The Annals

by Petronius Jablonski

Notice how harmoniously this argument blends with polytheism. The gods did not create; they prodded, nursed, and sculpted the crude materials already present. Notice the important corollary: they had no idea what they would eventually wind up with. The artifacts of nature are as accidental as most pregnancies.

  Perhaps this simple refutation of monotheistic creation accounts seems banal to the Reader. I mention it only because of my delight at encountering it during an analysis of the origin of the Shi Tzu and the alchemy-like nature of teleology.

  “And where did all these gods come from?” the precocious Reader asks. “Aren’t you ignoring Occam’s Razor, the preference for the simplest explanation?”

  Ignoring it? Nay, I am discarding his rusty, dull blade in the trash where it belongs. The befuddling nature of Reality commands the most complex theory at all times. Accordingly, the gods evolved from lesser gods whose ultimate origin was a supernatural stew. This primordial soup was created by an earlier group of deities who were wiped out by a metaphysical meteorite. They too arose from prior gods, and so on, and so forth, down through the canyons of eternity.

  What, does an infinite regress offend your little mind? How about the speed of light? Are you alright with that or is it impossible because it aggrieves your intellect? If the Reader wishes to overcome his childlike obsession with dramatic beginnings, plausible stories, and tidy endings with distinct morals, I suggest he abstain from motion pictures, which the universe is not.

  • • •

  “Your mom wants to know if you trained Zeus to go on your neighbor’s lawn. She says the second time it looked like he was forcing it.”

  “Trained?” I chuckled. “The native genius of the Shi Tzu intuits the appropriate receptacle for fecal debris. Inform my mother that with a counterclockwise walk he would not have needed to strain himself a second time.”

  Another ominous billboard loomed as I came out of a turn, more formidable by virtue of markings greater in density and extravagance.

  “Please pull over,” said Sandy. “Mrs. Jablonski, I’m sure he’ll call tomorrow. Yeah, I noticed that too,” she whispered, glancing at me and looking away.

  Obliging her trepidation, I parked on the shoulder, fortified myself with an Oval, and watched the confounding billboard glimmer from the floodlights. Two swept in horizontal strokes, one vertically.

  “Maybe it’s an advertisement for something,” said Sandy.

  I mused, then pronounced judgment. “No. The intellectual deficit of advertisers is best likened to a black hole from which no creative or intelligent light can escape. This exhibits trace evidence of planning.”

  “Maybe it only applies to truckers or locals.”

  “That would have never occurred to me,” I said after an agonizing pause. (Spellbinding aphasia from the eye-crossing stupidity of what one has just heard is Petronius’ Tenth Sensation. In its throes, a victim goes through four distinct stages: denial, anger, despair, and then back to anger.)

  “Why?”

  “Because my subconscious filters such ideas, keeping them a safe distance from my intellect. Do you think the highway planners anticipated a steady stream of psychics, or did they believe that drivers are born knowing what this gobbledygook signifies?”

  “Please stop at the next gas station. Find out what’s going on.”

  “And register my withering contempt,” I said, checking my mirror before brushing my toe across the pedal to instantaneously attain the speed limit. “The only signs on a long dark road are unintelligible. Who would be foolish or cruel enough to invest so much energy in something that only serves to confuse and distract? Oh, did Zeus receive a belly rub?”

  “Yes, and your mom kept the classical station on for him. He spent the day looking out the window or watching Hieronymus’ piranhas.”

  “He probably spent the day in contemplation of what kind of man-child keeps carnivorous fish for pets. Did he finish both meals?”

  “Look, an exit,” Sandy said like a castaway spotting a seagull.

  The rest area pavilion resembled a flying saucer. I approached a driver foraging through his trunk while Sandy headed inside.

  “Did you happen to see two rather unusual billboards on the way here?”

  “I’m going the opposite direction, buddy,” he said, not looking away from the boxes he was arranging. “But I know what you’re talkin’ about.”

