I want to put my ideas on spikes and line my fences with the impaled children of my mind. I need a garden, a reflecting pool, a network of meticulously groomed pathways, all arrayed beneath a communist sky and lined by my skewered musings.
I would take long walks in the garden, straying every so often from the finely clipped walkways and drawing near one of my lanced notions.
“Hello,” the idea would say.
“Hello,” I would say back. “And what sort of idea are you?”
“I am the glorious and elegant solution to the problem of…” or some such nonsense would be the reply. Feisty, conceited lot, ideas. That’s why I would put them on spikes; they really have it coming, I can tell you. My grounds are ringed by a thousand spikes, and on each I would place an idea who would know the meaning of the word, “comeuppance.”
They might be grateful for my company when I deign to visit them. They might tell me that they are happy to see me again, and that they haven’t forgotten the day of their birth.
“Shut up, you lousy piece-of-shit ideas,” I would scream. The sky would hide its face from my wrath. “You are the husks of my growth, the rinds of my cheese, the singing perverted bluster of my undivided attention.” And I would stalk back to the house and perhaps fix myself a plate of chocolates.
On Sundays, I would climb up to the highest room in my house and peer through the windows at the ideas arrayed in a wide circle below. I would see their twisted, tortured forms from above, with the spikes poking up through them from below. From this height they would almost look like hors d’oevres if they weren’t so obviously spindled brain fruit.
From time to time, I would have another idea. I would explain to it that it wasn’t the idea’s fault, that it was my fault and mine alone. That would of course be a lie. I would tell it that this was going to hurt me more than it hurt the idea; I’d also be lying about that. The newborn idea would scream piteously as I plunged its helpless body over a spike. It would moan and whimper as I took it out to the fence line to stake it. Then I would go back to the house and wait for it to become something I am afraid of.
Ethan Abides 