Tonight on Fox

 

Everyone thinks it is easy to promote Fox shows during the World Series or during football games. They don’t even consider that anyone even writes them. I bet most of the brainless hogs sitting there with their mouth open watching some roid-addled doofus try to hit something with a bat (big deal, I hit things with bats all the time and instead of being given millions of dollars I am usually asked to leave) think that Joe Buck simply goes off the top of his head and says things like “Tomorrow night it’s an all-new Grease Pyramid. Three more contestants try to climb the grease pyramid for $75,000 but they’ll have to fend off the Whackers, the Smackers, and their own friends and relatives. Are you slippery enough to beat the grease? An all-new Grease Pyramid tomorrow night. On Fox.” Do you think Buck actually could come up with “beat the grease?” Well even if you do, he didn’t.

Every day I wake up and open up The Box, which is a heavy safe that contains a half dozen different brands of smelling salts and I stick my head right in it and scream at the top of my lungs. Then I sit and watch four to six hours of new Fox television programming that I will need to come up with a promo for. This is a lot harder than it looks. You need to get to the essence of the show and sell it in a couple of sentences. You can’t just loiter around the point and hope the audience will get there because they are a bunch of dead-eyed cattle who think it’s impressive that a fat guy can throw something 90 miles an hour. So you can’t take 35 seconds to tell viewers that next Thursday on an all-new Stack, Stack faces his greatest threat yet: his own dad without telling people that Stack is actually a dog that turned into a man and became a detective with a powerful sense of smell like Phil did that time. You can’t just assume that people know that Stack is a dog-man!

You need to know what gets to the heart of the matter. There is an art to writing “Wednesdays on Fox, you’re gonna be glad you don’t have smell-o-vision with a brand new episode of America’s Stinkiest. Who is going to be the one who brings guest judge Breckin Meyer to his knees? America's stinkiest. After an an all-new Wyoming Plaid.” That requires a totally different type of promo than when you’re writing for “The Stink,” which is about a detective nicknamed “The Stink” who is as brilliant as he is irascible. These shows did not overlap, by the way. 

You think I care what happens to these shows after I write my promos? I don’t really watch TV anyway outside of work. The only thing that I know, for example, about Mantis & Mantis is that it is 2002’s hottest law drama and on this week’s episode a high-powered attorney’s biggest case yet is how to conceal his steamy affair with the opposing lawyer. Or that tomorrow night on Fart Circus, someone’s going to get farted on “real bad.” What I like to do is I go out late at night with my friends to an industrial park and line up a bunch of empty cans and we drive our motorcycles through them repeatedly which we call “riding the shark.” That’s the kind of stuff I’m into.

So the next time you hear Joe Buck say “Tuesday, it’s America’s funniest and rockin’est new comedy Butterface. Five friends. One band. Can they make it in L.A.? Who will end up with the bassist next door? And will the record company make them change their band name from Butterface? With original music by Shep Lunk. It’s Butterface, Tuesdays, on Fox” you’ll know that it wasn’t just some dumbass who came up with that. This is what I do. 

Remains of the Season, by Joe Bruin

 

It appears that my trip to the Mid West is more likely to happen.  I spoke to Interim Coach Skipper and he told me I did not need to remain with the team while they performed their calisthenics and tackling rituals and that I should take a golf cart that says “Bruins Football” and is used to cart around players with broken femurs and drive up to the Evanston area.

The football facility has been more empty than it was in the days of Coach Foster.  In those days, it was full of visiting dignitaries: Bill Walton, Dorian Thompson-Robinson, even Stephen Davis.  The best of the Professional Sports landscape convened here, and I was very busy fist-pumping at them and carrying various flags, and occasionally doing complicated hand-slapping rituals with their children. Coach Skipper has favored a more austere environment, wanting the players to focus on the fundamentals and not as he said “taking selfies doing butt bumps with the mascot.”  These are not the ideal conditions for mascotry, but I also believe that the professional is able to work within whatever restrictions the Coach sets.

