Dear Stephen

Dear Stephen

By Max Karnassial

--1--

Several years ago, this guy I know joined a group of citizens protesting King George Bush the Second's insane progressive tax policies---but the organization lacked "singleness of purpose" and was quickly usurped by xenophobes, antiabortionist, and 2nd Amendment advocates.   

The guy was actually a staunch constitutionalist who agreed with the usurpers on many points, so the only thing that depressed him more than this was watching as the tax-and-spend anti-border pro-abortion gun-grabber party successfully turned the group's name into a toxic four-letter-word and even invented a special slur based on an odd sexual practice.  None of this offended the guy, nor did it surprise him in the least. It just depressed him---a lot.

For a long time.

One day, the guy remembered something he had heard another guy say a long time ago when that guy was trying to encourage yet another guy. Since the guy was mostly white, and the other guys had been mostly black, he didn't exactly understand what they said, but at the time, the guy I know took it as a way of saying that you don't have to let stupidity get to you---that when stupid stuff happens, it doesn't mean anything about YOU. When the guy I know remembered what the other guy had said, it became his secret mantra. 

It was so helpful and handy he started using it in all sorts of situations.  When his boss informed him that his "position was being deallocated," he said it to himself over and over. He soon found work. When one of his children was, angry and said, "I hate you!" he said it to himself again, and he loved the child none the less.  When the rest of his countrymen elected a circus clown to be president of his country... When his car was towed even though he had paid for the parking... When his friends insulted him, when his efforts were unrecognized---his secret mantra seemed to be infinitely useful.

Then one day, the guy's daughter suffered an unexpected and devastating heartbreak.  The guy was very angry with the young man who had broken her heart, but the guy's anger was eclipsed by the oppressive sadness he felt for his daughter who, try as he might, could not be consoled.  Hearts are like that.  He realized that the situation met all the conditions for the use of his secret mantra; acts of enormous stupidity (check) that are beyond your ability to control (check) and which any attempt to resolve might not only be beneath your dignity (check), but would most likely be counterproductive.

The guy really wanted to share his mantra with his daughter, but he felt it was somewhat inappropriate since the first and last word are considered obscene, plus, he had recently vowed to stop telling people how they should feel. Besides, he thought selfishly, you can't have a secret mantra if it's not secret.

--2--

Anyway, the guy's daughter got this cute little dog that the guy really fell in love with. But then, he started having nightmares and panic attacks about something happening to the little dog.  The guy lost a lot of sleep because of the nightmares, and he missed several engagements because he didn't want to leave home and risk something stupid happening to the cute little dog. The guy already had a fat little dog that seemed capable, ready, and immutably committed to ripping the cute little dog to shreds at the first opportunity. It was the shreds that his sub-conscious latched onto and used to test the limits of his sanity.

See, this guy has a profoundly overdeveloped sense of imagination that would be a character asset if it were not for his equally profound lack of ability to control it.   Sometimes, when the guy is just minding his own business his imagination would break in to his mind, grab a thought, and start embellishing them with back-stories, sound effects, and detailed graphic imagery that makes modern computer generated imagery look like old Japanese monster movies. The guy had the feeling it was brutal and random---like a series of home invasions where the invaders would barge in, tie up the family, and grab whatever was there; however, he had noticed that the invaders had developed a tendency to bypass anything of value, and go straight for anything private, dangerous, or disturbing.

In fact, as soon as he thought about the fat little dog ripping up the cute little dog, he knew he was in for a visit.

At first, the shreds appeared in his nightmares; he would see one of them somewhere in his home---protruding from under the desk---draped over the handrail on the stairs, or dangling from a ceiling light fixture.  As he looked around for the source of the shred, he would invariably find a trail of them that led to the fat little dog gleefully wallowing in a pile of the cute little dog's remains.  He would struggle to remember his secret mantra but he could not.  Well, he could remember it, but he couldn't "think" it. It was like those dreams when you think you're paralyzed because you can't move or speak or scream, only he could do all of that.  He just could not think the mantra out-loud in his mind.

The guy would start awake and shout his mantra out-loud.  The guy's wife would ask what he said because she had been sound asleep and didn't catch it. He would assure her that everything was OK---that he had just had a bad dream.  He told himself that the mantra might not be effective in dreams and nightmares, but that it was still perfectly functional for waking life, and that the nightmares would subside as such things always do, but when they did, that was when things got ugly.

The first time it happened, the guy was driving to Church when he thought he saw a cute little dog shred dangling off the passenger side door handle.  On closer examination, it was a just a piece of shopping bag; however, this realization did nothing to prevent him from starting to cry.  The guy tried the mantra and it seemed to work, but then he found himself sobbing uncontrollably.  The kind of thing where the tears are gushing out, you're convulsing wildly, and the snot starts to puddle in your lap.

When he pulled over on the side of the road to collect himself he remembered crying like that only once before, but that time he had known why he was crying.  He just sat there a while trying to stop, but when he eventually did, he saw another shred; this time, draped over a branch on a nearby tree. 

At this point, the guy was almost paralyzed by two competing fears; 1) He was losing his mind, and 2) the cute little dog was at home alone with the fat little dog who was at that very moment making all of the guy's nightmares come true.