  “Is something the matter with the road?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “Then what message are those signs supposed to convey?”

  “I drive through here threes times a week for my job. I hear a lot of things about them. They say different things to different people. Some folks even fight each other over what they mean.”

  “If you were in the least concerned with the welfare of your fellow man you would assume the noble responsibility of burning them down. As a frequent traveler through these parts you are undoubtedly familiar with the terrain. Purchase a can of gasoline one night, hide your car on a back road, and you know the rest. Your selfless act will benefit generations of travelers with fretful copilots and prevent credulous fools from fighting over meaningless signs.”

  He stepped back. His appearance seemed contrived to convince clients that he cared for naught but his product, to fill their minds with the conclusion that anyone whose contours and wrappings concerned him to such a scanty extent must have his eyes fixed on another beautiful horizon.

  “Do you deny their unsettling effect on woman? I attest it from firsthand experience.”

  “Buddy, just because everyone don’t agree on what they say don’t mean they should be ignored. Those signs are important to a lot of folks.”

  “But if no one can agree on what they say how do you know they are important? If they are, why weren’t they written clearly, so all could understand them?”

  “Hey, I didn’t say no one agrees about what they mean. There’s different groups who think they mean one thing and other groups that think they mean something else. Some folks have even been killed over disagreements. But that ain’t no reason to burn them down.”

  “You have left the larger questions unanswered,” I said. “How do you know what the message is if no consensus exists on its interpretation? And why was it not written with a clarity enabling everyone to —”

  “Let me give you some advice. Most folks think it’s impolite to talk about them in public. You might wanna consider that.”

  On the way to the saucer I encountered a couple sharing a cigarette on a picnic table. The girl’s hand-woven anklets stirred a pleasant query regarding the tactile experience of clutching them during a particular act of libidinous union. To alleviate the caponizing effect of her nose, lip, and eye rings, I recalled Benjamin Franklin’s wise observation that all cats feel the same in the dark.

  “Could either of you tell me what the two hideous billboards down the highway refer to?”

  “They’re art,” the man said from behind a frightening array of face décor. Conspicuous in their absence were the lip plates worn by the Kayapo. The green splotch on his bicep demonstrated how even the lowly art of tattooing has declined.

  “Art.” I reeled from the Tenth Sensation. “And you know this how?”

  “What else could they be?” said the girl, exposing, of course, a metal bulb on her tongue that stirred an earnest query regarding another pleasant tactile experience. The tattoo on her lower back did not need to be seen. I intuited it.

  “Am I to understand that in your estimation a sufficient condition for an object’s categorization as art is that no competing justification for its existence is forthcoming? How lofty. Incomprehensibility is the essence of art. That would explain most of what we see, hear, and read these days.”

  “Maybe they mean something but no one knows what,” the man offered half-heartedly.

  “Then they mean nothing at all. Something only has meaning if there is someone there to understand it,” I said, devising an expository thought-exper
iment with a glance at the pavilion. “Imagine a UFO flying over a city and dropping thousands of unintelligible pamphlets.”

  “Just because we can’t understand something doesn’t mean it’s meaningless,” the girl said.

  Exasperated, I wondered if Socrates encountered discussants hermetic to reason. Plato probably “misplaced” the fruitless dialogues. No doubt the finest ones shine from the whitewash of an adoring pupil. If only Boswell had been his contemporary, or mine.

  Like children stricken with gigantism, my thoughts grew too fast for words to fit them, but it was essential that the couple understand. “Consider a tangential topic: the incomprehensible ravings of Nostradamus and other cryptic prognosticators. When something is open to innumerable interpretations, none of which command precedence, we can safely deride it as meaningless by virtue of its arrant ambiguity.”

  “Wasn’t he trying to disguise his message?” said the girl.

  “When no one can agree on the interpretation of something it ceases to be a message!” I told the imbecilic couple.

