Victim of Surstance

What You Don't Know
by
Maxwell Sudden

       Dull the pain

       Une boulangerie ennuyeux

       As is life

       As isn't art

       As is this

       And outside, a carpentress

       With a customised setsquare saw:

       A framing device

       Of her own design

       That we will leave her to

 

       Artlessly afterthought prepositions

       And Google Translate French

   

       Nothing left but title and author

       Nothing right at all

       The crux, the main body, the child, the object, the hope, the delivery, the delivered

       The placenta, off-centre

       The whole thing

       Seven spaces over

       Difficult to justify

***

CAPS LOCK; UNDERCUT THE ABOVE.

At this stage, I'm just typing so that I can pummel the keys. I want to teach them a lesson. But the harder I hit them, the more valued they feel. I need to try using reverse psychology. Ignore the keys you hate the most. Especially __

Stupid underscore.

I might start meditating. My default state of existence is wincing. That can't be right, can it? A wince should be fairly rare. You shouldn't wince at oxygen or wood or Nathan. But I wince at all of those things.

I need to recalibrate myself. When I'm at rest, I'd like to actually be at rest. I don't want to be stressed at rest, even if it rhymes.

Meditation would probably help me stop being such a wuss.

Apparently a wuss is a cross between a wimp and a pussy. Ditto pimp.

Enough of this, though. No-one wants to read or write about my personal problems. They want something of substance. Or, if not substance, the opposite: surstance.

I'm trying to be a better writer. I just choose the wrong things to write about, the wrong times to write and the wrong font to write about.

Calibri has been covered at great length by greater, longer minds than mine.

I just googled "which animal has the longest brain".

There are lots of results about which animal has the largest brain, or the biggest brain, but that's not what I asked.

I want to know which animal has the longest brain. So the search results are useless to me.

Some might say that the animal with the biggest brain would, also, therefore, necessarily, QED, have the longest brain.

But not necessarily.

It might just be really tall.

Height ≠ Length.

Which animal has the longest brain?

We may never know. It's not the most pressing zoological issue. I'm not pretending that it is. And I'm not arguing that it should be.

I'd just like to know, that's all.

Tapeworm?

Yanked horse?

It could be anything.

***

I came up with a really fun idea last night. Really fun. You can try it.

What you should do - and I can barely type this because I'm smiling so hard - is start using the word 'property' as an adjective.

It works especially well if you're talking to an estate agent.

"Yeah, it's a good size, but... I dunno... I think, ideally, I'd prefer something a little more property."

"I suppose it's quite property... I guess we're not going to get anything much more property under our budget?"

"Well, it's propertish..."

DO YOU SEE?!

Really fun. You can try it.

Sometimes, it's these little things that make life worth continuing for a time.