War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044) by Nath Jones Read Free Book Online

mother in a free rocking chair I found on the street in
Philadelphia, and my sister in the desk chair—giving thanks. There
wouldn’t have been room on the table anyway. I’ll get them out next
year maybe. Or take them to wherever I’m going.
    I also put a lot of time into
decorating my apartment. I decided to put up some pictures of
people who make me happy. So I’ve got some pictures on the walls.
There is an area to sit down and talk. There is an area to watch
television. And I bought a used electric piano where I play hymns
and folk songs when I get so bored with the silence. I guess I
forgot to mention that there is a shelf with some piano music on it
when I was telling about the shelves before.
    If there’s no shelf on which to work,
I’ll get up and make tea. Most days I watch at least one movie.
Depending on the movie I end up thinking about someone I know,
someone the movie reminds me of or who I think might like that same
movie. Sometimes I go so far as to mention it the next time I see
that person or if they live really far away I just send them an
email about it. If it’s not nighttime (which is when I watch
movies) I read something, maybe from a magazine or a biography or a
book about finance or perennials to put in the garden or something
a friend recommended months ago. I rarely finish reading
anything.
    I don’t always finish dealing with my
shelves, either. There is a shelf above my coatrack that I have
decided to ignore for the time being. There are two boxes on that
shelf. They hold paperwork that extends back into all my identities
and addresses and lives and roles and I just can’t rectify those
boxes right now—so I leave that shelf alone.

67 — Sperm Donor
    Dear Fake Advice Columnist,
    My wife recently had a baby. Or she is
thinking about having a baby. Or she is thinking about getting me
to marry her so she can have a baby. Or she is thinking about
fucking me once after we stumble home from the bar drunk so she can
have a baby. Or something. I can’t really figure it out. Is there
any way that I can tell if I want to have a baby with
her?
    Dear Sperm
Donor,
    Whoever this woman is, she is crazy.
She obviously wants nothing substantial with you, and you don’t
deserve to be treated like that, so dismissively. It’s demeaning.
Hard to say what any of us wants, so I’m not sure if you’ll ever
figure out whether you want to have a baby with her. But you should
probably fuck her, and figure it out later.

22 — AT-4
    Have you ever picked up an AT-4? That is a serious weapon. You
have to be pretty pissed off to come anywhere near that thing. But
I did. It intrigued me. I was an E-2. An army private going through
the motions. I was being trained. They call it soldierized. I had
signed a contract. Whatever the justification, on a quiet morning
out under the smudged skies over the Ozarks, I picked up that AT-4.
And I shot tracer rounds right into that bastard
horizon.
    It was nothing to consent to this act.
Much less a commitment than volunteering to kill and be killed. I
remember picking up the weapon and almost laughing at it. The AT-4
is nothing. It's basically a piece of PVC pipe, plastic. Made to be
light, easy to carry. The thing almost seems silly. If you drop it
on the ground it makes this donk sound.
    But then when you shoot it, there’s
that enormous back-blast.
    What submissive hell do we ask of
others? In the living room, where children grow and where we daily
assault our loved ones, in the workplace where we exert our
authority as a matter of course, on the battlefield where we are so
excited to get to kill and be killed, what are the motions we're
asked to go through?
    If Mom or Dad yelled at each other
it's a pattern. Easy to pick up as an AT-4. Why are patterns of
anger so hard to put down?
    What if no one is asking you to shoot?
What if no one needs you to be as pissed off as you are? To keep
you identified with such rage. If it didn't define you, would you
still choose