  “I guess,” the man said, staring at me, his jaw agape. “Hey, you asked us if we knew. We don’t. Why are you yellin’ at us?”

  “Clearly, the meaning of a message is determined by the intention of the sender, the means by which he sends it, and the recipient’s ability to understand it. What would you say about me if I wanted to warn you not to eat a certain type of berry because it is poisonous, but to achieve this I sent a card that says, ‘Slippery when wet’ written backwards in Sanskrit with half the letters in invisible ink and the paper torn to pieces? And no, the subterfuge of potential meaning is not a solution.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” said the girl, giggling, her eyes wide.

  “Honey, don’t,” the man whispered. He led her to the pavilion while keeping his eyes fixed on me.

  Was I out of line? I wondered. I knew what I meant. But what if no one else does?

  Sandy headed for the car. “Nothing to fear,” I said.

  “That’s not what I heard. The janitor said something’s wrong with the road ahead. There’s a special way we need to go.”

  “Very well. At least we settled this unpleasant account.”

  “But he didn’t say what was wrong or where.”

  “How crystalline. Though unable to interpret the signs, he knows what they refer to. We shall leave the area before we succumb to this bucolic madness.”

  “There’s a gas station next to here.”

  “Is that a test? Yes, I still recognize that the term gas station refers to that structure. My cognitive circuit breakers have yet to be thrown by the malady afflicting the locals.”

  “Please stop and ask.”

  “It would be so much easier, and in keeping with local customs, if we form our own crackpot theory and argue with anyone who disagrees.”

  “Please.”

  • • •

  A white tendril wound its way from black crust in a coffee pot, filling the station with an acrid gas. The younger attendant stood at the register and clicked a pen with the incessancy of a cricket. The elder sat at a table chest-deep in receipts, typing a calculator without watching his fingers. Above them a fluorescent light produced a disorienting strobe effect. Like a judgment of Solomon taken literally, the radio, tuned between stations, played snatches of different songs.

  “Those two billboards down the road, what do they mean?” I asked with a nauseating congeniality that Sandy would have recognized as sardonic.

  The younger stopped clicking his pen and turned to the elder who ceased his calculations and sat back in his chair. Their profiles could have been bookends.

  “Those signs have been here longer than I have,” said the elder.

  “I will be sure to put that in my diary. What do they mean?”

  The elder came to the counter and removed a pen from his shirt pocket and began a duet with the younger. The only differences between them were a few strands of hair and twenty pounds. Both sets of eyes looked out from the same cold gray room.

  “A whole lot of work has been put into them, to maintain them,” the elder said.

  “Now, as a driver who has gazed upon them but not understood them, who longs to rectify this ignorance, what should I know now that I did not know before?”

  Cicadas sang. Sulphuric gas seeped from the glass volcano. The Sons of the Pioneers morphed into Karen Carpenter and back. A malign presence filled the gray room, warming cold eyes with the flame of suspicion. “What makes you think you’re supposed to know anything?” the elder said.

  “Why put a billboard next to a road unless you want the drivers who pass it to learn something, to receive its message, to bathe in its —”

  “Wait a second. You think the billboards were put next to the road?”

  “I did not say that.”

  “The hell you didn’t,” the younger said.

  “Which do you believe: Were the signs built next to the road or was the road built next to the signs? You believe one or the other. Now which one is it?” The elder cross-examined me while the younger reached under the counter.

  “Sir, I simply had some questions. Now I have several more pertaining to eugenics, but I need no help with those. You have been most helpful.”

  “Around here we believe the road was built next to the signs. You got that?”

  “What did they say?” said Sandy.

  “As best I can tell, generations of bewildered troglodytes have been preserving the useless, annoying beacons because they deem them authoritative. What they fail to understand is how a vague message undermines the authority of the sender. We shall proceed as though they do not exist. For all practical purposes, to all enlightened drivers, such is the case.”