I have, with other professionals, discussed the essential traits of a good mascot. I believe that the essence of good mascotting comes from the principle of buffoonery. The mascot must be a silly, jovial oaf whose antics entertain the crowd without ever becoming a sad or macabre spectacle. One’s thoughts naturally turn to stories of the infamous inflatable velociraptor who attempted to rollerskate down stars, slipped, and went flying as its mouth flopped open in a disgusting, leering spectacle, its tail deflating in silence as it was swarmed by medical personnel. The crowd was not guffawing but terrified that the fool had broken his limbs. My colleague, the duck from Oregon with whom I had passed many hours discussing the finer points of our profession, also pointed to the time the Denver Nuggets mountain lion passed out while being lowered from the arena ceiling before landing on the floor in a lifeless heap in a demonstration that looked like a warning sent from a rival mascot crime family.

The professional mascot should charm and delight, unlike, for example, the dreadful Stanford “tree.” I had endured its disgraceful antics for several years every time it visited, many times suspiciously wavering and tottering in an amateurish stomach-turning parody of the types of wholesome capering about one should expect from a trained mascot.

It is difficult to describe what I mean by professionalism in buffoonery, but I often heard this anecdote from my father, also named Joe Bruin. He told me that he heard of a mascot who had gone over to a section filled with rowdy children who had spent hours at a tailgate ingesting the type of candy where one licks a sugary stick and then swirls it around in pure sugar, and he had een warned that these children had already been chided for roughhousing. Nevertheless, the mascot walked over there, greeted the children and the largest and most aggressive went in for what appeared to be a hug before kicking the mascot in the most sensitive of regions. He wandered off into the tunnel to shake off the pain before returning to the section and another child then repeated the motion. Once again he returned to the tunnel before going out again, knowing the fate that awaited his most delicate parts, and once again another child delivered. A cheerleader organizing t-shirts to be thrown to the crowd said you cannot keep going out there, please find another section, but the intrepid mascot, without flinching, took another five kicks and one punch without showing pain, discomfort, or disgust, and managed to high five and take photos with more than a dozen children in the section. The mascot completed the game before retreating to his quarters with a package of frozen peas, a job honorably and professionally done.

Many mascots become briefly fashionable as the ideal of the profession.  For a time, I suppose it was Gritty, a hockey mascot with maniacal eyes and a morbid, terrifying grin.  I suppose those in the profession valued a mascot who appears to be performing his duties with the unhinged enthusiasm of an escaped maniac, but I suspect it will not be long until the pendulum swings in the other direction and the professional standard defaults to those of us who have perfected the more subtle mascotry arts instead of flashy, fashionable antics such as breakdancing or leaping from a trampoline and dunking flaming basketballs before getting immediately sprayed by a team with fire extinguishers.

I motored up the scenic environs of Interstate 90 from the airport, bludgeoned by the ubiquity of Brian Urlacher hair replacement billboards.  Urlacher is himself one of the most famous Lobos from New Mexico, a program that contributed to an incident that led to the ouster of Coach Foster.  I do not care for the slanderous insinuations about Coach Foster.  In my experience, Coach Foster was a good, honorable coach who acted from the most noble instincts of his way of life. I do not believe that it was a defect of character that led to the team deploying their linebackers ineffectively against the relentless New Mexico rushing attack, nor do I think it was his intention to put heralded transfer quarterback Nico Iamaleava in a position where his statistics are well below where they had been at the University of Tennessee even though he had deployed a large section of the program’s resources to bring him over to our facility.  
It is not the job of the mascot to question the Coach on the direction of the program but only to stir up the fans in support, to do pushups after scoring touchdowns, and to never hang one’s head or be caught by cameras in the “surrender cobra” position after an ill-advised turnover or defensive breakdown. These things are simply not done by the professional mascot.

As I motored up the twisting byways of Evanston, I could not help but think of how things had been in the heady early days of Coach Foster’s leadership.  In those days, we had a larger staff of mascots, particularly with my colleague Josephine Bruin. From time to time, she would try to show me videos of other mascots such as the time Tommy Lasorda tried to assault the Philadelphia Phanatic after it made a series of provocative belly shakes in his direction and the old Coach was offended enough to try to steal the Phanatic’s personal ATV and to knock down the mascot and beat him with the Phanatic’s own crude effigy of himself, a video that I admit I had watched alone in my parlor during off-hours several times and found very amusing despite the Phanatic's actions that went beyond what I feel is appropriate mascot behavior.

