Xensen: Suppose you love someone romantically—a woman, let’s say. Do you parcel out your love, setting it in scales and weighing it out against little blocks, one that says “improved character,” another that says “better self-understanding”? Or do you simply love her, without inhibition? Now suppose her name is The Humanities.

Conrad H. Roth: I do love someone romantically, and it is even a woman. However, if I spent my whole life--or even a large part of my life--stroking her lovely face, I might have reason to worry I was not spending my time as well as I should be.

Myself: Now suppose multitudes of people all over the globe love her, passionately, covetously, and these multitudes spend their whole lives stroking her face as well. This stroking, however reverent and gentle, has, through the constant attentive friction of countless fingertips, an unintended effect; A quantitative effect oblivious to the romantic clink of wine glasses and undiminished by concupiscent cooing.

The affectionate caress, when administered by a mob, feels decidedly more ardent. 

Capillaries are broken, bruises formed, skin stripped, layer by layer, from her cheeks and forehead and chin. The Zygomaticus and Orbicularis oculi and Oribicularis oris are tenderized, breaking peptide bonds between amino acids and dissolving sinewy connections. Her lovely face breaks down. The fervent hands of the multitudes, with fingertips pressing into a slurry of scrap and cartilage, caress their way straight through the processes of autolysis, putrefaction, decay, and diagenesis until they are left, finally, pawing at a beautifully polished bone.

-

Notes:

The image is adapted from a shot of Clown Skull by Vik Muniz, 1989.

Any resemblance to loved ones, living or institutional, is purely coincidental.

It seemed very odd, my bulb not working, because honestly I liked this light. It’d been very reliable, illuminating the darkness for me hundreds of times… hundreds of thousands of times probably! Well, for as long as I can remember, let’s just put it that way. Since I was a kid… there was me, the darkness, and my light bulb. Simple as that. I’d be hanging around in some darkened, dim, dingy, drab, dull place, thinking about nothing or some synonym of nothing… and ZAP! the light bulb would go on, everything becoming perfectly and pleasantly clear. Good times… really good in retrospect. No more though.

I’m still here obviously, and so is the darkness. But the bulb? It just hangs there, dead and stubborn as all hell. 

I know what you’re going to ask and the answer is yes. I shook it… not even a hint of that musical “tinkerbell humping an ice chip” sound. The filament is fine. And yes, I checked the screw thread and the foot contact. I looked it over, wasn’t much else to do… I had to squint, obviously, but I looked, believe me. There was nothing wrong with that bulb, except for the whole “not working at all” thing.

Truth be told until today I had basically given up. I’d accepted that my light bulb wasn’t coming back. I’d sunk into reminiscences… all the good times we’d had… all the times we’d laughingly beat back the darkness, feeling clever and accomplished. I’d begun trying to conjure the bulb’s warm light in my mind. I ran down a list of all the things that made my bulb such a very great bulb. I did every pointless weepy god-damned thing a person does when faced with a feeling of inexplicable loss, and the bulb, like all dead things, didn’t notice or care. If it had had a gastrointestinal track (and wasn’t under vacuum) it might have farted a little.

Today though… today I looked at the bulb again.

I promised myself it’d be the last time, the casket viewing, because as much as I missed my light bulb I didn’t want to be one of those nuts who keeps a corpse in the house, all dressed up in an easy chair, with lipstick and a hat on, pretending the awful stink is potpourri. I had to let the thing go and accept my new seat in the shadows. So I approached the bulb (with a decorum befitting a one-person wake for an inanimate object)... picked it up gingerly, lovingly… I rolled it gently over my palm… and I squinted at it as hard as I could there in the dark. Which is of course when I noticed…

My light bulb was a HUGE dick.

Now don’t get all “uh-oh! I didn’t sign on for this!” I don’t mean that literally. I’m not trying to cleverly explain to you that I was standing there in the dark “gingerly and lovingly” rolling a huge penis over the palm of my hand. What I mean is that, standing there, squinting, I realized my light bulb was a HUGE dick… as in GIANT asshole… as in a schmuck, a creep, a real honest to goodness glass bastard.

Though it admittedly took me far too long, today, I finally noticed the not so subtle cues my light bulb had been offering me all along. Go ahead, take a look at the photo above and see for yourself. Can you believe the balls on that bulb?! Imagine me there in the dark, all sniveling… “oh light bulb, please don’t die, what good times we’ve had!  I can’t go on without you!” and the damned thing just sitting there, laughing at me the whole time… un-fucking-believable. 

Well I’ll tell you what, even without this prick light bulb I managed a little epiphany. It’s not exactly brilliant and shining, it hasn’t left me feeling “clever and accomplished,” but seeing as how it could very possibly be my last, squinting and in the dark as I am, I feel compelled to write it down-

Q: How many light bulbs does it take to screw a person?

A: Just one.