Chapter 21 20

------------------ 20 When whether or not to buy a small bowl of ice cream that only holds one scoop has become a major family decision, your standard of living is undoubtedly reduced to the lowest level.The strategy of "saying no" in the dying days has now become an infinite number of powers of "no".I can't remember the last time I had coffee in the city, let alone the last bottle of aspirin or tube of toothpaste I had.The main meal was "vegetable soup" consisting of a few beans scraped from the bottom of an A&P can and poured into a large pot of soup.I haven't been to the cinema since I saw "Snow White and the Dwarfs" a long time ago.The piggy bank has been looted long ago, and all the forgotten steel coins in every corner have been swept out.In conclusion, we have sworn off all activities that involve the exchange of money, although it is astonishing that everything we humans engage in involves banknotes.Even the paper used for literary creation has been strictly controlled, and small paper heads, napkins and toilet paper have been used instead.

Since my last memorable meeting with the forensic doctor, I've been watching with almost fair interest the life I've been living before, almost every predictable event in this soap opera that could be called my whole life. All wrong, all turned sour and stinky.The car is wrecked, the marriage is in crisis, and the Soskies are in trouble.Even the dog had a problem with peeing, and the veterinarian cost $150 to perform an operation to check it. And so things like that multiplied like a prairie fire: a small fire in the kitchen, not serious but needed a new roof.A stove and a set of cupboards.The roof was leaking, and I tripped on the way to the house to check the roof tiles. To avoid falling over the wall, I stepped on the roof so hard that I sprained my ankle and broke a toe.The doctor reassured me that as long as I kept my feet off the ground for a few months, everything would be fine.The pump was out of order, and the water had to be carried in pails from a spring half a mile away.Liv was caught stealing a candy bar. The shop owner was magnanimous and did not charge the child, but only paid 15 cents to make up for the loss, because the half-bitten candy can no longer be put on the shelves.

To make matters worse, Leo called this afternoon at my expense to tell me that his book was dead. "But I thought I was done." "It should have been, it would have been," he tried hard not to cry, "so the publisher was left to send the contract." "Is that so?" "But they changed their minds," he said hoarsely, "and all of a sudden novels about fat people aren't fashionable. That's what it is. Poof." And those girls!He said they were driving him crazy.He's got to get out of Brooklyn or he's going crazy—so he's coming to live here for a while next week.The country air was good for him.

How long is a period of time?All he brought was the wardrobe and the appetite, which meant that Leo was going to eat up our house in two days, and eat up the house—everything he liked to eat couldn't escape.He was coming to Goobsville as soon as he had packed his things.Would I be honored to meet him at the bus station? The precarious life was slipping away at such a rapid rate that a few minutes ago I decided to call the last patron, Mandel, and persuade him to lend me a little less money.But you know what that pragmatist slick says?"If you keep giving someone stuff for nothing, it destroys his ego," he said.

self?what ego?Mandel, you selfish stinker, save your bloated savings account and battered storage room, I grit my teeth and stare out the window at George, who is driving the tractor on the road in front of my house again walk through.His felt-haired head came up with another bad idea. He discovered that the quickest way to collect firewood was to drag the whole tree from the jungle behind the mountain to his house across the soft road in front of my door.I sat there and watched the new pothole in the road before my door and listened to the dog moaning in pain as it lay by the door, its bladder swollen like an inflated basketball.I'm not only reminded of the nagging old question, exactly: What is "Gooberswell Crumbling" about?Is it a record of economic collapse?Or a nervous or social breakdown?Health and family breakdown?The collapse of the formerly harmonious neighborhood?Or a moral breakdown?Or, could it just be, the collapse of everything I, the Midas king of human trash, touched?