Of course, I had explained that I was far too busy attending to my duties: checking “Let’s Go Bruins” cards to make sure that no one had slipped in a card with obscenities, combing the costume fur, cleaning and oiling every part of the hot dog gun to make sure that it fired consistently and regularly but would not cause an injury to a spectator's face. I suggested if she has time to watch Phanatic videos, she surely had time to take comical photos with Jonathan Ogden where he looks enormous compared to even the largest mascot heads, as I had been alerted that he had just arrived on campus.

I arrived at the Lake and saw another mascot just sitting there, saying perhaps to no one in particular how much he enjoyed the smell of dying fish in the air on a crisp autumn day.  He turned to me and noticed that I too was a mascot.  He asked where I had come from and I told him I was the Bruin after working for the interim Coach. I am not sure why I did not mention working for Coach Foster. 

The Wildcat told me he was slightly embarrassed discussing important matters of mascotry with me, a mascot who worked in the Rose Bowl while he was at home in a stadium that fits fewer people than our basketball arena.  But we both, I suppose, were working at difficult times.  “I have heard that previous mascots here were locked in a cage until Northwestern scored, which rarely happened, back in the ‘80s,” the Wildcat said.  I resolved that no matter what happened that afternoon I would learn some of the more restrained antics that Coach Skipper preferred, perhaps a Jose Canseco-style forearm bump.

Infinite Big Ten Cities

 

The Great Big Ten Commissioner has an atlas of all of the cities in his empire. “Sometimes,” the Commissioner says to Marco Polo, “it seems that it is easier for you to describe cities from this atlas than the ones you have actually been to.”

“For these cities, I just need a glimpse,” Marco Polo says. “I just need to see how the light looks when the sun sets over their jumbotron. To smell a single bratwurst wafting from a tailgate. To know how close I am to a Culvers. From there I will put together the perfect Big Ten city, one made from fragments, from the combination of space and time, from the collision between memory and plans for the future, from the people who have dwelled in a city from time immemorial and the people who will arrive and make it their home, buildings reassembled from ruins only to be razed again and cultures rising and collapsing the same way.

In this way, I can see infinite Big Ten cities. These elements already exist in some city in the world and they will be put into infinite combinations in cities that have existed or will exist somewhere on earth or within your Conference. Once you see their forms, you only need to be able to put them together in different ways to see cities that do not yet exist but yet already exist somewhere. The landscape of cities is flattened across time all being built, existing, and being destroyed simultaneously within the Big Ten into bigger tens, tens not even yet in your empire.”

The Great Commissioner paused and took a puff off his pipe. “How many of these infinite cities do you think we can get into the Playoff?” he said.

Cities and Language V: Minna

 

The Great Commissioner brought his foreign envoy Marco Polo to the seat of his empire’s greatest crown jewel. It sits at the nexus of all known types of transportation with rail lines and great highways and even airplanes landing majestically overhead. He takes them through a complex of inns and sites of great exhibitions of goods from lands that even Marco Polo has never heard of. It is ringed by portraits of an unsettling man with an uncanny head of hair impossible to exist in nature. 

The Great Commissioner takes Marco Polo to the seat of his empire, an ornate palace that shares a parking lot with a meat restaurant. It is across the highway from a minor league baseball stadium named for a hot dog where the ketchup mascot is regularly imprisoned and humiliated to reflect the tastes of the populace who abhor that condiment. 

“Tell me, Marco Polo,” the Commissioner says. “In all of your travels and all of the cities you have told me about, could you ever envision a city like this?”

“No,” Marco Polo said. 

Cities and Language V: Minna 

One arrives in the great city of Minna by road or perhaps even by the river through the gates and marvels at the enormous inflatable buildings and structures ingeniously designed to shield its residents from the harshest of the elements. The city is prosperous and tidy as residents bustle around conducting their business. It is only when a visitor attempts to speak to a Minnan that they will be utterly befuddled by how they communicate in this city.

