Assignment #3

1. She dreams of her lover late at night.
   He wakens to an angry call.
   
   
2. Gray skies and hair loss.
   An injured ant gives hope.
   
   
3. Poetic prose of obsession and love.
   Tragic tale of a sports car.
   
   
4. The cowboy goes to New York City.
   My boyfriend learns Korean.
   
   
5. Red, hot sausages that burn and kill.
   The witch makes brew.
   
   
6. A story of tigers eating little girls.
   A lullaby at naptime.

2-6-95

I call these Bantu-like combinations "My Boris Vianese" because anyone reading this would probably recall the French Pataphysic's words, roughly in English "The question isn't asked; there's too much wind for that." No logic. No link. Except what the reader perceives or creates.

But my combinations do have logic, and they do have links. Here they are:

1. One time my sister called her boyfriend up in her sleep. She was dreaming that he was messing up her room, so she yelled at him in her sleep. Meanwhile, he was thinking, "God! It's four o'clock in the morning! What the hell is going on? Why is she yelling at me?"
   
   
2. Back in high school I wrote a story about a boy sitting at home after chemotherapy (thus the hair loss). The weather was gloomy, and so was he; all seemed hopeless to him. Then, of course, he started playing around with an ant, crushing it and watching it endure and live anyway. He somehow related to the ant, and he gained hope from the ant's survival.
   
   
3. I also wrote a very, very short story back in high school called "You Loved Me." The invisible narrator talks about how "you" (some generalized, vague and universal man) loved "me" and were obsessed by "me." Anyone reading it immediately assumes that the narrator is a woman, but in the end, it only turns out to be a sports car.
   
   
4. My boyfriend went to South Korea to teach English there for a year. He is the typical Western, All-American male--blond hair and blue eyes--and he is living in the East. It's all about a Westerner in the East. He is the cowboy in New York City.
   
   
5. One night--in the sixth grade--I had a very vivid dream about a party at my house. Some party crasher poisoned the sausages, and the sausages went wild, burning everything in their path as they crawled everywhere. In my dreams, I have magic powers, so I created a potion in the bathroom sink, filled up a couple of squirt guns with it, and started spraying it at the sausages. Did the trick and killed the sausages. Go figure.
   
   
6. When I was a little girl, I loved playing with my best friend Daman outside, in the sunshine. My uncle had a very hard time trying to get me to go inside to take my nap. One day he told me that if I didn't take my nap, The Man will come and get me. When I asked him what man he was talking about, he told me that there was a man in the neighborhood who took skinny little girls like me and fed them to his tigers. I believed him, of course, and I was further convinced when the doorbell rang right at that time. My uncle then told me that The Man wouldn't take me if I took my nap, and I believed that, too. Then the doorbell rang again, and my uncle said, "Quick! Go to sleep!" I was scared enough to run into my room and hide underneath the covers. When I heard The Man ask for me, I shut my eyes tightly and told myself that I was asleep. Yeah, right. Who was I kidding? With fear like that, how could anyone sleep?

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