  • • •

  Having quieted my restive passenger, I slouched until my eyes were well below the dash. An elementary extrapolation revealed the straight road would tolerate this indulgence. I put my hands by my sides and looked through the uppermost quarter of the windshield. Blobs like the foam on root beer stood between the drab sublunary region and the twinkling lights of the empyreal. While my peripheral vision acknowledged the beam of light leading the car and the mangy silhouettes rushing past, the sky absorbed my attention, admonishing me for neglecting a breathtaking panorama in favor of a hood ornament.

  A discombobulating sensation overtook me, insisting to my cowed senses that we stood still while the plane connected to the dark shapes moved beneath us. This was not merely an amusing hitchhiker picked up by my lonely intellect. I felt it. The earth spun beneath the car, which was suspended by invisible wires. “So which one is truly moving?” I whispered, wondering if anyone else had experienced this curious spell, hereby baptized Petronius’ Eleventh Sensation, which may have some interesting entailments.

  Rotating green and purple lights in the sublunary zone exorcised the disorienting hex, forcing me to sit up and take the wheel. A billboard approached, more outrageous than either of its brothers. I looked upon the tight little ball Sandy had curled into, realized a similar opportunity would never arise, and prepared to savor the Twelfth Petronius Sensation: the experience of a pleasure that cannot be adequately described to another. I sucked my finger and gently placed it in her ear.

  “What the fuck,” she yelped, clutching her head and nearly falling off the seat. “What the fuck is wrong with —”

  “Look. Another one.”

  As she wiped her ear out with her shirt, the hideous billboard absorbed the wrath that would, under normal circumstances, have been discharged upon me. “This one has to be important. Look at the flashing lights.”

  “Ostentation and vulgarity neither entail nor bespeak importance,” I said, not bothering to glance at the display. “And what manner of beast sends an important message in such a fashion that no two people can agree on its interpretation. These crass exhibitions speak volumes about the ignominious nature of their sender, but have nothing to say to us.”

  “I ha
dn’t thought of it that way,” she said, as though my obviously correct stance were novel.

  “If a man has an important message, a message crucial to the well-being of others, and he does not divulge it in a manner that all relevant parties may comprehend, his conduct is beneath all contempt.”

  She knelt on her seat to watch the meretricious billboard’s departure. “Most people would keep trying to interpret it.”

  “Most people are fools,” I told her, and turned my attention to the composition of a historical narrative regarding the arrival of Shi Tzu in the New World.

  On the Felicitous Absence of Part XIV

  As with most of the profane graffiti adorning the restroom wall of common sense, the allegation that the number thirteen is accursed is not simply erroneous, but prejudiced and dangerous insofar as distracts attention from the baneful number: fourteen. The following is a distillation of my critique of this noxious numeral.

  Compare the relatively bland thirteenth century with the nightmarish fourteenth. Need I continue my analysis? What event in the thirteenth compares with the Black Death? What event in history? My purview does not, of course, include the decline and fall of the dinosaurs. (Although their demise, given the nature of integers, occurred fourteen years anterior to, and fourteen years posterior from, two other years.)

  In August of 1814, a tornado interrupted Britain’s heroic siege of Washington, making the wrong call for the wrong side like some referee from hell. (On the wrong side of History, am I? Thank the gods! I urge the incredulous Reader to reconsider his opposition to George III. How was this decent man worse than the many murderous and tyrannical thugs elected by American mobs?)

  The war that began in 1914 was mankind’s worst cataclysm since the fall of Rome. The litmus test of a man’s political spirit is the contempt in which he holds Woodrow Wilson, the twentieth century’s patient zero of democracy, who outlined Fourteen Points as his grand solution to the Great Stalemate he needlessly and disastrously spoiled by dragging our nation into the war. This phantasmagoric vision filled every little thug on the playground of Europe with delusions of grandeur, inspiring them to become bullies in the glorious name of “self-determination.” Verily, the sleep of monarchy breeds monsters.