The residents here speak in an almost impenetrable argot of slogans and acronyms. For example, a visitor simply attempting to greet a stranger and perhaps ask for directions will be told “Board the Train!” and when they ask for further clarification being told that “train” is an acronym that stands for “take risks and invalidate naysayers” before the person will chestbump the visitor. 

Even those practiced in Minna-speak can get tripped up. An experienced guide who spent a happy childhood in Minna and then left to pursue studies in other parts of the Commissioner’s vast kingdom before returning to serve as an interpreter for visiting dignitaries suffered a humiliating breakdown while trying to convey the meaning of G.A.R.G.A.N.T.U.A.N. somewhere around the second G. Even years later he could barely get through the story without holding back tears. “That is too many letters for a motivational acronym,” he said. “A child could see that.”

Despite the bizarre and oblique methods of speaking by telling each other to “readying hard means going hard” when “h.a.r.d.” is an acronym that in some tortured way ends up meaning trying hard, the people of Minna understand each other. There is a sort of labored poetry to their words. Unfortunately, this type of speech can lead to problems. I once witnessed a man greet a friend with “maximum drive means driving your max” and the two men disagreed with whether the V in drive stood for Velocity or Vicissitude. The two men came to blows on a sidewalk, pulling each other’s dri-fit quarter-zips over their heads exposing the shirt and tie they wear underneath and pummeling each other until passersby urged them to be K.I.N.D. (kindness is never donnybrooking).

The residents are kind and welcoming, largely because they are happy to sit down for hours and explain what their various sayings and acronyms mean. They are excited because it has taken their ancestors hundreds if not thousands of years to compile such a beguiling and twisting language that follows its own logic, even if it is kind of silly. But because they cannot speak without their comforting store of aphorisms and sayings, every conversation mushrooms into an even more impenetrable nest of references. I recommend staying away from Minna at all costs.

Cities and Legal Structures II: Anna

 

The Great Commissioner has an atlas that shows all of the cities in his conference’s empire. He shows it to Marco Polo who sees them unfold from coast to coast, popping up features. The explorer remembers the freeways of Angelina unfolding before him in a shimmering, endless ribbon whose haze formed a curtain between the real and the possible. He remembers the great and terrible grotesques of Lafeya, their hammers poised above his head. And he remembers Piscataway, where he once had a nice sandwich.

"When you return to Italy, will you tell the people about the cities that you see?" the Commissioner asks.

“Each person is only able to receive the stories they can understand. When I talk about a city where memories are at war with the living, the gondolier or stevedore hearing it can only understand from the context of their own memories, their own ghosts. That city will be entirely different than the same city I tell you about, Commissioner. The cities all exist simultaneously to buttress and destroy each other.”

“What’s the cable TV market like for football where you’re from?” the commissioner asks.

It is an unwise traveler to Anna who arrives without legal representation. The city of Anna is a city of formal complaints, lawsuits, and hearings. To walk down the street is to invite a summons or be deposed as a witness to a dispute happening several feet away. 

The citizens of Anna are busy appearing in courts, writing letters, and demanding evidence. They move furtively through alleys and sewers to avoid further complaints and denunciations and subpoenas. Or they sneak about themselves, trying to track down the targets of their lawsuits. The largest growing industry in Anna are people who will disguise themselves to deliver notices. They pop out of garbage receptacles and paint themselves like tree bark; they hoist themselves onto ceilings and dangle themselves from light fixtures. The most diabolical of them disguise themselves as someone their target is serving papers to only to whirl around serve their target before anyone has time to activate a smoke bomb and melt into the streets.

The city is filled with discarded paper from letters and transcripts. They blow into alleys and onto people’s faces. There is so much official paper flying from windows and open doors and briefcases accidentally jarred and flying open while a dimayed Annan sinks to his knees that the sheets stick together and congeal into hardened bricks. These paper bricks form into large structures that are the only things built in Anna. It is legally impossible to do any sort of construction, and people cram into wobbling paper buildings to hide from each other or to spring through the walls unexpectedly.

The people of Anna send their disputes to courts, committees, and government bodies. But these organizations are beset by infighting and formal complaints as well. All day, matters are referred to responsible bodies whose members are off filing motions each other or disguising themselves as statuary in order to serve papers to rival members. They all form networks of complex alliances and constantly betray each other. They ambush each other with trick complaints that actually turn out, when read aloud, to be a complaint against the person reading it. No dispute has ever been successfully settled.

