Al Roker and the Lexicon of Tomorrow

Although by no means do I consider myself interested in nor acquainted with the culinary arts, my eye happened to stumble upon a copy of Al Roker’s The Big Bad Book of Barbecue while browsing the public library. It was not Mr. Roker’s venture down the avenue of literature that provoked my inquiry, but rather the crudely-contrived title of The Big Bad Book of Barbecue that was of particular interest to me. The context of the word Bad used in the book title represents a growing trend in the modern English lexicon concerning how certain adjectives are used in proportion to their intended definitions. I am sure that Mr. Roker, a popular TV meteorologist turned food connoisseur, does not intend for his readers to believe that his book is terrible or bad in any sense, but rather appeals to this aforementioned trend in order to satisfy the alliteration contained within its title and to perpetuate the reckless and disobedient stereotype associated with the demographic of individuals who eat grilled food.

There are those of us who continue to use the word bad for its intended definition, which denotes something to be of poor quality, inferior, or defective. Then, there are those such as Mr. Roker, who would prefer to use the word in reverse proportion to its intended meaning. Such negligent use of adjectives is part of what contributes to the downfall of the English language. The ocean of language is truly shaped by those individuals who use it, and thus stands to be desecrated or even destroyed at the hands of whoever poisons its precious waters with their illogical nonsense.

The existence of a word which represents both an idea and its own antithesis is a fundamentally illogical notion. The word bad has come to represent in colloquial dialogue, the polar opposite of its dictionary definition (as observed in the title of the aforementioned book, and in the common idioms badass, and bad to the bone), and is thus a contradiction of terms.  Consider if I were to use the word hot in order to refer to a boiling pot of stew. Only a fool would assume that by using the word hot, I actually meant cold and then proceed to eat a large spoonful of said stew, scalding his palette profusely. A differentiation between the words hot and cold is necessary in language simply because both words represent two respective ideas. The use of the word bad, thus representing the antonym ideas of both inferior and desirable is an illogical and poisonous notion in any language.

Therefore, just as Aristotle would scarcely be remembered today if he had published The Big Bad Book of Metaphysics, I would encourage Al Roker to consider naming his next incursion into the literary arts in more accurate proportion to the content found therein. 

The Denizens of Gethsemane

1.

Thousands of years ago, in the northern regions of present-day Palestine, there was a town called Galilee. In a small, mud brick house on the outskirts of Galilee lived two humans named Mary and Joseph. They were engaged to be married and were fervent religious adherents. Mary and Joseph had few friends, namely their neighbours Elizabeth and Zachariah, with whom they often talked and drank wine. According to some obsolete and archaic tradition, Mary and Joseph, had never fucked each other because their nuptial bonds had yet to be tied. Of course, innocent Virgin Mary didn’t mind her seemingly boring celibate existence, as much of her teenage years had been spent singing with birds and baking pies. However, Joseph lived in perpetual agony. Joseph would lie awake many nights of the week on his tick-infested straw mattress trying not to think of how much longer he needed to wait to fuck her. He was consumed by pulsating sentiments of bestial lust whenever he gazed upon her tits or her ass, knowing that it was only a little while longer before they were his.  There came a day when Joseph reached a breaking point. He told himself when he saw her ass on a really good angle when she genuflected at the temple one morning:

“I’m going to fuck Mary today!”

Joseph knew of an old, homeless cynic who lived on the shores of the River Jordan. He disregarded wealth and status and fulfilled his dietary obligation by feeding upon locusts and honeycombs. He usually wore a cloth of bearskin and from time to time, locals knew him to baptize unsuspecting people in the River Jordan. The whispers that Joseph heard around the marketplaces in Galilee led him to believe that this man  could help him bust his nut into Mary. He came upon him one day bathing nude in the River Jordan.

The cynic didn’t appear to be looking at anything in particular but seemed to be captivated by an object that may have been right in front of him. The man grabbed at the air before his face- Joseph knew that he was drunk. Joseph watched him bath naked in the river and yell obscenities at passersby. Locals named him John the Baptist.

John waded to the shore and approached Joseph after a few minutes and knew immediately what it was Joseph sought from him. He retrieved a small burlap sack of psilocybin mushrooms and gave them onto Joseph. John said to him,

“Feed these unto thine beloved and she will succumb to a hypnotic fervour which shall submit her to your every suggestion.”

Later that evening, during the last supper of their celibate lives, Joseph put the fungi into Mary’s meal. To his surprise, she consumed the whole bag of mushrooms without noticing them. She began to betray her submission to the effects of the tryptamines about half an hour later and he began loosening his rags. Through the onset of her trip, Mary’s eyes were trained on her fiancé, with an odd, drug-induced perplexity, empty of all intent.

“Who are you?”

Joseph panicked. Standing nude and erect before her, he rummaged through his psyche trying to satisfy his wife’s peculiar question.

“My name is umm, Gabriel! Do not be afraid, Mary; I intend to do you no harm.”

“Are you really Gabriel? Your wings are awfully small!”

“My wings?”

He remembered that she was most likely hallucinating.

“Yes, I am an angel of God, my name is Gabriel. God sent me here to, uh, examine you.”

                He started undressing her rags. For the past 25 years of his miserable virgin life, Joseph had been waiting for this very moment. Mary seemed so much more sexually enthralling than any of the times he had seen her clothed. They fucked furiously for hours on Joseph’s straw mattress, frightening away all the household pests in doing so. It was moist passion. After he had ejaculated into Mary several times, he contemplated the possibility that he may have inadvertently impregnated her.

“Mary, The Lord Yahweh has instructed me to dowse you with his holy sperm as part of his heavenly insemination program. You may bear the son of God in about 9 months. This is non-negotiable.”

“Oh yes Gabriel! Thank the lord for he is good, for his lovingkindness is everlasting. Let the redeemed of the lord say so, whom he has redeemed from the hand of the adversary!”

“What the fuck are you talking about Mary?

“Did I pass the examination Gabriel?”

“What? Oh yeah, you pass.”

Joseph’s intuition had been correct. Mary eventually came down from the mushroom trip and after about 5 months, her expanding womb began to betray signs of pregnancy. He was frightened at what the gossipy Pharisees at the marketplace should whisper once it had been made general knowledge of his wife’s pre-marital child-bearing. They hid in shame. The rapist made the necessary arrangements for the two of them to flee to the nearby city of Bethlehem once the child was to be born.

2.

When the time had come for Mary to give birth to her rape-conceived bastard child, the couple gathered together what meagre possessions they had and fled their mud house in Galilee on a donkey to Bethlehem. In a bizarre twist of circumstance, Mary’s neighbour Elizabeth had been pregnant at about the same time, and being at the whim of various unpredictable hormone fluctuations, was unable to keep secret the word about Mary’s fertilization, which spread faster than the fire that consumed non-believers. Elizabeth later gave birth to a boy she named John.

It was about the time at which Mary and Joseph reached their destination that word of mouth concerning their bastard baby ascended up to the throne of one Herod the Great, King of Judea. King Herod the Great was a psychopathic, megalomaniacal pedophile and a false king; known by his people as an insane puppet ruler ripe with political corruption. Evidently, he was not warmly taken by the news about the couple whose child had been conceived out of wedlock, so he ordered three of his opium-inebriated assassins to travel to Bethlehem and apprehend the bastard child so that he could fulfill his depraved desires upon him. However, once the three assassins had come down off the opium and had run out of wine, they found themselves lost hopelessly in the desert, having been chasing after stars for two weeks.

