MAN 1: Yes, but the way I see it, you know, is that life itself is built up rather delicately, like a ham sandwich, say. You can't eat it, of course, but there it is. Staring at you, as it were, though it has no eyes. Glistening. As if in one of those Japanese restaurants where they have immaculately fake versions of what is real on the menu displayed behind glass to tempt hungry, or perhaps merely peckish, people in. But this ham sandwich, or life, if you follow me, is always real. Always beckoning. Through glass even, at times, I suppose. And what if one were to break the glass, say, and steal the sandwich, say. What then? Would life end, simply? Or would it only be digested? Would life cause gas? Have we been digested, say, by merely peckish men? Slightly hungry passersby? That, my friend, is what chills me right to the bone. But perhaps I digress a bit too much, how is your thigh? How is your thigh?
MAN 2: It is not so much a question of the thigh in so much as a question of where the thigh ends, or rather, not where the thigh ends, but what begins where the thigh ends, or in point of fact, what occupies the region wherein the two thighs end, thank you very much. And yet you would speak to me of sandwiches. You would speak to me of displays of hunger in the course of one's life. You would display a hunger for life. You would cease to distinguish between hunger and life. Life, you would say, is hunger. And hunger, life. If I am understanding you correctly. If I am understanding you correctly, though you speak delicately, you speak to me as though I were an animal. And I am of course an animal, but I am not an ordinary animal. What distinguishes me from the ordinary animal is the palpable void that exists in me wherein the two thighs end. The other word for this of course is consciousness. But now I can see that I've lost your attention, and, anyway, I never could stand the fucking Japanese. They're an island people, fundamentally. It's reflected in their cuisine.
MAN 1: Consciousness on legs, ha! What a pleasing image. Eggs on legs. How strange it is that when a woman gives birth, consciousness passes between her legs. I mean to say that toenails and eyebrows come out of the vagina. Though sometimes they do not. You’ve heard of people who have bits of their undeveloped sibling lodged in their brain? Does their consciousness get interrupted, overlapped, by their siblings' consciousness? Or do they think as one being? A giant, loud, palpable consciousness. How does being an island culture effect consciousness? The eggs on legs makes me hungry. Hungry for life? Perhaps. Ignore the hunger and the life makes itself ever more present. I mean that hunger makes me aware of my egg. This egg on my legs. Perhaps eating then, pacifies our awareness, and thus our anxiousness about life? Why tryptophan inside turkeys? I feel they merely wish to placate us. They yield to our urge. Wait for us to consume them, and then when they find us logy, you know, sluggish, that’s when they will take over the place. I feel Benjamin Franklin wasn't far off the mark when he wanted the turkey to be the national bird. “No use in pissing off fowl,” as my dad used to say.
MAN 2: My mother used to always answer, "Mercury is in Retrograde." I cannot recall the question.
MAN 1: Yes, questions, questions. Now did she always answer that way, as you say? Say you were wondering, little shaver, what was for dinner, would your mother then answer you, "Mercury is in Retrograde?” Was Mercury the name of your household pet? Was he in retrograde? Is it a classroom with nineteen-fifties d?cor? Ha, dinner, I almost forgot how hungry I am. Come come, we should dine then. A fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into already. I assume no Japanese, or indeed, any island cuisine for you my friend, eh? Hah! Have to watch that thigh of yours. You know, lately, my eye has been bothering me. Those little floaties, they seem to cloud at times, sometimes I think they are trying to spell something out, like airplanes that advertise with their smoke curls. No bother. Here, fine American cuisine, let me get the door for you.
MAN2: Chivalry, I see, is not dead, at least not between men. You are too kind. I am troubled by your floaties, by the way, because I can also see them out of the corner of my eye and to be perfectly honest I'm not sure if they are mine or if they are yours. Can two friends share these ghastly apparitions? Something to think about. Ah. The scent of home cooking lingers in the air, over checkered table clothes, heritage wood tables, paraffin lamps, and interrupted only by the wind produced in the air by harried, spiritually arrested waiters attending to the varying needs of the multitudes. Chicken pot pie, I believe. Meatloaf. Fried Chicken. Fish and chips. Cultural Appropriation even between the old and the new world. Pulled pork. Pork loin. Tenderloin. Chicken Tenders fashioned from the Almost Meats of Fast Food Chains and Multi-national Franchise Organizations. Hydroponic tomatoes, no doubt, in the salads. Genetically Modified corn. One wonders what one eats these day when one eats meats. One wonders what the meat eats before it becomes a meat. And whether or not the meat was happy before it became a meat. We are concerned now with happy meat. Whether the meat was named. Whether it was granted a relationship with the earth before harvesting. Did it, one wonders, run freely? Did it suck at the teats of it's mommy? Or was it at rest in a cage of feces rendered from artificially fashioned growth hormones. Was it injected? If so, with what? It is not enough these days to simply feed. One must concern one's self with history. Every Lamb Chop tells a story. We must know the beginning of the story, and some portion of the story's middle, before we come to how it ends. But then again, I've never been in favor of a story's end. A story's end, and please forgive me my aphoristic tendencies, is the brown tubular excrement sucked down the toilet bowl of life. Regularity permitting.