The citizens of Anna have heard about this section of my writings and dispute it. I have already had fifteen pointed legal documents delivered by a boat navigating around the most treacherous capes to get here and demand my appearance in Literature Court before getting another note that Literature Court had been dissolved and placed under the aegis of Literary Court and then another telling me to disregard the previous letter, Literature Court had in fact never gone anywhere and is in fact suing the members of Literary Court for Court Infringement before getting another letter telling me that Literature Court is actually dissolving and I was hearing from the true Committee on the Activities of Literature Court and not a series of belligerent imposters, who had sent the previous letters and are themselves the target of multiple lawsuits. I also received a letter that was just a drawing of a hand making an obscene gesture.

Under the advice of counsel, I should like to tell the Great Commissioner that Anna is an ordinary city with no unusual features.

Cities and Memory: Linka

 

Big Ten Commissioner Tony Pettiti told Marco Polo that he would tell him about Big Ten cities and Marco Polo would tell him if they existed. "Here is an enormous, teeming city," Pettiti said. "Buildings pile up next to buildings. All manner of people that have ever existed bounce off each other on unimaginable business.  And yet, despite their differences, there is one thing that unites them: wanting to watch small, regional football teams from suburbs or even small towns nowhere near them on television. Every single week, they huddle together around television sets fervently hoping to see their team or other teams from cities hundreds or even thousands of miles away play, and in their excitement they are willing to buy the products they see on screen: extra large men's pants, various braces for sore limbs, farm implements. Every person in these gigantic cities where they are crammed next to each other in small apartments will order a backhoe or one  one of those string spinners used for weeds."

"Great Commissioner, I have not seen such a city," Marco Polo says.  I have seen a city where no one sleeps, where dreams become corporeal and mingle with the half-awake people. Where the distinction between dream and reality becomes blurred and so it has been for generations, no one quite able to determine whether they are in the city or in its familiar but convoluted double, where connections between the dreamers are ephemeral and yet somehow more lasting than in cities where people can differentiate between them. They float on gossamer streets that might not be there and nothing is where it is supposed to be. Those are the cities I have seen."

"You're always seeing cities like that," the Commissioner said.

Cities and Memory: Linka

Linka, the great city of the past.  Everyone in Linka knows that the city had once had been astonishingly prosperous, covered in riches, everyone happy and learned.  The love of the city's past is palpable.  They say that anyone born in Linka or who lives there long enough, no longer even sees the city as it exists, but in their mind's eye they travel the great thoroughfares and boulevards in their own parades celebrating the city's former glories.

Conversation in Linka only consists of the recitation of these former triumphs.  The residents' devotion to ancient scholars and poets and architects who built the great libraries and gardens and palaces is so clear that these great figures seem alive and well in Linka.  Their teachings and personalities have been passed down so thoroughly it is as though they can still speak. But they are not alive. Years of interpretation and scholarship and popular bastardization have created competing versions of the same figures. People in Linka sometimes argue over the merits of these great ancestors, arguments that lead to shoving matches and the inevitable interjection of passesby, who proclaim that the celebrated old figures would never shove, except for Balon The Shover who had perfected the art beyond the comprehension of any contemporary Linkan. "To shove like that is barbarity unworthy of Balon The Shover," is a refrain that is sadly more common than ever in contemporary Linka.

You would think that Linka is covered in monuments and statues and museums to honor the glories of the the city's storied past. But the city is barren. No one can agree when the golden age of the city was. Every person seems to have a different idea of when Linka was a guiding light to the world and when it has shrunk to its present decrepitude. Any meeting where someone proposes erecting a monument descends into denunciations and recriminations and the inevitable bout of shoving. Even after a particularly vigorous bout of shoving when someone suggested building a statue to honor Balon The Shover, a small but insistent faction denounced Balon and claimed that it was actually his successor Pleton The Pusher that had perfected the art, and that whatever shoving Balon The Shover was doing was low, brutish calisthenics. It took three days for the people of Linka to stop shoving each other. A similar episode happened after a suggestion to dedicate a street to Uliot The Chest Poker.