Mary and Joseph had come to Bethlehem in the midst of its tourist season, which filled up all the local hotels, inns, hostels, and boarding houses with an unsavoury flavour of Thracians and Armenians. There was not one suitable place in the whole city for the couple to stay, so their son was birthed into a swine’s feeding trough. The baby was not well. Due to a combination of being born into a bacteria-ridden slop puddle, and possessing the extensive medical knowledge common to bronze-age desert serfs as his sole means of thwarting off illness, Jesus of Nazareth, as he would come to be known, developed a plethora of infectious diseases; among them, a prevalence of both syphilis and gonorrhoea. Furthermore, despite being born to Levantine parents, Jesus appeared mysteriously Caucasian. Once he had reached adulthood, Jesus became a carpenter by trade. He had very few friends and spent much of his time in his parent’s basement whittling cedar dildos.

One day, in an attempt for some privacy with Mary, Joseph demanded that his thirty-year-old son leave their home so that he could make his own living. Lonely and rejected, Jesus walked along the shoreline of the River Jordan when he heard an unknown voice calling out his name. He saw a man jumping around gaily in the water, yelling at passersby and making obscene gestures.

“You there! The long-haired, neck-bearded bastard!”

Curious, Jesus walked down to the tide and confronted the crazy old man. The man was covered in thick mud and bearskin and was snacking on a handful of honeycomb. He motioned for Jesus to wade out towards him. Before he was able to introduce himself, the man grabbed Jesus by his long hair and dunked his head beneath the murky water. When he let go, Jesus sprung back up, gasping heavily for air.

“Hahaha! You ought to thank me for baptizing you Jesus! I’ve been preaching to all these good people for years about the day you would finally emerge from your solitude and come see me!”

The man motioned with his hand to the bystanders watching along the shoreline.

“You should know, I was acquainted with your father Joseph. It was I that gave him the drugs which resulted in your conception.”

Jesus was perplexed. He looked deep into the crazy man’s eyes.

“Wait, aren’t you John the Baptist? Son of Elizabeth and Zachariah? How could you possibly have been around before I was born to have met my father?”

John the Baptist let out a deep, bellowing laugh. He took another bite of his honeycomb and rested his right arm around Jesus’ shoulder.

“Jesus, my friend, you are over-analyzing things! You mustn’t interpret what you hear so literally. This is all occurs on a biblical timeline after all-- shit doesn’t need to make sense!”

The both of them shared a hearty, friendly chuckle, and what John had left of his drug stash. Jesus and John made their way back to Jesus’ house, where they laid with one another.  John, who was already in possession of just about any venereal infection known to man, didn’t seem aversive to Jesus’ bloody ejaculations or his grotesquely deformed genitalia.

3.

“Jesus, do you want to go to an awesome party tonight? One of my mushroom dealers is marrying this girl in a town just a few miles over called Cana. From what he’s been telling me, there should be a ton of liquor and supple, young boys there.”

Jesus agreed to go to the wedding.

“You’ll have to meet these guys Jesus, they’re fucking crazy, man!”

“But do they uphold the scriptures?”

“Do they uphold the scriptures? Shit they do! You’ve never seen anybody as Jewish as these guys, but they’re crazy man! They do tons of drugs and fuck tons of girls too. There’s Peter, and Luke, and Bartholomew, and fuck man, I’d be hard-pressed to list them all, but you’ll meet them all at the wedding!.”

Excitedly, Jesus put his rags back on.

 His father then burst into the room, chasing him and John back outside.

“Don’t ever fucking come back here Jesus! You and your sick little boyfriend can go live elsewhere! I and your mother didn’t raise you to be a drug addict!”

Mary was weeping heavily and screaming incoherently at the two men and then to her husband. Joseph took her into his arms and she slammed the hut door behind them.

Jesus and John travelled the tens miles to nearby Cana; which they walked because they weren’t pussies like people living in the 21^st century. He met John’s eleven other friends at the wedding reception. They feasted on the lavish cuisine and wine that was offered to the guests until all of it was consumed. The other guests, who were all still sober and hungry, began to clamour for their removal if Jesus and his friends could not compensate for the wine that they stole. He gathered his twelve disciples in the restroom. John had been eating mushrooms during the whole ordeal and was now so disassociated from reality that he was barely able to maintain an upright composure. Matthew, James, and Judas Iscariot had all been quite inebriated from drinking cheap wine and happened to be vomiting on some of the other guests, fomenting a climactic insurrection. Jesus knew exactly what to do.

“My friends, there is no need for us to leave; I’ll have these vases filled with wine in seconds.”

One of the men among them, Thomas spoke thusly,

“I don’t believe you Jesus! You’re bullshiting us! I doubt you! How are you going to get the wine?

“Please, just turn around, all of you for like one minute!”

The men did as Jesus had commanded them. Iscariot collapsed drunk on the restroom floor. Jesus then proceeded to urinate into all three of the wine vases. When the apostles turned around to see that the vases had been filled up, they were much too drunk and high to have questioned that the bloody, gonorrhoea-infected piss could have been anything else but wine.

Jesus and his friends burst monumentally back into the reception hall, carrying the giant clay vases on their heads. The Canaanites, who had grown desperate to consume the smallest bit of alcohol, chugged  the swirling froth of disease and all became intoxicated from the ammonia. John introduced him to all his acquaintances at the party, who praised Jesus for his “water into wine” trick, as they called it.

4.

One of Jesus’ least repugnant disciples, a strapping young lad by the name of Peter Simon had acquainted himself with 2 young female parishioners named Martha and Mary (no relation whatsoever with Jesus’ mother) at the Cana reception, along with 2 of her friends. Having met them in such a hopelessly intoxicated state, managed to arrange for himself, Jesus, Matthew, and Luke to participate in an epic eightsome with the four young ladies (unbeknownst to  the apostles, one of the four, Lazarus,  was merely a very convincing transvestite). John, having been offered to go with them, had declined because he was really, really gay. Jesus was bisexual.

The women with whom they were about to lay lived in a small house in the neighbouring village of Bethany. Bethany was a small, desolate space with few landmarks and inhabitants. “This is perfect”. Said Jesus, ”There’s nobody around for miles. We can make as much ruckus as we want.”

Once they arrived at the home of Mary and Martha-- a small wooden hut at the summit of an olive valley, Mary and Lazarus opened fresh bottles of wine. Peter Simon produced a bag of cannabis he had purchased from a gang of Scythians days prior. A fantastic and bombastic time was had at the orgy by all. The writhing mass of bodies, glistening with perspiration fornicated for what seemed to them like days; each constituent thrashing limb appeared indistinguishable from one another in the fornicating flock of Christ.

Lazarus, who was the brother of Mary, had joined in the sexual escapades against the advice of Bethany’s medicine man, having warned him/her than any aggressive sexual activity could potentially aggravate his/her heart condition. Evidently, this was to be the case, as the misshapen cross-dresser collapsed lifeless upon the ground after a good hour of alcohol-fuelled fellatio. His/her sister was traumatized.

“Please Help Lazarus! He’s not breathing! Matthew, seriously, get that fucking thing out of my ass! My brother is not breathing!”

“Your brother?”

She began frantically pressing down on his chest. Lazarus did not wake. Jesus motioned Mary away and took hold of her brother.

“I believe I know what the problem is.”

He turned Lazarus onto his stomach.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing Jesus? What if you hurt him more than he already is?”

“Positive, Your brother isn’t the first person to choke on one of my cedar dildos!”

Jesus recoiled his fist and then shot it directly into the deviant’s spinal column, dislodging the giant 10-inch dildo that had obstructed his/her breathing. Lazarus coughed up some cum and some phlegm and thanked Jesus for raising him/her from the dead.

