Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

148: MOMENTS WITHOUT PROPER NAMES (A Fatty Arbuckle Story):

Leo Tolstoy was just here and he left without charging a dime or saying a word and it was almost as if he'd seen something spooky something which accelerated his departure and all I can think it was was Greta cutting carrots with her teeth but no matter because in her purple bathrobe she'd have scared most anyone anyway and just about at the same time I received a note from Carlyle saying I'd not be welcomed at his dramatic production but if I wanted to watch here's a free pass-for-one enclosed - and I figured that had to be worth at least twelve dollars but I declined the offer and went on my way or stayed my course (since I wasn't really going anywhere anyway) determined more than ever to be singular solitary and alone and united to nothing but me : and there were a few things people were talking about and stuff I overheard at the exact same time (befuddled as I was by trying to read philosophy between the lines and to learn the ways of all mankind) : be sure to put everything away and do not stay up past some pre-determined hour be neat with your possessions and quiet about your losses and gains both use only a sharpened pencil when you write out lists be sure the lightbulb you are using to read by is adequate for proper illumination and don't leave things behind you'd not want others to see - - and by God that was it and nothing more and then I muttered something to myself about how 'nice it is to arrive somewhere with nothing in hand and just walk out later on - again with nothing in hand' a seemingly perfectly innocuous statement but one fraught - as I saw it - with all truth and possibility too but moments of clarity are far too few and often only come to the uninitiated anyway.
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'Prove you are alive - prove it!'
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"That warehouse is not burning it's only painted that way to look as if it's burning because flames are the logo of the motorcycle master-builder hot-rodders who work in there - pretty good trick huh" and I thought to myself 'no not really and I never for a moment thought the place was burning - what sort of shithead would go around thinking a 'good' paintjob would confuse such an issue?' and I let it go figuring that's the exact sort of stupid talk that these neanderthals thrive on and their small coterie of rocket-scientists and race-car builders probably really do think it's cool as all get out - this paint-job - but for me it's a big nothing and there really are so many other things to dwell on : ('blurring the boundaries between food and sex - in 1921 Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle was accused of using a Coke bottle to rape a virgin - named Virginia Rappe - and Fatty Arbuckle's 'manly equipment' it was said would not do his bidding so he searched the 'fridge' for a tool and finally came up with a soda container and whether or not the charges were true the public was more than happy to see him as a perverted overeater so much so that 'Fatso Funster' became 'Blubber-Thighed Anti-Christ' very quickly') but the more I reason this out I find that that story has so many holes in it as to be suspect - the 1920's idea of a 'fridge' is all wrong to me as they'd not really yet become accepted appliances and were actually referred to as iceboxes since actual ICE was put into them in blocks - only much later did the more automated and efficiently electrically-cooled 'refrigerator' become the 'fridge' from 'Frigidaire' a brand name and was this the first use of a 'Coke' bottle as a sexual 'tool'? or was the shape of it so derived from its use already (any bottle with a thin and graduated neck perhaps) and was that particular folk-use part of the reason such a shape was developed for the popular beverage (which wasn't totally popular yet back then) and does any of this actually make sense could it have been true were there public testimonies and the like or perhaps has all this arisen as folk-tales often do as part of mere popular lore at the expense of someone or something - fat people in general or Fatty Arbuckle in particular - who as I recall reading was in those days of evolving talk-pictures and comedy sketches considered as extra-baggage and old talent leftover and necessary to be gotten out of the way - comedy or sex whichever worked better - and perhaps this instance of local entertainment politics was all the more than meets the eye even back in that day BUT such is sleight of hand such is the ribald rhythm of comedy and solace that we'll never really know.
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The writer John Kennedy Toole - who had a propensity for plumpness too (read WAS FAT) turned - in his writing - obesity into a kind of personality disorder and in his sprawling book A Confederacy of Dunces (1980 but written much earlier) hot-dog vendor Ignatius J. Reilly is SO passionate about the tube-steak business that he sees meat-deprivation as a form of physical assault 'the human desire for food and sex is relatively equal' he says 'if there are armed rapes why should there not be armed hot dog thefts?' and deeply suspicious of the female body Ignatius pays his dues to Freud as he wanders around in a constant state of 'weenie' consumption 'the tip of the hot dog...sticking from his mouth like a cigar' and his pen pal Myrna Minkoff proposes sex but he repeatedly refuses noting that he'd rather concentrate on the way it feels when his nostril hairs are 'analyzing cataloguing categorizing and classifying the distinct odors of hot dog mustard and lubricant' and his 'meaningless impotent existence' drives Myrna crazy while his body puts HER in a bad mood 'where will you ever end?' she snaps 'there's something so unbelievably tacky about your obesity' (the perfect shape for sexual anxiety- the hot dog is the obvious food of choice for fat literary heroes perhaps) YET in some ways the very same prolixity for richness is shown in both men - Fatty Arbuckle as the comic-man exemplar the fat rotund one the roly-poly man to make us laugh who eventually gets overwhelmed by his excess - food comedy or Coke bottle in this instance - and the entire real world then did conspire to enfold around him and smother him and the selfsame genius of Ignatius J. Reilly comes to the fore in the matter of fat and sex and fat/sex combined - which is exactly what did Arbuckle in : FATSEX - perhaps an entirely different notion then just plain sex for FATSEX has no less a lineage - and a far greater story - than plain sex too and another writer Daniel Pinkwater wrote 'The Afterlife Diet' in 1995 in which his characters are 'always eating' and their weight problems did not seem to be biological but induced instead by a certain pleasure in eating and his obese characters - as he wrote them - could be 'sexy' and his publishers refused to reprint the book even after it sold out in three weeks with the cover featuring a flying hot dog instead of the skimpy-bikini-clad beautiful fat woman on the cover that Pinkwater initially sought for and the book 'offended' senses of propriety because of its erotic content in the context of fat people : the novel features a flabby sausage-vendor named Milo who makes love to his voluptuous girlfriend Linda by moaning selective words like 'Protein rich! Bull meat and trimmings of sweet brisket! Ah! Sweet brisket! Hardwood! Hickory! Smoked! Spices! Secret spices! Oh! Knockwurst!' and sure enough when Linda has an orgasm she screams 'Milo...the...weiner...is...good!' and all this was touted as the first commercially published fat novel or 'Scmalzroman' and it has within it a heaven designed exclusively for the 'circumferentially challenged' and two of the characters see the same shrink at the same clinic where ingesting massive amounts of meat is the only therapeutic method that works.