The city of Linka as it presently exists can never compare to the glories of the city in the past, and that makes the people who live there disgusted with their own city. They cannot build anything new because they fear it would compare unfavorably to what was there before, but they cannot admit that the desolate ruins of old, rotting buildings can ever be destroyed because of what they meant. The people of the city lead double lives, traipsing around the imagined city of past glory in their own heads while they grow ever more upset with the state of their own city as it exists, the one they traverse every day.  Linka is a city trapped within a million other cities that perhaps never existed, smothering the present. 

Cities and Transportation IV: Lafeye

 

Every night, the Great Commissioner Tony Pettiti and Marco Polo would sit at Big Ten headquarters smoking as the Venetian described the cities of his empire to him.  One night, Pettiti said to Marco Polo, "every night you tell me about the cities in my realm and yet we sit here smoking. You do not ever seem to leave this Rosemont Fogo de Chao." "Commissioner," Marco Polo said while flipping over his meat card, "consider that a city that is not a fixed place in space or in time, but a collection of memories. These memories build and perhaps are more important than bricks, and mortar, and roads. Cities are a collaboration between the living and the dead in simultaneous realms, for without the dead the city is an empty husk, a collection of asphalt and steel imbued without any meaning. Do you have to travel to a city or can you merely rearrange collections of memories until you can see every city?" The Commissioner chuckled, not completely believing what Marco Polo said but also realizing that the alternative to listening to him was to watch a Rutgers football game.

Cities and Transportation IV: Lafaye

There is no way to get to Lafaye from a road or by boat. The only way to enter the City of Rails is on a train. The entire city exists on rails.  Every road, pathway, and alley, and even the floors of large buildings have been torn up and replaced with tracks and elaborate switching systems. Different trains are constantly moving through the city: zippy cars carrying passengers, ponderous freight cars, trucks that have been mounted on rails to move them from the outskirts of the city, hand carts pumped by Pumpoliers in colorful costumes who belt out songs as they pant that are immediately drowned out by the ferocious roar of a passing train.

Some people in Lafeye wear elaborate rail boots with wheels on the bottom. They propel themselves up and down the tracks with large poles that the push from side to side like kayak oars. The traffic as the tracks narrow through tunnels and around rivers matches the pace of the slowest train. There is no way to pass, so Lafayens are patient and unhurried. But not perfectly so.  Every so often, there is a dispute or a scuffle where two people shove each other with their train-oars and try to roll the opponent off the rails entirely where they will be trapped and flailing until a train car with a joist can lift them back onto the rails to continue their journey.

To move around Lafaye requires travel in a predetermined circuit. Everyone is always going the same way. No matter where you thought you wanted to go when you started out in your journey, the city of Lafaye will deliver you to where you are supposed to be. This does not seem to trouble the residents of the city, who exist with a good-humored fatalism.

The defining aesthetic of Lafaye is grotesque. The only art in the city consists of large, hideous statues of people with jutting chins and eyes dilated with madness wielding heavy bludgeoning instruments. These grotesques stand at every corner designed to surprise and terrify unsuspecting visitors. Some are spring-loaded to leap out unexpectedly at passing trains. The Lafayens know where all of them are at all times and they simply smile and smooth their blonde mustaches.

Take a Lafayen out of the city and this person will fall into the throes of confusion. Put them in a sunny plaza and tell them they can walk in whatever direction they want and they will stand still, unable to comprehend the idea. Tell them they can take a car or a boat and they will worry.  They will even regard a street car with some suspicion. Show them stairs and they will panic and fall down.

The Lafayens seem happy with their lot, boarding trains, taking them where they will go, and being deposited with the flow of the crowd or forced to continue riding around the city until the train stops. There is no concern with what to do next. They are content, even if every night they all end up in the same soot-covered train depot where the trains stop and rest for the next morning. The people of Lafaye do too.