“There. Problem solved.”

5.

It was not until several weeks later, did the good news about Jesus’ resuscitation of the filthy freak Lazarus make its way back to the party guests in Cana. Due to the absence of mainstream media in the lonely bronze-age, exaggerations and hyperboles that had been contrived from the tale of Jesus travelling from party guest to party guest went unexamined. Some said that he was divine; others alleged that he healed lepers and the blind. Some said that he was even the son of Yahweh the most high! A modest cult following arose shortly thereafter, proudly upholding the divinity of the one they called Jesus of Nazareth (the plebeian class had little else to do with their lives back then). Idiots and inbred fools congregated like insects at the sermons and meetings of the cult, all eager to profess their own unfounded claims of the alleged miracles witnessed by the rape-conceived bastard of Nazareth. 

The Pharisees had reiterated countless times that Yahweh alone was God and it was blasphemy to propose that there could be any before him. In the eyes of the Sadducees and the Pharisees, and of a county preacher in particular named Caiaphas, this Jesus fellow was naught but a divergence of their duly-earned attention. Those of the spiritually enlightened demographic had always regarded Jesus Christ as the false idol he was. Like their hero Moses, who had smashed the golden calf on the summit of Mount Sinai in the harsh, yet enduring tales of the Old Testament, there was no question about what had to be done to rid the earth of such idols. In a petty attempt to wash their hands of the nomadic sodomite of Nazareth, the Pharisees had devised a plan with the compliance of the Roman Government to put an end to this heretic cult for good.

Judas Iscariot had not been on friendly terms with Jesus lately. He had contracted syphilis from him at some point during the past few weeks and was cross about not being invited to his orgy in Bethany. Caiaphas, who was known by his devote congregation as a disgruntled old celibate who hated life, bore a particular disdain for Jesus and saw Judas’ wavering loyalty to work very much in his favour. Judas was offered 30 pieces of silver, an offer he could not possibly refuse considering his immense poverty, to turn his former associate over into the hands of the Roman Government. Iscariot later spent the money on some crack, got high and hung himself on a tree out in the desert because he was smoking extremely potent crack and it gave him paranoia. Caiaphas, having finally captured Jesus, took him before the office of the mighty Pontius Pilate, governor of something.

“Sir, I have brought before you a man who refuses to pay taxes unto Caesar and claims he is King of the Jews!”

Unfortunately for Jesus, Caiaphas and his centurion bodyguard had arrested him in the midst of the autophagous orgy which  he orchestrated with his disciples. He cut pieces of his flesh off with and knife and instructed his followers to eat it. They drank his blood and bowed before his knees, surrendering their wills to him. It was a dirty and disgusting affair that had drained Jesus of enough blood to have impaired his judgement. He would have died had Caiaphas not stopped the bleeding in time.

“Are you King of the Jews as this man claims?”

Jesus fumbled around. He did not answer him.

“I will ask you a final time, are you the King of the Jews? Son of David the most high?”

“It is as they claim.”

Pilate was aghast. There was not a man in all of Bethlehem who would dare not cower in sheer inferiority before the presence of Pontius Pilate. He had men put to death over nothing.

“You Blasphemer! You Heretic! You and all your disgusting friends shall be subject to the most excruciating punishments conceivable! Caiaphas, take this scoundrel away and nail him to a piece of wood for misleading the religious inclinations of my people—such is the punishment for false profits. I only pray that misled fools will forget your name in a thousand years from now, though I’m sure that this Christianity you’ve inspired, being no more than a passing fad, shall be lost to the history books forever. Those plebeians you’ve inspired with your despicable nonsense and unsanitary rituals will die and leave no word or influence upon future generations, so I pray. ”

Jesus, still very much intoxicated from the blood loss, did not fully understand what the governor was saying, and when he was taken away by a guard of Roman centurions and crucified, he was in no state of mind to resist their punishment and fight back.

When Jesus was taken away, Pilate turned to his historian.

“When all this is said and done, make the history books seems as though I was a nice guy in the midst of this whole affair. Write that I tried to give that Jesus character a chance.”

6.

After Jesus’ death upon the cross, Pontius Pilate ensured that all of Jesus’ apostles suffered a similar fate that he did. John was beheaded and two thousand years later, the portrait of his severed head was used as the cover art of Cryptopsy’s None So Vile album (a landmark release in the genre of death metal that is mandatory listening to all who have not had the fortune of doing so already). Peter, also having been crucified, requested that his cross be hung upside down because Peter was a fucking hipster and had decreed that upright crosses were far too mainstream.

Three days after Jesus was buried in a tomb, a necrophiliac by the name of Barabbas dug up his half-decomposed corpse and had his way with it. The Christians however, did not desist in their blind worship of the fornicating carpenter, and proposed that the disappearance of his corpse was proof that their master has raised from the dead and ascended into heaven. Much to the plight of Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate, the cult of Christianity did not dissolve, in fact after Christ’s execution; the following grew stronger thanks to the glorious Justinian I. Every Springtime to this very day, they still celebrate the ascension of Jesus into heaven and look forward with meek anticipation to the day when he will return once again to forgive their trespasses and fuck them all in the ass.

Amen.

Incursions

Napoleon Bonaparte: So George I hear your country needs my assistance with your military campaigns?

George W. Bush: Yes Napoleon, come in and sit down. I’ve just had the oval office reupholstered with the taxpayer’s money. They think it’s gone to fund our drinking water purification initiative, but nobody will be the wiser. In my hands I carry the most flawless battle strategies ever devised by man. I plan to carry them out on our new campaigns in the middle-east.

Napoleon: Ah, so you’re finally going to quell those miscreants in Israel are you?

George Bush: Better yet—we’re going to invade Iraq!

Napoleon: Wait, what? That shithole? Why?

George Bush: Hey, hear me out alright? I was up until 3 in the morning configuring the fine-tuned aspects of this most genius plan of mine.

Napoleon: Okay George, what are you doing in Iraq?

George Bush: Well first, we’re going to run bombing raids over Baghdad in order to establish a good resistance to our occupation. You know; we don’t want this to be too easy now.

Napoleon: Okay...then what?

George Bush: Then we siphon their oil supply and subvert all the profits back to the United States!

Napoleon: That sounds incredibly malicious and unethical George, even for a war. I’m not sure I want any part in this.

George Bush: Wait! It gets even better. While we loot their natural resources, we’ll train a few of the local police under the guise that we’re there to promote peace and stability.

Napoleon: George, I really don’t see why any of this is necessa...

George Bush: Hold on, I’m not done yet. Next, we’ll blow up some of our own troops—you know, to make sure our guns work properly. Then we turn them onto the civilian populace. I’m talking complete devastation here Napoleon; photographs upon photographs of US soldiers posing with their bullet-ridden corpses, mosques and coffee house gutted and burned to the ground. We’ll patrol the streets everyday to instil fear into the hearts of the Iraqi people! Ha-ha! That will show them the almighty power of the United States of America!

Napoleon: Wait, you’re going to patrol your armies down the streets of an enemy country? That doesn’t sound wise. Didn’t you guys learn your lesson in Vietnam that that’s no way to fight a war? Even if they lack the manpower to fight you back, your unwelcome presence there could rouse suicide bombers and insurgencies.

George Bush: We’ll keep our fingers crossed and hope that doesn’t happen. Anyways, I’ve considered that this Incursion is going to make me extremely unpopular with my electorates back home, so here’s what I’m going to do: I’ll hire one of my black henchman to run for office under the false premise that he will end the war, but once he gets elected, I’ll be free to keep the war going for another four years after both my terms are up.

