My German Knife Was Made in China

My problem?

That I became a genius much too early.

In retrospect it was my undoing, though I didn’t know it at the time.

Years of self-immolation followed, taking long baths in ice cold vodka, learning to play golf and then forgetting what I’d learned, then playing golf over and over, bad leg and all…

Frankly, between you and me, I was shocked when I was selected to be a SpaceX astronaut, having passed my driving test. The folks there—they’re really nice people by the way—assured me they’d be using Charlie Mingus for the soundtrack and that my collected literary works, so often overlooked by the literary community, would be taken up to outer space for presentation to a remote outpost of French deconstructionists living in the cloud above the gulf of Mexico.

As SpaceX ascended I had second thoughts—a second thought is often a best thought, at least it always has been in my experience. Mingus had barely begun “Haitian Fight Song” when SpaceX began listing, first to the right and then to the left. The thought came to me that nothing’s made anymore the way it used to be made. Corners are cut, prevarication is now Job 1, knives that claim to be German are actually made in China, and so forth and so on…

The crash was coming, I could feel it in my prehensile tail, SpaceX was losing power, even the great Charlie Mingus was beginning to sound like Elton John singing ‘Candle in the Wind.’

Knowing I had only a last few precious moments in space, I unzipped my flight suit and took out my high-altitude journal to scribble a few words that would resist gravity as best I could—

wouldn’t you love a reader who understood every word you’d written and thought the

construction of your language both elegant and beautiful, enabling the reader

to climb on top of what you’ve made knowing that he or she would be able to see

more than they were already seeing—and to thank you for it…