my idea is to have a lion onstage that nobody is afraid of. my ambition is to have a wall onstage that everybody knows is a wall, and not a person. ideally, everybody on stage would tell the audience, “i’m not really a person. this is just pretend.” and the audience would say, “thanks. before I was confused, and now I am not.”

had an argument with my roommate about the existence of conspiracy theories. I believe there are none and he disagreed. stories make possible the imagined associations which in turn make the nation possible. the bigger we think our nation is, the bigger our stories get, until they get so big that no stage can hold them any more. either the actors get too crowded and some of them fall into the audience.

although “big” really isn’t the best word to describe the stories. “more” is more precise. conspiracy theories are in an arms race with bullshit. the conspiracy theory tries to implicate bullshit as complicit with the schemes of the illuminati jews from the center of the earth, deaf to the fact that these implications are, also, bullshit, and that if the schemes of the illuminati mole-people jews are correct, then the conspiracy theorists are also complicit by being bullshitters as well.

see, what i’d like to do is grow a beard the size of a tree, and then show it off to my neighbors, how it breathes. except i wouldn’t be able to move my jaw, because that’s how big my beard would be. so i’d just mumble at everybody, and eventually my friends would stage an unfair intervention wherein they appear profoundly concerned over my having such a big beard. they fear that a growing beard may indicate a great personal tragedy during which a person might decide, “I am going to grow my beard now.”

then this would happen: I would have my tree-like beard in its Red Racer wagon per usual, unable to say that much without great discomfort to my jaw. my lawyer would be present. theirs would be, too. our lawyers would talk. mine would say this:

“My client requests I inform you that a beard, like a tree, will grow indefinitely, some as long as seven hundred years.”

then their lawyer would probably talk at length about the effects growing a beard has upon the skin of the chin, jaw and cheeks, the increased cost in shampoo, the face dandruff. to which I, in a feat of endurance, my jaw distorted in obvious pain but nonetheless determined to respond, would do so with the following:

“the only thing that keeps a beard from growing forever is gravity. same as a tree. what becomes of a beard in space?”

the obvious answer is that god is a beard in space, and proceed into genesis. one day I’ll load a little red rowboat with a gallon of water and half a pound of bread. I’ll get sunburnt and pull fish from the ocean and every last one I’ll tell the same thing. “I’m not a real person. It’s all pretend.”