Napoleon: I’m sorry George, but this plan of yours is convoluted and fucking nonsensical. I will have no part in it. How long do you expect to keep this facade going on for?

George Bush: I don’t know, I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. Maybe ten or fifteen years—twenty if the American people are stupid enough to elect my black henchman for another term thereafter.

Napoleon: Goddamn! I conquered Egypt in fucking 5 days! I defeated the entire Prussian army and became Emperor of France and you can’t defeat some lowly peasants armed with nailbombs?! Fuck, people in the twenty-first century are fucking stupid as hell. I’m going back to being dead now. Bye.

A Leaden Stride on The Chocolate Expressway

Meursault flipped the channels up and down, giving way to an intoxicating mess of the occasional infomercial drowned out in a sea of blaring static. Not much of interest was on the air at 3:30 am, nor had there been for the past three hours or so. However, numerous weight loss ads and an Oreck Vacuum cleaner commercial ago, something caught Meursault’s eye. It was a timeshare ad, though unlike many of such advertisements Meursault and his jolly friend Proudhon saw frequently while wasting their early morning hours gazing blankly at the television. This particular commercial was perhaps a bit unlike the rest of the boring and superficial infomercials, as it demanded Meursault’s due consideration, and caused him to raise an eye from his drunken, 3am disgrace. It advertised a time-share opportunity in a newly developed housing bank in west Israel. Housing had been overabundant for undisclosed reasons in Israel’s West Bank area and was currently selling for extremely low, low prices-- as was indicated by the advertisement. Even in his miserable, drunken state, Meursault knew he would have been a fool to pass up this one-time opportunity, also as indicated in the advertisement, and that if he escape America to start new life in Israel with Proudhon, he could surely escape his many creditors, as finally indicated by the advertisement. Although Meursault was certain Proudhon would be as interested about the Stolen piece of Palestinian land as he was, he decided not to awaken the piss-drunk Proudhon at that hour, for he had a rally to go to the next morning and needed his sleep. Throughout the past several months, Proudhon had been associating himself with a series of extreme-left syndicalist organisations, or “dumbass-clubs” as Meursault knew them. He claims to have been the one to set fire to the police car during the Toronto, 2010 G20 demonstrations. Either there was big money to be made in social destitute, or Meursault had invested in another pyramid scheme, for despite being recently jobless and credit less, he still managed to provide an income steady enough to keep him and Proudhon alive. And no, they weren’t gay....

            They always wondered why it was I can endure a job so horrible and tedious, put in long and hard hours, yet remain completely unstressed or unphased by the work load. “You seem so happy, so laid-back, what’s your secret?” I’ll let you in on my little secret here. Every morning before work, I crush up two extra strength Demerol tablets and mix them into my coffee. They’re not quite enough to get me totally incapacitated, but more than enough to make all those work-time Asteroid games that much more amazing. The caffeine ensures I stay focused as well as happy and the pills maintain an observable crescendo effect throughout the day. Feel free to use this one for yourself. I like to share my saviness.

            Proudhon woke Meursault with a phone call at noon the next day from prison. Earlier that day, he had among others, been taken into custody by Lowell Riot Police after the demonstration he had attended went violent and he kicked a police dog in the jaw. The protest, which had been against the perceived injustices encountered by the city’s workers union, would make the third page of the Boston Globe, with a picture taken of Proudhon dawning his oversized black and red anarcho sweater shamefully being led into a police truck beneath a title “From Constructive Dissent to Social Disgrace”. Meursault felt this incident with such frustration, for the money he would have used in order to plan a lavish migration to Israel was now being put forth to bail his idiotic friend out of prison, and Proudhon, who was understandably upset by the whole state of affairs, had his reputation tarnished, his character besmirched. The dog Proudhon kicked had to be put down. Evidently, the cost for the surgery to fix it’s jaw fracture was more than enough the Lowell Police Department were willing to dip into their donut fund.

            Proudhon starred shamefully up at Meursault from his cell, cuffed and beaten. The area in which Proudhon was being held was relatively small, the walls were slathered with graffiti and the air smelled of almonds and paint-thinner. There were a few other inmates in there with him, despite the cramped space. The pigs had tased and beaten him profusely following his arrest. Meursault handed over two thousand dollars bail to the officers and they let his friend free.

“Your anarchy sweater smells like shit dude, you need to take a shower when we get home.”

“It’s probably you, you idiot, sitting around drunk all day without a job or any friends!”

“Shut up! You realize I just spend the last two thousand dollars bailing your ass out of jail, you could express a bit of humility.”

            When I was younger, after my parents had gone, I moved in with my grandmother in her small, one bedroom-apartment on the industrial outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts. Needless to say, there wasn’t too much to do there, but I managed to find ways to keep myself busy. So far from urbanization, there was no shortage of open fields and industrial sectors which provided for long walks and childhood exploration. One thing she told me that I’m likely never to forget was to always take the time and pick up pennies I saw lying on the road. They were good luck apparently? Nothing more than superstition, I’ll never know why to this day, I still do this, but I do.

            Meursault sat down, still being somewhat drunk from the morning and eyed several travel brochures scattered on his desk. Israel almost beckoned him, teasing him perhaps. He knew that between his enormous debt and Proudhon’s now defeated honour, there existed only the one solution. Proudhon strolled into the room; still wet from his shower that drips of water dotted his trail across the carpet. He eyed the travel brochures Meursault had ordered on the desk.

“You can’t actually be considering that idiotic commercial you saw? I think that all this whiskey is starting to drown your brain neurons.”

            Meursault leaned further back in his chair and lit up a cigarette.

“What do you have keeping you in America? You have nothing for you in this country. You cannot deny that it is far cheaper, safer, and smells less putrid in any other country in the world. Do you not want a change of scenery?”

            Just then, an overwhelming feeling of shame overcame Proudhon as he gazed around their ravaged, nicotine-stained apartment. The amount of 40 oz. bottles littering the ground outnumbered the shades of colour in that room. A few cigarette ashes floated around in an pool of water that had dripped of his towel atop an empty, crumpled Ruffles bag on the floor. 7 years: It’s how long it had been since Proudhon was able to hold down a real job.  He looked up at the cracked and stained ceiling. Proudhon contemplated what had just happened, the roar of the riot, the barking dogs, the police and the rubber bullets they shot at his abdomen. He thought about how he was broke and unemployed and he thought about how his mother would react when she discovered her son was a politically defiant dog-beater.  Him and Meursault had struck the under most depths of social hierarchy, and besides basic cable and a barely usable dial-up internet connection, they had few possessions in America for which they would stay. Meursault was almost done his smoke; he flicked it in Proudhon’s direction. The two of them booked a travel agent that night.

            As he regularly felt during points in his life that demanded any sort of radical change, Proudhon felt slightly unnerved. Meursault was sure to slip a pill of something in his coffee the morning of the meeting to calm him down. As plainly as the presumably genuine college degree that hung in her lobby indicated, they were in the hands of professionals.  The travel agent was relatively tall, slender, plain looking women in her mid-40s, whom neither of the two could have possibly said anything more about. Her office was of a dull shade of grey, with drab decor and a few maps and flags pinned up about the room. Meursault did much of the talking during the meeting while his counterpart starred at his hands and hallucinated for the most part. You see, Meursault hadn’t planned to get the best deal he could, nor a mediocre, or even satisfactory one, he just desperately needed one: a flight for two to the holy land based on whatever money he could fiend off his friends. The travel agent starred confused for a few moments when he pulled out a few crumpled twenty dollar bills from his back pocket and slid them onto her desk.

Just get me the hell out of here, I don’t fucking care how.

