Life Among the Mannequins

Unable and powerless to circumvent my miseries, daunted, discouraged and unable to face reality, I felt myself to be unworthy of human company and so took to exile. I had no skills and no achievements. Of abilities, I had only my habits, which was to stand around all day doing nothing, this and that I was in fairly good physical shape. These being my sole attributes, I resigned myself to cross over to the other side of humanity’s double, on the opposite side of the glass, to a land where everything is cool and clear, perfect and pleasing to the eye: I went to live among the mannequins.

Life among the mannequins is ever fashionable. We live in your future: sweaters stretch across our perfect bosoms while you still swelter, and our matchless bellybuttons pucker above brave swimsuits while you shiver.

We are a sensibly evolved race, only those who need heads and arms have them. But each is a perfect exemplar of what it is. None of us have eyes, but, being perfect, like numbers, we have nothing to see, nothing to admire and nothing of which to be jealous. We are gracious in accepting your gazes. We are your royalty: you dress us in your finest, you carry us, you display us to represent you.

Sexless and perfect, immune to decay and age, born fully formed, we are more like angels than men. Indeed, in the story of creation told by mannequins, God, who like us, is perfect and immortal, made us in his own image, but first, wanting to get his creation right, experimented with clay studies and figures. After many, many trials, he was at last ready and created us, the mannequins and was pleased. Then he realized he had many, many leftover clay figures. Loving all his creations, however unequal, he decided to keep them, only to discover that the unfired clay was prone to rot and lose shape over time. The mud was getting everywhere. He thought that the clay figures might last longer if they were kept somewhere moist with lots of mud to fix them with: so he placed his flawed creations near the mud hole he had scooped out. This was your Garden of Eden. Despite all the moisture and the mud, the poor things kept falling apart, so perhaps he gave you procreation. In any case, so the story goes, he gave us to you, so that you might have something to look up to and to know what to wear.

Perfect in proportion and lack of detail, we are your ideals, your greatest of impossible hopes for yourself: in what sense can it not be said that we created you?

TURN #84: WEEK 70; WORDS: 79,648
NEXT BY 25 OCTOBER 2006

A Small, Yet Stimulating Guide to Erotic Punctuation

As the notorious inventor of the erotic chess story, people often ask me “what is it that makes your erotic stories so absolutely devastating, so painfully lascivious, terrifying and carnal, so hot and wet that I felt I must rip myself to shreds and committed incest with my brother in the parking lot of that car wash?” The answer is, of course, that I care. Not only that: I care. As a humble student in the world of the erotic arts it is a pleasure to relate my simple, unadorned experiences in incredibly filthy narratives that will soil your imagination forever like a masturbating bat. See what I mean? (Those that are disturbed by the idea of masturbating bats should probably stop here and perhaps jump to here: this is what I do when I can’t take anymore masturbating bats, what with all the screeching, the squeaking, the dizzying weak bobbing beam of the head lamps, the female bats tangling in your hair and the male bats ejaculating in it and the sudden stunning blow to the head that signals a collision with a stalactite).

Other than that, however, there are simple procedural things, the knowledge of which, however cursory and vague, like the location of the clitoris, improve one’s style immensely, the most neglected of which is: punctuation.

The Exclamation Point

I have always been of the opinion, with Thurber, that the exclamation point should be avoided, if not actually shunned, in print, as in real life. You may find this thought alien if you are one of those people who respond to casual demure questions like “how are you?” with “Super!”, but I can tell you know that there isn’t much that we’re going to agree on and this relationship is going nowhere, except for your really hot body, which is perfect and gives glory to Allah just walking around.

I feel the same way about the exclamation point as I do about a lot of mainstream male-oriented representations of heterosexual intercourse: it places emphasis on exactly the wrong things in the wrong way. In fact a lot of mainstream male-oriented representations of heterosexual intercourse is so terrible it makes heterosexuality itself seem like a bad thing, and a bad thing that happens when you’re eighteen and in an RV surrounded by a lot of dudes in baseball caps. As representations go, imagine a world in which advertisements for hot dogs consisted entirely of 300 pound men in eating contests to the death and you have the image given by most mainstream pornography.

Not that I have seen such things.

The exclamation point is not much better. The mark itself is just a horrible phallocratic giveaway:[!]. It consists of a long, solitary shaft which has onanisticaly yielded a small, pale rapidly cooling spot of graphematical excess that belies its original passion. By itself, the exclamation is a sad and lonely thing that tries to conceal its profound hollowness with a lot of extroverted noise. It is the Tigger of punctuation marks.

Worse still, the exclamation point will sometime band together with other exclamation points in the inferior erotic narrative:

“I can’t believe it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My flippers are so dirty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I must have gotten them dirty when I walked across that erotic cake!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Of our Founding Fathers!!!!!!!!! Evacuating!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You know what I mean!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So dirty!!!!!!!!!!!!!Won’t you please lick them!!!!!!!! Clean!!!!!!!! OHHHH YESSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NNNnhhh!!!!!!!!”

The effect of these multiple exclamation points is not so much arousal, or the communication of arousal, as it is short graphic stretches of pointy fencing that warn the reader to “stay away.”

The exclamation point, LIKE ALL CAPS, is really an entire language of bad pornography. And to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life. This form of life has a name: it is fascism.

For it is only in an imaginary perfect fascist state that all men have ROCK HARD BATTERING RAMS and all women are TOTAL SLUTS who WANT IT REALLY BAD and ALL THE TIME: “OH, YES!!!!!!! NOW!!!!!!!! PUT THE DUSTBUSTER ON MY CLIT!!!!!!!!!!!!”

In short, any conventions that appear in spam should be avoided.

The Period

The period is, on the other hand, while certainly not under utilized, is under appreciated. In eroticism, as with anything else, sometimes it helps to come to a complete stop, get some more martini olives, check the news.

There is nothing more erotic than lying there, crimped like a kitten, drifting in and out, muttering various nonsense endearments when various slow distinct technical noises inform you that your lover is now doing laundry. Indeed, very cool people will now pretend that nothing has happened: “So, what are you doing this afternoon?”

Though archetypically the erotic narrative is a comedic one, of springtime, renewal and eternal return - a thing of commas and semi-colons -it is ideally well-stationed with the regular servicable period:

It did not matter. They were dead. They were all dead. Who would know the winner of the blowjob contest?