rose, or gentle ruby.

It’s conceivable that Ruby would have herself “gone goth” later, become a cutter, her red hair matching her spiked black choker, the lacerations on her arms the perfect flesh tones. Then again, Ruby, being new to the small town, having arrived as the migrant deer do into the snares of the locals, may well have instead shacked with another transient, say a train-hopping goth gal, while remaining the hippie redhead she was, and they become Dutch born-again lesbian evangelicals. 

This is speculation, the kind that comes from a stupid fucking brain that needs to be injected with lime juice and Vodka.

A few months after seeing the doc, I was drunk in a small room, the wailing mountain winds knuckled the windows, fumbling for something in my desk drawer, when I felt something metallic and cylindrical. Wow, I actually had my own can of cleaner. 

We pass tics on to each other. The scrunch-sniff of upper lip that makes you look like a comatose senior: learned through aping some random acquaintance who happens to sniff his own face; the pick-and-eat of one’s own dandruff: learned through hearing stories of somebody snacking on his scabs, as observed by co-workers on Zoom. Death? Merely another behavioural pattern we pick up from our mortal ilk. Contrary to the medieval exile scribes, it is the hope, nowadays, that the subject-citizen can immediately overcome such tics BY WRITING THEM DOWN IN A STORY FOR ALL TO SEE. Feeling obliged to then “stand by one’s words.”

In Spencer’s Faerie Queene, The House of Pride is where all the sins party. There’s this sense, Peter Baudrillard notes in his Second Tower, that peeps were lucky to be alive at a certain point in the event horizon. However, in this lucky era, peeps were actually well aware of their own culture’s decrepitude, its built-in lose-ability, the dirtiness of personal power; you had to completely wipe your conscience blank to enjoy such supposed entitlements; the joys of art entirely satirical and/or masochistic. Or maybe actually there was no reason for that self-flagellation after all. If only we had “done more with our time” and appreciated everything! I should make an evanescent ragdoll of myself for having been completely ungrateful, for the fact that I cannot balance and unify and actualize the fullness of my prevaricating and equivocating self; in short, be more like Notes of the Underground, dude!

The Exiles wander the Moors, the Highlands and Badlands, the Steppes that overlap. One carries a knife trailing necklaces of clotted blood for the lizard hawkers while another she says not a word and nobody understands her which is why she is here away from all the gawkers.

Baudrillard and Buckminster Fuller are at the table eating sandwishes [sic, I guess]. Everyone has turned in their seats to listen to the conversation happening at this dream luncheon. I’m out of cleaner. Without a publisher. The writer without a patron howls in the blasted landscape.

“All I wanted was the odd orgasm, didn’t even have to be every time.” Ruby!

Wfhhhh. This shit is geodesic this shit is simulacric. Hang with the Incas when you blaze the Indica/chill with Shiva/when you rip the Sativa. 

The underside of a spruce tree at the end of the river is scattered with empty whippit cans bright red and white, like satiated revelers in an arboreal campground, the happy losers of relay race round one, content to be sitting out and relaxing. My dentist used to put on me a nose piece attached by a wrinkled plastic tube to a nitrous canister with glass compression gauges. On a ride I got hitchhiking this guy showed me a nitrous tank he had between the back seats of his old Corvette to inject into the engine through a thin metal tube that disappeared under the floor.  

Let’s simply rewind and play the scene again. Locate and approach Ruby at the house party this time, instead of fleeing out the back door down to the river with the inhalant can. This time hold out the spray in offering. “Taste?” She springs an immediate liking for not only the duster but for you, gripping your belt and yanking you into her as you give her little blasts with the duster. She’s soon hooked. You’re her whippit man now. You pitch a doc to Bravo, sensing a new trend: whippit sheik. You’re in. She’s in. Famous, you obliterate yourselves off the planet with rare opiate isotopes.  

In truth, I should have gone for women who are more like the goth girl. I could have lived a more authentic life that way. Like in Jude the Obscure. No… or a… 

The river in summertime. The pebble beach is also rightly called a beach of shards. We pick the glass out of the foot cut. We extract the leech teeth from ankle. The Canon isn’t extinct, it’s atomized into a golden shower of knowledge constantly getting tested by nano doping agencies. You are the symbol of solace when you walk along the river in that painting done by your mother. You are full of the stuff of potential pain. The spank bank is replete with prideful moments. It’s okay to let your drives drive you when the driving conditions are right: this is de Sade’s example, leant a modicum of respectability by Simone de Beauvoir’s preface to his collected works. As Sartre points out, it was in fact society’s labeling of Genet as a thief, a criminal, that boxed him into that identity and caused him to manifest malignantly as he did. The skull is the only exoskeletal part of the human body. Everyone is carrying around their potential piñata and it’s time for the world’s birthday party. Will my green goitre act as an effective silencer if I stick the barrel far enough down my throat? Who needs a whippit can jamboree?