She picked up the phone after a few moments, maybe to call security, perhaps the lunatic asylum; instead she did what some might consider a terrible gesture of kindness, and others, given the circumstances in which it happened, a terrible mistake. Over the next few minutes she made a series of phone calls; airplane companies, travel agencies, immigration agencies, lawyers, pilots, sailors, mercenaries and elite human traffickers, everyone she knew could possibly fly two people to Israel for $42.16. Others might have found it more bizarre, is the fact she actually came up with someone. They were a group of four people who claimed to be members of the militant-Christian missionary force, one of the ever growing number of sects of post-modernist Christianity. For some unapparent reason, Protestant and Anglican churches denied all association with their particular practise of Christianity and refused to acknowledge it canon to the Christian faith, but they were planning to show off to the local bishops, with whom they shared an ongoing rivalry, by organising what they claimed would be the brutalist, most hardcore religious pilgrimage of all history. They demanded a sign-up fee of $50 which would fly them in the hull of a cargo plane into undisclosed location in East Africa, and then another 15$ for a train-ride that would take them through Africa, through Egypt to Jordan, where Meursault and his friend would depart into Israel and start their new life. The whole trip, which would never have been considered by any sane individual, would take about 2 weeks. The Travel agent sighed.  Meursault, excitedly, looked over to Proudhon, who was busy examining the thread count in the office pillows.

            Sometimes I think that this whole ‘smoking is bad for you’ card has been played to death already. Tobacco has been smoked by humans for hundreds of years; it can’t possibly be as bad as the media makes it out to be. I know a good handful of people who have been smoking for their entire lives, yet appeal totally unscathed from it. I mean, look at a country like Japan. Statistically, 45 percent of the population in Japan smokes, yet they have the highest life expectancy of any country in the world, figure that.

Meursault and Proudhon rendezvoused with the four missionaries early the next morning in a foggy airfield whose visibility no further than one could spit up. Their four figures stood like ghosts in the fog. As they came closer, they could make out they consisted two men and two women. The first one from the left, women named Анастасия-Гроздана was tall, well fit, with long reddish-brown hair and a leather jacket. A gold, oversized crucifix hung awkwardly around her neck and she spoke with a thick, barely decipherable accent. Next to her were two taller men, Michael and Randal, both wearing leather jackets with the church’s logo on them. One had his hands bandaged up; blood seeped through them and stained his sleeves. Michael, the other one, who was the church’s equivalent to a priest, had hands and arms enveloped in tattoos, untasteful ones at that, and his hair was dyed bright blue. The fourth was a small asian girl, certainly no older than 15, who wore large, horn-rimmed glasses and spoke not a word of discernable English. She carried around with her a giant plush anteater about half her size. Michael called out to Meursault through the fog.

“We won’t be able to take off until this fog clears up mate, but you might as well make yourself comfortable, we’ll be up in the air for a while.”

The Six introduced each other and made their way to the aircraft.

            After my grandmother died, I was left all her money and apartment as her sole heir, the latter in which I still reside. I invested all her money in a business venture in “Pharmaceuticals”, which has to this day been met with moderate success. I can’t afford to keep it going for too much longer, so I’m planning one final, penultimate acquisition. He’s going to give 1 million dollars in cash for it. Neither her, nor I will ever have to work another dreaded day of our lives. The only trouble is getting it there...

            Randal and Proudhon sat across from each other during the flight. As one would assume, a 10 hour commute in the hull of an overstuffed cargo plane barely holds up to luxury. And to make things worse, there was an intoxicating aroma of roses coming from somewhere in plane, the cargo perhaps. He looked up at Randal.

            “How did you hurt your hands bro?”

            Randal starred back and without saying anything, began to unwrap the bandages from his hands, grinning slightly in resignation the entire while. Most of the bandages were completely soaked in blood. They began to pile up on the ground, as Randal unwrapped layer after layer of bloody gauze from his hands. As he got down to the final layer of gauze, Proudhon almost choked in horror at what he saw. The smell of roses was intolerable at this point, as it was clear that it came from Randal’s wound. Анастасия-Гроздана leaned over to the two.

            “He has stigmata. It’s a divinely inflicted mark of Christ’s chosen few; a hole in each hand and one in each foot.”

Randal spoke thusly:

“I woke up Easter morning three years ago and discovered these giants holes on my hands and feet. It doesn’t hurt, and you get used to the floral aroma after a little while. I’m going on this

Pilgrimage in hopes that my divine gift might help turn others to Christ.”

            The six arrived in a small village in Algeria after the most uncomfortable plane ride claimed the last ten hours of their lives. The land was mostly desert with a few distant trees and buildings breaking up the consistency of the horizon. Night had fallen and the air was clear and cool. The train station was a 2-mile walk from there. Meursault and the Russian woman led the way with a leaden stride, Proudhon just behind him.

            “You know, my grandfather used to live in Algiers.”

            “Your grandfather was also a sociopathic murderer as I recall.”

They made the rest of the walk in silence.

The train was a three-car rust bucket, large and imposing, it was something nobody would ever guess would go three inches, let alone take them across Africa. Meursault sat with Proudhon up in the front row, while the Asian girl sat with Анастасия-Гроздана and the two men in the car behind them. The sweet smell of roses would have made a welcome alternative to the reek of urine and sweat on the train. It was overcrowded with the local flavour of peasants and merchants and freaks, thieves, and minstrels. People hung onto the outside of the train, off the windows and roof that reminded Proudhon of a mass of insects hurdling together. Meursault looked out the window, contemplating a good many things. He knew that his new life would be worth any amount of discomfort that anyone could endure. Landscapes whipped by them at an incredible speed. They made their way through miles of savannah, grassland, jungle, marsh, and urbanity. They watched antelope and lions graze off in the distance. The sun rose and set a good many times, but still the train kept going, deeper and deeper inland.

            Proudhon kept busy by reading several books he had brought with him, rarely making conversation with the other passengers. After about a four day train ride, without notice, they made an abrupt stop. It was very early in the morning and the passengers, most of which were still asleep were thrown forward. One would notice it become extremely hot and humid. The air was so heavy that it almost hurt to breathe. Though their destination was heavily obscured by the darkness of night, Meursault and Proudhon could see they had arrived at a train station and the area was largely urban. There was a large sign just in front of the train which he barely found legible.

Welcome to Uganda, Population: pending

            Proudhon looked in shock at Meursault who was just waking from his sleep. As a geographically-aware, pseudointellectual liberal, he knew that Uganda, which lay somewhere deep in heart of Africa, was located about two thousand miles of their charted cause. He began to hyperventilate and felt weak.

“Jesus Christ dude, we’re lost, I knew it! This was a bad idea! We’ll be stuck in this god-forgotten country for the rest our lives!”

Meursault slapped Proudhon out of his panic and the asian girl then reached over to slap him for taking the lord’s name in vain. Oddly enough, Meursault was barely in stress regarding their two thousand mile tangent. He just continued to stare out the window into the deep, black distance.

            It was then, the silence of the night was broken by a thunderous explosion, and the shockwave shock everyone on the train awake. A bright ball of fire lit up the train as two more explosions followed. Panicked, many of those hanging on the outside of the train jumped from the roof and ran. Four heavily-armed men were now visible in the night. They were all armed with large automatic rifles and wore brightly coloured clothing. The passengers in the train began to panic en mass and flee out windows, doors, and rusted holes in the floor. The gunmen were members of one of the twenty-seven warring factions of the local Zambafusamafusoo tribe who had been engaged in a blood-feud with the neighbouring Yamadrdussazo and Zorazofasmozaso villages. The civil war, which had lasted the past twenty or so years, had put a bit of a dent in Ugandan tourist circulation. Negotiations with the tribal leaders to reach peace had been abandoned due to the absolute futility of task, as the governments had decided it would make the most logical solution to leave them to their own devices. Neither of the four hundred warring villages took too kindly to outsiders, and the missionaries knew if the soldiers captured the train hostage, their lives were not likely to be spared.

