Antkind

by Charlie Kaufman

“Am I disfigured?” I ask, suddenly terrified. “We don’t know what you looked like before you came here, so it’s hard for us to tell.

“I think it is a coincidence.” “If there is one thing they teach us at grief counseling camp, it is that there is no such thing as a coincidence.” “How would they know that? And why would that be part of grief counseling training?”

I must shift my focus or I am in danger of ejaculating during a hurricane, which the National Weather Service strongly advises against.

If only I had an eidetic memory. But of course I don’t because it is a myth. A myth that has left me high and dry, for I am certain if eidetic memory did exist, I would have it. I am just the type to have it. That I don’t have it is proof that it doesn’t exist.

There was one plain girl who was sad (probably because she was plain) who latched on to me. She really wanted to be my girlfriend. She was annoying. A pest. And she made me feel bad about myself. She made me feel shallow for not being interested in her, which wasn’t very kind of her, when you think about it. It is not kind to make someone you like feel bad about himself.

You should know that in addition to working with alien abductees and past-lifers—both of which I believe in, by the way—I also work with the NYPD and several other major police departments.” “Oh,” I say, impressed. “What is your success rate?” “I do filing for them and I’m pretty damn accurate.

A movie is not only the image on the screen, the sound from the speakers. It is the translation of all this by the brain. It is the social milieu. It is the year you see it, your age, the state of your marriage. It is what happened on the way to the theater, what you expect to happen after, it is who is next to you on each side.

One has to be supremely untalented to fail as a white man as frequently and as spectacularly as you have. It is well understood that mediocre white men fail upwards and that talented women, POC, LGBTTQIAAP folks, and the differently abled (POC variety) must fight tooth and nail for a seat at the table. Consequently we are left with inferior white men running and ruining the world. And what of value have they contributed?

I sip my drink to steady myself. “Have you heard of the Kentucky Meat Shower of 1876?” “ ‘Have you heard of the Kentucky Meat Shower of 1876?’ ” she repeats back to me in a mockingly effeminate voice. I stare at my drink. I have no idea how to proceed after that.

“Me” and his “assistant” step back onto the street, both eating from cardboard containers, his labeled Chicken Souperman, hers, Arm Falafel Boy (a pathetic play on the name of the criminally underutilized DC character Arm-Fall-Off-Boy, whose detachable arms he uses as bludgeons. Of course they’ll never make a movie of that because it’s too real).

So did James Gunn read this and take it as a challenge, or

I turn to van Gogh. “Have you seen that Dr. Who episode?” “Which one?” “The one with you in it?” “No! That’s crazy. Really? I’m in it? Is it any good? I love that show.”