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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
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AN INFANT PONDERS THE TABULA RASA.BY KENT WOODYARD- - - - Gaze upon my beauty and tremble, oh fallen humanity! Look down on my naked form writhing in this sink you call a bathtub and ponder my immeasurable capacity for good or evil. I am all that you are not, all that you once were, and all that you most fear. I am the beatific, unspoiled future of the human race, and you are rightly terrified in my presence. I realize you don't often encounter a pure potentiality that has yet to be actualized by education and sensory stimuli, and your offerings of many-colored rattles, things to suck on, and scented wipes for my unmentionable areas are received with gratitude. However, your attempts to equip me with empirical familiarity with the objects of this world are not appreciated and I ask that you cease and desist posthaste! You think I don't see what you're doing? You desire for me to learn. You fill my virgin mind with tales of an intrepid tank engine and a pair of vaguely ethnic child-explorers with the hopes that my observations will lead to prepositional statements, which when compounded will lead to further abstract concepts. I won't stand for it! Even as we speak, you are clumsily chiseling away at the blank tablet of my mind. You listen to Glenn Beck while squiring me about town on a million frivolous errands. You watch that insufferable tease, Nancy Grace, during my evening meals. You and your bearded companion season your arguments with untenable systems of ethics and jurisprudence. And I, lacking the motor skills necessary for independent locomotion or remote control operation, am forced to lie on my binky while all manner of falsehoods and Dr. Phil-isms irreparably mar my latent intellect. Truly, it is one of the great injustices of the universe that unblemished human minds are left in the care of community college educated Gilmore Girls fans. Do me a favor: keep your Middle American values and collection of Thomas Kinkade knockoffs to yourself. Please, spare me your Reaganite political leanings and affinity for Melissa Etheridge. I desire to experience stimuli pure and unbiased. I have my preexisting familiarity with space and time. What need have I for numbers, colors, letters, or late 1980s fem-rock? Thanks but no thanks, tits. I have no interest in that a posteriori knowledge you're peddling, and neither Baby Einstein nor the curiously effeminate residents of Sesame Street will convince me otherwise. I am now as I always desire to be: a kinetic force of limitless potential. Now if we're quite finished, it appears the force of my indignation has caused me to soil myself. Please direct your full attention to my hindquarters. - - - - OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES: - - - - An Infant Ponders the Tabula Rasa By Kent WoodyardE-Mail From Your Facilities Department By Rick Stoeckel Corporate Folktales: How Bernanke Tackled the Depression, as Recorded 150 Years From Now by Post-Apocalyptic Hobo Folklorists By Grant Munroe Traveling Europe In Style With Auckland Dingiroo, Dark-Age Tourist and Critic of Food and Drink: People I've Met By John Hallmann Yoga Proverbs By Crystal Schachter |
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