            Just then, Meursault noticed the faint shine of a coin on the floor beneath were one of the train passengers had been standing. He reached over to pick the penny up, and almost simultaneously, a rocket-propelled grenade struck the side of the train Meursault had been seated and threw shattered glass all over the remaining passengers. Meursault, who was unscratched, would not have been as lucky had he remained seated. Proudhon, also unhurt, was in extreme panic, breathing heavily and covered in dust and debris. The asian girl clutched the plush anteater in terror. The six would have escaped too if the exit wasn’t already crammed with panicking fleers. The last thing either of them remembered was a devastating shockwave that rattling the entire train loose, and then, as according to the trend in every unimaginative literary climax, they all blacked out.

            Proudhon came to beneath an intensely blinding, bright light. The room was otherwise empty, apart from a tall man in a dark suit standing over him. He identified himself as a detective of the Lowell police department. He offered Proudhon a cup of coffee with milk and a blanket, and then sat at the table beside him. He then began to ask Proudhon a few questions regarding his friend Meursault. Proudhon, who was still visibly shaken, was in no mood to be interrogated. He had a few cuts and scrapes on his face but was largely unhurt, but the trauma was crippling. The officer handed Proudhon some documents and photographs.

            Proudhon had no prior knowledge of Operation Chocolate Expressway until the officer told him. He told him how Meursault had not planned to go to Israel at all, that he had hired a fake travel agent and had his friends pose as missionaries to smuggle drugs to African drug cartels. Confused, Proudhon began to look through the documents he had been shown. There were pictures of Meursault and the missionaries stuffing their luggage full of pill bottles. One of the photographs showed the girl’s plush anteater which had been ripped apart, stuffed entirely with Demerol tablets. Another showed Randal’s hands, with several pill bottles inserted into his wounds. and another with Анастасия-Гроздана and Meursault both in an embrace. The officer told them they were engaged to be married. After they planned to sell the pills, they were going to live out their lives in luxury together. Proudhon could not conceive of what he saw. He refused to acknowledge that his best and only friend could have lied and betrayed him so profusely. The police had tracked the party down using the scent from Proudhon’s anarcho sweater he had left behind in their Boston apartment, which left a distinct pungent scent of American cigarettes which police dogs were able to track all the way to Africa. Luckily, they had arrived just in time to save them from the tribal warlords and intercept their drug stash.

            The phony travel agent and the missionaries were all apprehended and dealt with in the harsh Ugandan justice system, the details of which will be sparred for the sake of your stomach. Proudhon looked at one of the documents; it was an ID card that appeared to belong to the asian girl. The other documents revealed she was in fact one of the most-wanted drug smugglers in Southeast Asia. Proudhon slowly began to realize the absurdity of the whole situation, which he would have earlier, had Meursault not mixed borderline lethal doses of sedatives into all his food. What was I thinking? How could I have agreed to move to Israel? I’m not Jewish, I don’t speak Hebrew. Proudhon cupped his face in his hands and let the facts settle in. He then asked the officer what happened to his friend. The officer sighed. Meursault and his girlfriend apparently, had somehow escaped with a few pill bottles during the chaos of the whole ordeal, and were never seen by either of the characters again. He’s presumed to be living in luxury somewhere in the world. somewhere.

Isosceles

The evening’s final rays of sunshine penetrated into his study and became suspended into brilliant patterns of light; scintillating within the glass geometric models he kept on the table. On a clear day in the early evening, his room would dance with the lustre of the dusk filtered through these glass models and fill the otherwise melancholy space with a radiant display of the sublime. He seldom noticed these nuanced moments of beauty. He seldom noticed anything besides the triangles. With a sharp, almost mechanical precision, his hand steadily etched a perfect 45 degree radial arm of what was to be a right-angle triangle on another sheet of graphing paper.  He needed not a ruler, nor a T-square; as the ratios and proportions of the triangles he drew were an integral component of his decisive coordination; carefully projecting the models from his mind into the tangible greatness of reality. His hand guided the movements of the drafting pencil across the paper with the precision of a surgeon’s first laceration into a quadruple bypass. When the triangle was complete, he pondered it for a good few minutes. He stepped back and basked in the product of his labour. Isosceles knew he had created perfection. He adored that the sum of the squares of the opposite and adjacent angles equalled the square of the hypotenuse. He loved the sine ratios, the cosine ratios, the secant ratios, and every other self-evident aspect that this most sacred polygon was a manifestation of God himself into Isosceles’ beloved discipline of mathematics.

He mounted the triangle up above his drawing table to accompany the other thousands of triangles he had amassed throughout his lifetime.  The walls of his study were enveloped in triangles. He pinned up pictures of bridges with distinct triangular patterns in them, news articles mentioning triangles, etchings and diagrams of triangles, and countless other constituents of his shrine to three-sided polygons. His favourite types of triangles however, were right-angle triangles. Isosceles felt that the ratios and proportions of a perfect right-angle triangle were a deep affirmation of the logical consistency to life. He clung to the triangles like a rock against all the doubt and illogical nonsense he endured about his daily routine. Tomorrow would be the first day of classes in the fall semester. Isosceles dreaded having to emerge from the nurturing solitude of his triangles to face the spiteful gazes of other humans roaming about the university campus. His employment could have been worse, as he had so often contemplated, but the awkward relationships Isosceles shared with his fellow professors made his life at the university a rather disheartening experience.  Nobody understood Isosceles; not like his triangles did. Triangles were the dominion in which he was a god.

There came a knock upon his study door.

“Come in.”

Paige softly opened the door and stood in the entranceway of his room. She wore a grey blouse and a black skirt; her dark hair was tied up on the back of her head.

“Good evening professor, I was just making sure you had your lesson plan arranged for tomorrow.”

Isosceles peered over his shoulder to meet her gaze and motioned with his hand to the neatly stacked papers on his desk. They were soaked in sunlight. Paige sighed with a tone of apprehension and took another step into the room.

“I have been worrying about you professor. We all have been. It seems that lately you haven’t been spending any time with people. You’re too caught up in your work.”

Paige was Isosceles’ housekeeper. She was a young woman in her early twenties earning money to pay off her student loans. Her bodily structure was composed of symmetrical proportions and soft, angelic angles. The features of her face were acute and feminine while the angular curve of her backside was desirably obtuse. As Isosceles viewed her as both an attractive and intelligent woman, her presence in his home was a welcome taste of human company. She was usually left to her own accord to keep his house clean of dust and his clothes stainless and ironed. During the downtime, she studied for her classes or sometimes read the myriad of trigonometry tomes Isosceles kept in his library; to be filed alphabetically, as he had so vehemently insisted upon.

“Don’t worry about me Paige. I’ll be fine. It’s just all the work I’ve been doing to prepare for tomorrow.”

She glanced at the geometric models he kept on the table.

“You should really open your curtains all the way professor. The light is so nice in here this time of the evening.”

Paige shrugged and then turned to leave, gently shutting the door behind her.

            The following day, Isosceles set his coat on the back of his chair and organized his lesson plan. The lecture hall was large and imposing like an empty cathedral. The shuffling of his papers reverberated throughout the room like a man’s cry echoing in the opiate-ridden peaks of Appalachia. He glanced out to the hallway which was soon to fill up with thousands of University students. A familiar frump in a brown tweed jacket crossed the doorway. Isosceles called out to him.

