Sam Kinison died on his back on the side of a highway seemingly talking to God. Richard Pryor’s family and friends, thinking Pryor was dead after setting himself on fire, jumped over the fence of his compound in California and stole his belongings. When they found out he survived, they jumped over the fence and put everything back. Jumped back. As empty-handed as the moon. “Let me tell you the truth,” Lenny Bruce once said, “the truth is what is and what should be is a fantasy—a terrible, terrible lie that someone gave the people long ago.” And that’s as sure as the sun. Which continues burning on without us. Which is in itself a kind of comedy, a kind of punchline. Like Pryor, there it is, setting itself on fire. And everything that happens after that is the joke. “I don’t want to die now,” Kinison said, looking up at the sky as he died. Then: “Oh, ok ... ok.” …
Corey Zeller
We spend the evening listening to folk songs from the early 2000s. Make a stew. Cut carrots the color of Halloween or your brother’s nail polish. Rib eye and onions. Oyster mushrooms dug out of the earth by some guy at the farmer’s market who always wears a T-shirt with a picture of the Earth on it. As if that means something. As if we’ve forgotten where we are. We remember when we first heard the word organic. First heard text and meme. GIF and kale. Run and scatter. How proud we were in 2014 that we’d never cheated on our spouses. That we’d never bought a cellphone. How far, now, we’ve strayed from where we thought we had gotten. What we’d become. Which is what, really, but a battered sign on someone else’s highway. All the miles they’ve made from every version of themselves. None of it matters though. Not today. We’ve found ourselves here in 2024 and there’s no search party. No last goodbyes. We grow beards. We learn how to knit. How to thrum some kind of music out of where there are no strings. We sit down to our dinner and the dark presses itself against the windows as if it were hungry. And it is. It always was. …