List of 50 (1 of 50)

by Blake Butler

1.  'Good morning' is my least favorite thing to hear in the morning.
2.  I feel dumber now than when writing list item 1.
3.  I feel dumber now than when writing list item 2.
4.  I feel dumber now than ever.
5.  I am told 'Good morning' at least 3 mornings per week.
6.  Even when my mother says 'Good morning' I rarely answer.
7.  I need a good kick in the balls.
8.  Not the balls.  That'd be mostly only pain.  Redirect kick to back of head.
9.  I need a good kick in the head.
10.  I feel dumber now than ever.
11.  Nothing quite like the feeling of tapping the lever on the tub spigot that lets the water remains from the shower splurt.
12.  Nothing quite as evil as the initial liquid dribble from an unshaken mustard bottle.
13.  I have a small unhealing bruise in the center of my chest.
14.  I have logged hundreds of thousands of crunches.  I've never seen my abs.
15.  Grocery magazines talk big talk over the rows of candy that force me each time to buy.
16.  Photo of Oprah collapsed on the cover of Weekly World News suffused my heart with glimmer.
17.  Photo of Angelina Jolie on the cover of Rolling Stone suffused my heart with something else.
18.  She.  Another she.
19.  She who sober retains 18% of who she is when she is drunk.
20.  She with eyes.
21.  I am hit on much more frequently by black men than black women.
22.  She lifted.
23.  Accepting deafness a thousand times over before accepting blindness.  Even maybe praying for deafness.
24.  Waking up every morning to such noise.
25.  Such noise.  God's noise.  God telling me to get up.  God pouring rain hardest when it's time to walk from home to car; car to home, etc.  God wanting me to remember every other minute that I am another dumb item.
26.  I am the bitchmaster of tiny things.
27.  The afternoons all seem to blur.
28.  More doting, evening licked, want wanted, no telephones.
29.  That world without telephones the world I've always wanted.
30.  Motherfucking world of folks.
31.  12:31 PM sitting in an ill-angled chair writing the 31st list item and tugging short hairs from the front of my scalp.
32.  Motherfucking world of never enough cashews.
33.  Motherfucking please.
34.  12:33 PM sitting in an ill-angled chair with almonds in my teeth.
35.  Feeling slightly smarter during list item 35.
36.  Small crop of cysts around my left eye.
37.  Innumerable inoperable cancerous cysts found on my father's brother's brain.
38.  My father awkwardly prefacing family dinner with benediction; his voice cracked for the first time in many years.
39.  The first step of mummification:  The most perfect practice is to extract as much of the brain as possible with an iron hook, and what the hook cannot reach is mixed with drugs.
40.  So many pounds of brownies ruined by marijuana.
41.  12:43 PM:  I've burned ten minutes into the future.
42.  I could accept hearing 'Good morning' at this hour.
43.  At no hour do I prefer 'Have a blessed day,' though if my day somehow were blessed, it would most likely be a better one.
44.  Trying to imagine my father telling me to 'Have a blessed day.'
45.  My dad who once, after watching the evening news, asked my mother what happened to God.
46.  Who said he sometimes imagines swimming to the bottom of our backyard swimming pool and staying there.
47.  Whose other brother has been confined to a wheelchair with acute Parkinson's.
48.  Who I can mostly ever only think to buy peanuts or cigars for at Christmas.
49.  Who the other day asked me to help him hang a kangaroo in my parents' front yard for Halloween, by 'kangaroo' somehow meaning 'skeleton.'
50.  Who, knowing my sour bent, always makes a wacky face instead of trying to say 'Good morning.'