“Hey, Dr. Crandall, can you spare some chalk? Somebody appears to have taken mine.”

The man walked into his lecture hall, ignoring his request. Isosceles asked again for chalk. Crandall glanced to the collection of implements and instruments on his desk.

“You see that X-Acto knife there Dr. Triangle?”

“What about it, Dr. Crandall?”

“Imagine the feeling of that utility knife being thrust into the back of your hand!”

Isosceles flinched.

“You know that feeling triangle boy? That’s me. That’s what I am to you; is a utility knife thrust into your hand. Don’t ever so much as speak before my presence, or I will shoot you with my musket. You can never comprehend the deep intricacies of reality within the span of your pathetic lifetime, and you waste it studying triangles.  I, as a superiorly enlightened human specimen can attain a certain higher morality than you. I am the master of morality, and you are but a slave to me. The mere presence of your putrid slave morality has harmed me to an unfathomable extent. Don’t ever look me in the eye again!”

“I’m sorry; I just wondered if you had any chalk I could borrow.”

Crandall stormed out of the lecture room without responding.

Crandall had been the head of the Philosophy department at McMaster University for the past nine miserable years. He and his department of woe-begotten miscreants and borderline-schizophrenic orators had a particular grudge against the likes of the Mathematics department, whom they denounced as being charlatans to the pursuit of capital R, Reason, and capital T, Truth. It was Isosceles in particular whom they targeted their bullying.  Dr. Crandall and his female accomplice, Dr. Stragger had virulently tormented the Trigonometry teacher by nailing Cartesian plots depicting crossed vertical asymptotes to his classroom door and etching disfigured triangles whose total degrees were more than 180 upon his chalkboard. They rarely spoke to him, except to mock his study.

He reclined in his chair and watched as the fresh batch of students slowly trickled into his classroom, reminiscent of the congregation of flies to a fleshly-laid dropping of shit on the sidewalk. Isosceles felt an unnerving disdain towards those students who did not hold trigonometry to the high regard that he did. They were born into wealthy families and their parents paid for their University tuition with the sole intention of removing them from the basements. During his lectures, they played Minecraft and surfed Reddit on their high-end laptops and sent each other insipid and redundant text messages via their BlackBerrys. After class, they retreated back to their frat houses, drank themselves into retardation, and fornicated like insects. Isosceles had never recalled any of his students displaying the slightest interest in his lessons. They had no reverence for the majesty of his triangles.

“And so, as we can see from this graph, the period of this sine wave is 360 degrees. The amplitude of a sine wave is indicated by a. For instance, the amplitude of f(x) =4sin(x+2π)-2 is 4.”

An obese male in the front row interrupted his lecture.

“Excuse me sir, but what application does this stuff have to the real world?”

“Actually, there are no shortage of practical examples I can name to which trigonometry is applicable. In computer programming for instance...”

“No, that’s not what I meant. How the hell do sine waves help us to find jobs?”

Isosceles winced.

“Is that all you kids care about, is finding jobs? Don’t you care about the mathematic concepts?”

“Yeah, math is good if you want to be a charlatan all your life.”

The class laughed.

“Dr. Stragger and Dr. Crandall teach philosophy and its application to real world situations. They teach us the think laterally and critically. They teach us about logical strategies to cope with problems that arise in the business world. You teach us about Sine Waves.”

“That’s because this is a mathematics class. If you wish to learn about philosophy, you should not have taken a Trigonometry course!”

This was precisely the brand of insolence from which his triangles provided refuge. He didn’t understand how anyone could be so wilfully ignorant of these mathematical concepts-- It wasn’t as though they were difficult to understand. Later that evening, Isosceles drove the 5 miles to his secluded rural estate and retreated back to the solitude of his study. At his request, Paige brought him some sliced cantaloupe and a glass of warm milk, homogenized, with 3% fat.

“How did your first class go Professor? Do you have any aspiring mathematicians among the lot?

He grunted and sunk his head deeper into the papers on the desk.

“So, what did you cover in your lesson today? Trigonomic identities? The Pythagorean Theorem?”

“Sine wave functions.”

“Oh, well that’s neat. I love Sine waves.”

“Great. That makes two of us at least.”

She walked closer to the desk at which he was seated. His palm was buried in his thick, greying hair, supporting the exhausted weight of his skull. Though Isosceles did not drink, his face bore the expression of a man whose spirit was defeated by alcohol as he leaned forward, towering over his work—tomorrow’s lesson plan and a few sketches of some triangles he had recently drawn up.

“I take it you wish to be left alone now Professor?”

Paige had worked at his home for just over three years now. Even though she had developed the personal relationship appropriate for her to address him as otherwise, it always just felt correct to call him Professor.

“If you don’t mind. I have a lot of work to do.”

He watched her ass while it oscillated gracefully from side to side as she walked out the room.

That putrid excuse for a life form, the one whom Isosceles had come to know as John, again interrupted his lecture. It was the final review before the weekly test and the conceited, overweight bastard had the audacity to interrupt his explanation of how the cescant ratio of a triangle equalled the reciprocal of its cosine ratio. The young man’s insolence was merely an obstacle he had come to accept. John was also taking Dr. Crandall’s philosophy class and was told to be metacritical of the doctrines opposed upon him by the mathematics department.

“Dr. Crandall told me that Pythagoras was an insane cult leader whose deceitful banter was not be trusted!”

Isosceles winced.

“It is irrelevant whether Pythagoras was a tyrannical cult leader or not, his concepts are infallible. It doesn’t take a genius to see that the tangent ratio equals the sine over the cosine ratio!”

“But what if the tangent ratio doesn’t really equal the sine over the cosine ratio? What if mathematics is only a mere illusion? The only thing that I know is that I exist! Everything else in life is but a mere assumption. Cogito Ergo Sum!”

Isosceles would have kicked him out of his class if the University had not given him a generous raise to stop doing precisely that. He would be lying if he told you that at times he didn’t think about not accepting that raise. There were students like John in every course he taught at McMaster. They were the wealthy pseudo-intellectuals, the incorrigible, thoughtless drones who saw it their way to conduct themselves with a demeanour of unwarranted self-righteousness. They were the valiant heirs to the future world, as they had learned in their philosophy class, and they virulently denounced everything that either stood between their arrogance and reality, or likewise, that which they did not have the capacity to comprehend. Isosceles had endured their antics before; there were uglier, stupider, more porous students than John that his patience had withstood, but he knew it was the growing influence of Dr. Crandall and his philosophy department that bred these over-sceptical creatures. He didn’t know how much longer he could put up with them.

Isosceles had never attended any of Dr. Crandall’s lectures. He had heard that Dr. Crandall gave the most passionate, exuberant lectures pertaining to epistemology, metaphysics, and the nature of reality, but Isosceles had never found a time when he would not rather have been amongst his triangles. However, It was a certain feeling he got, looking into the eyes of the smug bastard who sat before him, that compelled him to finally see what Crandall’s students were always going off about.

“Uh, John, when is Dr. Crandall’s next lecture?”

John swallowed his mouthful of hamburger and responded.

“It’s this afternoon at 3:00. He is going to introduce us to the great works of Arthur Schopenhauer. Dr. Crandall said very clearly that he doesn’t want any math teachers to come though. He says your dogmatic influence stifles his philosophic contemplation.”

Isosceles winced.

Later that afternoon, Isosceles walked briskly across the campus to Dr. Crandall’s lecture hall. It was at least twice the size of his, and he could see an ample supply of fresh chalk at all the blackboards. He took his seat in the last row to avoid making eye contact with Crandall and being struck with a musket ball or stuck with a utility knife. Dr. Stragger sat in the front row making conversation with the students beside her, one of whom Isosceles recognized as John.