The chaos is going on, and life is getting harder every day, and I've seen it through.I have no power to recover from all this, no, I just stare helplessly and shrug my shoulders--in the face of this mess that cannot be untied and unreasonable, I become surprisingly calm.All I have left is vocabulary, and I suspect that even this precious vocabulary is running low.George felled another hundred-year-old tree, and happily dragged it up the riddled road, while I went back to the study to do my work: to complete the epilogue of Bernie's literary masterpiece, which I could hardly The deciphered words will one day become my book.Both books seem to be destined to be tragedies, but Kaufman's book takes a sudden turn because the protagonist suffers a heavy blow: Pete Miller can't urinate, his bladder is swollen like a big melon. The urologist later learned that he had a very rare malignant disease of the prostate gland and related glands - a fatal disease that not only affected his sexual desire, but also cut off his even thought of sex, and even made him health is deteriorating.

Dr. Robin wrote in his Red Book Magazine that a married life is only as good as what the wife says at the dinner table before the husband goes to work.Yet my wife hasn't spoken to me at breakfast for a long time.I wonder what exactly does this mean? Another day.It was a big day for the humble and down-and-out writer.I nearly threw up when I finished the last chapter of Bernie's book.Now it's just a matter of waiting, anticipating, and reading the catalog of New York Times bestsellers. I woke up this morning feeling groggy and have been very sad since then.The vigilantes have been asking me to "tell it all" since I was in New York, and last night I gave them all, and more than that.They yelled "Stop!" and I went on, and when I was done, even the one who picked his nostrils covered his ears.Now maybe they'll let me be quiet for a while.

Looking through old newspapers today, I found a letter written by my old friend Arnold before committing suicide. "Daily companionship of painting," Arnold wrote a week before his death, "at least two hours a day, day after day of inaction, but I must make these two hours of my daily routine radiate artistic glory— Don't underestimate the work." "My desire to associate with people is next to zero—whether or not a person needs to blend in with his kind depends on his cohesiveness." "That's why I must say goodbye to you and leave you to Nudelman. The great spiritual path remains, and it exists for all who will listen to the song of the spirit - otherwise only to the bottom of the world Or hell. Dr. Chestnut."

Life is untenable.Drinking cold water can also clog your teeth.George, who had sounded and confirmed the end of my rope with his loud radio, was now dragging his load along the road in front of the bedroom, as if begging me to get mad so that he could kill. Vivica and I did not sleep a wink all night, figuring out how to "solve the Soski problem completely and completely."In the evening, I saw Henry go to the fields with tools and small baskets to drive cattle, and a good idea popped into my mind. This was the first in a series of brilliant strategies: I could secretly poison Soth with poison The Keys, put arsenic into their meals through their cattle by feeding their old cow sweet corn soaked in arsenic--just enough arsenic to contaminate its milk without poisoning the cow.

Vivica suggested that LSD would be best.Let the family run amok with their cattle, but it would drive Maud even more mad, otherwise it would be a good idea. At dawn, I finally figured out a good way.I'm going to give George a little "reality therapy" and let him taste life through a series of major events over the next few days.Here's how it goes: I first hire George and give him a job that pays well.Fire him the next day.Then lure George into falling in love with a 14-year-old nymphet, and then, while he's indulging in his first forays into carnal desire, have some morphine-smoking thugs beat him up -- not kill him, just his Discount a few sections of the legs.As soon as George arrived home with his leg in a cast, our Goobsville nymphet showed up with her father, accused him of rape, and told a terrified George (and his demoralized wife) ), she believed she would get along with them like family.In the hell that does exist--though I don't quite know where it is--I'm going to torture George with Maud's phobia and make him drink rum, but tell him it's a new brand soda.Finally, ordering a lifetime of pornographic publications for their farm in George's name, and thus nailing the final nail in his heart.

The above is the product of a tired mind at 4 o'clock in the morning.Today, if the weather is nice, I'll check out the viability of these ideas in bright sunlight--though I admit that this last proposition is almost a great initiative. Leo called early this morning, and he expressed his sympathy for our troubles with the Soskies, and he also offered a solution. "You should put the gun to his head, put the noose around his neck, and when you're ready, pull the trigger to blow his head off." I must admit that the scene he has choreographed is all but one.We must carefully weigh the pros and cons of various disposal methods, and in short, they must be beneficial to us, no matter how far-fetched some claims are.