MAN 1: Regularity, yes, is of the utmost importance. Nothing more agreeable than a good shit in the morning. I agree with you, where does the Lamb Chop begin? I suppose we know how it ends. How it all ends for the most part. Just so much Pollock in the toilet. The apple and the animal, all just so much seed for the soil. Brillat-Savarin has given us, “You are what you eat,” “A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine” and indeed “A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.” He also told us that nations can be defined by what they eat. But what if we take something from say, Tibet, and then deep fry it? I will tell you, it is delicious. My grandmother was a bit of a gourmet cook in the kitchen, and it bothered her to no end that my grandfather would scoop everything into a big wooden bowl, stir it all with a big wooden spoon and exclaim, “It’s all going to the same place anyway.” Wise words I suppose, for one whose purpose is truly the destination and not the journey. But I will begin with the meatloaf, I guess, and some sort of beer. Meatloaf wrapped in bacon, it says here, and I for one support it. The more animals they can wrap, engulf, incase, or stuff inside my plate, the happier a man I’ll be. As for the beer, no preference. Not too much of a head on it. My brother told me this handy tip if you ever get a beer with too much foam. You ask the bartender if they can put some lemonade in your beer. When they agree you tell them, “Well, if you can put more lemonade in it you could certainly put more beer in it.” Wise words for someone whose journey and destination rest on the same stool. Stool. Yes, that seems to bring us round about. I’ll decide on dessert later. Though I see no one-eyed women wandering about the place. A good sign I suppose. No malnourishment.
MAN 2: I am always on the lookout for signs, good or bad. More good than bad I think in my life. The number nine, for example, always appearing at inopportune times. Always accompanied by ill news. One woman with one eye does not concern me. What concerns me is nine women with one eye or one woman with nine, which we must agree is a physiological possibility, in an accidental world of two headed snakes, bearded women, pygmies, the French, cleft palates, hermaphrodites, and free market fundamentalists. I've become thoroughly convinced in any case that the point at which humanity began to Stray from the Path was at that precise moment at which it began to express itself in symbols. Symbols. Symbols and Signs. Metaphors. Euphemisms. Aphorisms. IF this THEN that equations. SOMETHING where SOMETHING equals something ELSE. Reification. Leading of course to an abject proliferation of nonsense. An abundance, if you will, of little. Meat wrapped in meat stuffed with meat, though I'll agree, such excesses are delicious...What's that? Yes, I believe we're prepared to order. I'll have a gin martini, very cold, very cold, very dry, with olives, straight up. Very cold and very dry. With olives, if you please, accompanied by the, let's see, the, uh, the Ham Sandwich, I think. And the meatloaf for Frederick.
MAN 1: Thank you, Samson. You know our friend, Alexander, of course? Not a vermouth man. When I last saw him prepare a martini, he filled the up glass with gin and simply waved the bottle of vermouth above it. Solid gesture. Ritual.
MAN 2: Ritual indeed. Empty ritual, I would suggest. Alexander remakes your whole Journey/Destination Paradigm into a kind of mockery of transubstantiation in which the Pleasures of Living, such as is Vermouth, are transformed in a pseudo-ritual into the Appearances of Life. He's all about fashion these days, I'm afraid. I'm afraid that I stopped speaking to him when he began to 'work out' so incessantly. His musculature is encroaching upon his brain. When last I saw him he couldn't take his eyes off of himself in the mirror that he'd installed upon his ceiling. Never trust a man with a thick neck. I do hope at least that he did not neglect olives in his martini. There can be no martini where there is no olive to eat at the bottom of the martini, fat and full of martini-juice.
MAN 1: For me, it is certainly all about the alcoholic olives. I’m not much of a beer man myself, but it seems to sit well with meatloaf, and French fries and chocolate chip cookies. I’m not making up excuses of course, simply a matter of comment. What I am wondering is if I was lost in a labyrinth with two doors, one leading to eternal damnation, and one to the exit, and one was guarded by a woman with one eye, the other with nine, which would I trust? Certainly I would aim to talk to them, to ascertain. But purely on visuals alone, no pun intended I suppose… which one would I trust? Perhaps the woman with one eye had been punished. Punished for some unpardonable action, a defying truth, or a bold lie. Was she in the right or the wrong? Or was it all simply an accident? On the other hand, the woman with nine eyes. Her punishment was beyond her control, I suppose. No one chooses to be born in this manner. Of course, I suppose if I’m in a labyrinth with doors leading to damnation, anything is possible, yes? [Pause.] Ahem, so here we are, eh? A suitable place, I suppose, though I can’t for the life of me remember how we met, or why we always come here? I suppose our floaties, our motes, have been talking. Sharing the info. Perhaps that is why we can always dispense with the pleasantries and get down to business. Or at least talk around the business as much as possible. I suppose in the end there is no business, save to stuff our bellies and ogle the nine eyed waitresses.
MAN 2: You know me well enough to know that I only ogle waitresses after the third Martini, no matter their numbers of eyes. We have known one another, haven't we, for the whole of our lives? There is no singular incident of meeting in my memory between us. Nor memory of us in any place but this. I try not to think about it. It seems hardly possible, unless you are my under-developed sibling that has lodged in my brain and is beginning to express itself through my floaters. Or I yours. Or we together, another's. Alexander's, for example. If this, indeed, is the case, than we'd have to agree that every doorway leads to damnation. If this, indeed, is the case, than our position in the afterlife certainly is secure, so we may continue to swing freely from the center of morality's pendulum, with no hope for redemption. Which brings us, I suppose, to our business. Have you had any more of your revelations regarding the Vivification of The Plan?