Dr. Stragger was a middle-aged woman who had a disproportionately high level of enthusiasm for the likes of Dr. Crandall’s philosophy teachings. During his lectures, she attentively leaned forward at the edge of her seat, contingent upon every word he spoke. She memorized his debate tactics, his arguments, and every position he held on every contemporary subject in anticipation for the misfortunate drudge who was to come along and challenge her philosophical convictions. To compensate for her gnomish stature, thick strands of frizzed chestnut hair burst from atop her head like the eruption of a mud geyser, much to the plight of those whom she sat directly ahead. Isosceles had made it a point to avoid her presence whenever convenient.

He watched Dr. Crandall’s monolithic entrance to the stage. There was a noticeable tension in any room Crandall entered. He had a distinct air of self importance; the profligate expression of many ostentatious hand gestures and the unnecessary exaggeration of otherwise menial movements demanded the attention of all who beheld him. The tension those felt being in his presence was described as a sentiment of impending doom or of the suspense before a jury’s final deliberation. Nobody spoke during his lectures; they did not interrupt him, nor did they mock him or deliberately misunderstand him. His students were the most diligent of pupils, eagerly awaiting the slew of philosophical jargon which they would unquestionably absorb—to be regurgitated when any confrontation with the mathematics faculty were to arise.

“Good afternoon fellow admirers of philosophy.”

His voice resonated with the volume of a grand cathedral. To hundreds of over-privileged youngsters and liberal arts students among him, this was their god.

“Fellow philosophers, we have come upon my favourite part of the semester that is the great study of nineteenth-century German Idealism.”

Isosceles chuckled to himself.

“To hell with Belarusian idealism!” He thought.

Isosceles took his ham sandwich out of the Tupperware container. He was pleased to see that Paige had remembered to cut the bread diagonally, leaving two right angle triangle-shaped sandwich halves. Indeed, Paige had never once forgotten his daily routine, but it always pleased him nonetheless to see the two triangles awaiting his consumption.

“As I mentioned yesterday, we shall commence our study with a biography on Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the greatest philosophers of the past few centuries. He was born in 1788 in present-day Gdansk, Poland. Perhaps one of the most notable pessimists in philosophical debate is embodied in his pinnacle work, The World as Will and Representation, first published in 1818.”

Isosceles had never before heard the name of this man of whom Crandall spoke so highly.


“Of the many topics on which Schopenhauer wrote, one of the most unique among philosophers were his opinions regarding love and affection. Having been rejected by many women throughout his life, Schopenhauer lived alone with his poodles and his philosophy. His loneliness was commonly attributed to his extreme pessimistic, albeit realistic view of the world. He found little joy in money, fame, women, or education; his mother refused him to speak to houseguests in fear that he may depress them, and he toiled in obscurity until he achieved fame only a year before his death. Schopenhauer is a particularly admirable figure in philosophy precisely for this reason. It was his bleak worldview that denied him happiness, but it was this view that he held against all the nonsense he perceived about his daily life. I conjecture that to stand by one’s principles is a much more noble position than the pursuit of blind whims.”

Although he had never before displayed any inclination or interest whatsoever to study philosophy in the past, Isosceles was captivated by the life of this man whom he had never even known. There was a certain familiarity with this biography that aroused his curiosity. Having never had the time to seek out a spouse for himself due to his extensive studies, Isosceles knew, from listening to the plight of this Schopenhauer fellow, that he ought to peruse his quest for love. There was only one woman in his life that did not repulse him; she was the only one to share nearly the same passion for triangles that he did. Suddenly, he was captivated by the spontaneous urge to seek this woman out and tell her how he felt. He snuck out of the lecture hall, though was certain that Crandall had caught a glimpse of his presence in doing so.



Paige slid the giant mathematic tome back on the shelf. The professor’s library was immense. After decades of accumulating everything in the least bit pertaining to his niche, the shelves, of which there were hundreds, had been crammed with more books than one was likely to encounter in a single dwelling. Even the University had a collection that seemed miniscule in comparison to his. He had often complained to Paige about the incompetence of the University’s book collection, although it was unlikely that any worldly institution could have met Isosceles’ high standards of academic prestige. She enjoyed spending time reading his books that she would often lose track of time and find herself well into the early hours of the morning enthralled in a volume of advanced functions or vector calculus. The resources had been an invaluable aid to her study at McMaster. There were many instances in which a book found in the library had saved her on a test or had guided her through a particularly difficult unit. Now in her final year of university, she knew that she owed a debt of gratitude to these tomes, and of course to Isosceles himself. She climbed down the ladder and walked to the kitchen in order to prepare the professor’s evening tea.

When she entered his study, she found him standing, with his back to the door, looking nonchalantly out the window. The curtains had been opened all the way and the sunlight shone through the magnificent window, casting a breathtaking pattern of light into the room as it shone through the glass geometric objects on the table. She had never been taken by such a majestic scene before, and at this moment, the study was more resplendent than any other time that she had beheld it.

“I remember that day when you told me to open the curtains all the way. I have to agree with you Paige, that the room looks much nicer having done so.”

“Yes it does. Anyways, I left your tea on the night stand.”

She turned to leave.

“Wait, there’s something I have to tell you.”

“What is it?”

Isosceles turned from the window, and knelt down on one knee before his housekeeper, holding forth a large diamond ring in a velvet box. The diamond was in the shape of a perfect triangular pyramid and shone brightly, more so because of the majestic reflection of sunlight in its finely cut surface.

“Paige, I’ve always thought that you were the smartest, most beautiful woman I have ever met. I have never been more certain of anything in all my life than I am of this. Paige, will you do me the honour of taking my hand in marriage?”

She was silent only for a few seconds, though the tension he felt had made it seem like hours. Then, a look of unadulterated sympathy manifested upon her mouth and a tear streamed down her left cheek. She gently shut the velvet box with her hand, unable to bear the sight of the diamond ring.
“I’m so very sorry Professor, but I already am engaged. In fact, he is a student in one of your trigonometry classes; John is his name. I have told him about you, how he should make an attempt to connect with you professor, as the both of you are very smart indeed. However, I see that such a bond was not to be.”

Isosceles stared at her with hollow eyes. His face was empty of any expression, and he for a brief moment imagined the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and that the familiarity he had sensed was in relation to his own life—his own social and romantic incompetence.

“I’m very sorry professor, but I really must go now. I have been considering this for some time, but I hope you understand if I don’t come in to work tomorrow, or any other day for that matter.”

She turned away to depart, and Isosceles listened to the exhaust of her automobile as she drove away, never again to bring him tea or sliced cantaloupe; never again to sort his books or iron his clothes, never again to slice his sandwiches or comfort him in the wake of his interpersonal misfortunes. A wave of emotion, half-way between the searing fervour of rage and the lowly grip of sadness consumed him from his somewhere deep in his chest, and he once again recalled the beauty of a perfect right-angle triangle. However, it yielded him no exaltation. The world, as he had come to know it, was unworthy of the superlative proportions of such flawless splendour. As he looked around his study, and basked in the scintillating radiance of the reflected light, soaking the various trigonometry articles he had pinned up on the wall, realized, that he too was unworthy of their splendour. Isosceles remembered a revolver he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk, in fear of looters that may break in to steal his precious work. He retrieved it and held the barrel up to his right temple, and as a spray of his teeth and grey matter painted the drawing he had etched weeks prior; for the very first time, Isosceles had become one with the triangles.