The guy turned around and sped home where he was relieved to find the fat little dog snoring like a pig in its kennel, and the cute little dog safe in his daughter’s room.  It would have been beyond tragic had things been as he feared, but since they had not, he had to consider the possibility that he was insane.

Over the next week, evidence to support that possibility accumulated rapidly.  He kept seeing shreds in waking life, and the nightmares returned worse than ever.  One of the nightmares featured Sheriff Tom Bell from No Country for Old Men (the book, not the movie.) The guy remembered looking at a massive scene of dog carnage in his dream, and asking Tom Bell, "Ain't this some shit?" To which Tom Bell predictably replied "If it ain’t, It will do till some shit shows up."

He knew it was the Sheriff from the book because when he read it, Tom Bell was played by Abe Vigoda who played Fish on Barny Miller instead of Tommy Lee Jones.  Anyway…

Also in evidence---the only time he felt OK was when he was holding the cute little dog.

Also---the guy started to have this sort of waking dream about killing the fat little dog. He made a concerted effort to stop himself from having these, which is, of course, the one sure way to guarantee they will intensify.

The guy found himself muttering his secret mantra constantly, but to no avail. Things came to a head when he encountered some garden variety stupidity that the mantra would have been certain to extinguish in the days before his daughter got the cute little dog.

The mantra had worked so well for so long that he had to struggle to remember what he had done before he started using it.  Of course, John Barleycorn was the first applicant in line, but the guy knew that was a putting-out-fire-with-nuclear-warheads solution. He tried going for walks, but his wife asked him to take the fat little dog, and he was pretty sure that only one of them would return from that outing.  Even when he went alone---shreds everywhere.

He tried distracting himself with video games, cooking, eating, playing video games while cooking and eating, and just eating and eating and eating. The only thing he tried that worked even a little was reading novels.   

When he read David Sedaris’s Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls he found some of the essays engaging, but the guys imagination littered the other ones with enough imaginary canine carnage for a mashup movie of Cujo and Carrie.  This reminded they guy of the time he read Stephen King’s Gunslinger before he knew it was the first in a series of eight huge novels that tied together all of the Stephen King stories he had ever read, which was practically all of them.  He had been so captivated by the Gunslinger story that he had forgotten about things like employment, food, and personal hygiene for about two months.  In the aftermath, the guy had sworn off reading horror novels in general, and King in particular.

But this was an emergency.  The guys mantra was broken and he didn’t know what else to do.

 

---3---

The guy raced to his eBook reader, fired it up, and downloaded a newer Stephen King trilogy he had not read. He was a little worried when he realized that the first book, Mr. Mercedes, was not a horror novel, but a detective story! This turned out to be of no consequence because he found Mr. King’s gift for disturbing imagery and masterful storytelling transcended the horror genre.  The only thing more intriguing than the out-of-control psychopath was the even more out-of-control detective trying to catch him, and there was enough splash and gore in King’s novel that the guy’s own imagination was intimidated into utter silence.  

This was a huge relief, and the guy even thought that he might be on the mend, psychologically speaking; however, things took a major turn for the weird when he started the second book.

Finders Keepers begins with two quotes. The first one is this.

“It is by going down into the abyss the we recover the treasures of life.”

---Joseph Campbell

The guy might have been comforted by this sentiment, and he may even have recognized the name Joseph Campbell because he had read one of his books back in his college days, but he didn’t even see the first quote because his eyes were instantly transfixed on the second one at the bottom of the page; which was this.

“Shit don’t mean shit.”

---Jimmy Gold

Now, the guy had been reading horror novels all his life, but nothing he had ever read had an impact of this magnitude because, while he didn’t know who Jimmy Gold was, he really wanted to how the Sam hell Mr. Gold had managed to steal his secret mantra!

The guy felt profoundly overwhelmed and violated, but when his spine thawed out a bit he reflected that he had not created the mantra himself---he had picked it up from some school mates over thirty years ago, in fact, he realized he had probably heard it a few dozen times since then. It was only when he found it useful as a mantra that it had become “secret.”

The breakthrough came when, as the guy read on, he learned that in Finders Keepers, Jimmy Gold was a fictional character made up by a fictional author named John Rothstein who was made up by a non-fictional author named Stephen King! The bad guy in the book had loved Jimmy Gold, but was furious with Rothstein over how he had developed, or failed to develop, Jimmy Gold’s character in the third book of a trilogy Rothstein had written.

Somehow, the guy worked out that he had been thinking like the bad guy in Finders Keepers, but the author that had pissed him off was the Great Author---God Almighty. He also came to recognize that the Great Author is probably not finished with the character, and even if He is, it's not the guy's decision to make. Which---come to think of it--- is a lot like what the bad guy in Finders Keepers came to understand. As an unexpected result, his mantra started working again---plus! this marked the first time the guy was able to effectively apply the mantra to his own stupidity.

Nevertheless, the guy is still very confused, and a little afraid to read the last book, but he realized a couple of other important things.

One, that he would have to amend his mantra, or apply it a little more judiciously because sometimes, stupid shit can absolutely wreck you even when you know it doesn’t mean anything.

And two, If Mr. King thinks that providing a guy with easy escape from the terrors of a guy’s own imagination by writing hundreds of stories that are usually worse somehow gives him permission to break into a guy’s mind and steal a guy’s fricking secret mantra---well then, that dirty bird has got another thing coming.

Let me be here to tell you.

Thanks Stephen,

Max