Cities and the Future I: Happylis

 

At first Marco Polo and the great Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti could not communicate in the same language. Polo was mystified by what Petitti and his court meant when they kept demanding to see a “deck.” But Petitti soon came to understand Polo’s description of his conference’s far-flung cities that he would never see because there are so many of them through a series of gestures: Polo stomping around like an ungainly giant meant that there were fullbacks there, grabbing his head and pretending to angrily undo a chin strap meant that the city featured an inept Big Ten West-style quarterback, squinting into the middle distance meant an overmatched coach on the hot seat. Eventually, Polo mastered the Commissioner’s language and the Rosemont dialect spoken in his court, but after several conversations, he and Petitti soon decided that the gestures told him much more.

Cities and The Future I: Happylis

The city of Happylis is the great unfinished city of the conference. Every person you talk to in Happylis is excited to tell you about the great treasures that the city will have eventually. Every place you stand is the site of a future monument or edifice. And every person has a different idea what it will be. For example, you can stand in an alley and talk to one Happylisian and he will tell you that you are the foundations of what will be a great museum. Run into another person (the Happylisians are very busy) and she will tell you that you are standing where there will be a brilliant spire with decorations that will bathe the city below in different type of light depending on the position of the sun, turning the entire cityscape in its shadows into a psychdelic art project. It is a city that is becoming.

But while the optimism for the future radiates through every person in Happylis, all of them are despondent about the present. Here, any existing museum is a dump, any existing spire is a ruin, and any existing structure is only a placeholder meant to be demolished and paved way for something larger, bolder, and better. Everywhere there are signs on walls depicting what is going to eventually be there and contrasting signs with differing visions. 

On one building, largely considered the finest and most intricate in Happylis, the entire edifice has been covered in placards going up ten or eleven stories where residents have been feuding for decades about whether it is going to be a luxury hotel or an elaborate arena for laser tag; this argument for several stories until, as you reach the upper floors, the placards give way to personal insults about the person who had made the placard immediately below it. For two stories, the placards go back and forth in threats where the placard-writers threaten to fight each other, sending each other hypothetical combat moves. 

“Pig fucker!” one placard reads. “All you do is write on placards. When I see you in the arboretum (which will eventually be replaced with a helipad) I will do drum fills on your skull with my nunchucks.” “Swine-rutter! I have sketched a picture of my elbow on this placard to exact 1:1 scale so you can prepare for it to meet your solar plexus!” No one, as far as I can tell, has ever fought, and both placard-writers seem content that they had made their point.

The one thing everyone in Happylis can agree on is that the current leadership in the city cannot fulfill their future vision. Everyone spends all day with plans to depose the leader, to throw him in an oubilette. Every poster with his picture, warmly smiling on the site of hypothetical construction, immediately becomes a site for outdoor bowel relief for even the fanciest citizens. Those in their regalia, tails flapping in the wind, elegant evening gowns enmeshed in elaborate scarves that are cut to seem like they come directly from the neck, stop immediately and erect elaborate screens that they carry for this purpose to they can befoul pictures of city leadership. “He will not build the sky library,” one of them tells me as he laps up water to assault an etching of the city leader at a bus station. “That maniac wants to build a sky library” another one on tells me as he charges toward the same image.

For the traveler who is cursed to see Happylis as it is, the city is bustling and idyllic. But after spending any length of time there, the traveler begins to see the city becoming. The entire city becomes subsumed to becoming, the present becomes poisoned. The charming neighborhood becomes a slum, the parks a blemish. The streets curdle and disintegrate. Happylis drowns in its prosperous misery.

Cities and Transportation Infrastructure I: Angelinal/Cities and Waterfowl I: Eugenia

Tony Petitti does not necessarily believe Marco Polo when he describes the various cities of the Big Ten. In the life of any Conference Commissioner, there is a pride in conquering vast swathes of new territory and a melancholy and relief of knowing he should give up any thought of knowing or understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes in the evening, with the smells of unlimited Brazilian meats waft into his Rosemont headquarters and the traffic from the Jane Addams intensifies into a steady roar of passing cars rather than the grind of stalled traffic, and the din from the Chicago Dogs baseball stadium has died down. Only through the tales from the Venetian explorer could Commissioner Petitti grasp the subtle patterns.

Cities and transportation infrastructure 1: Angelina

Angelina is a great city of roads. The roads form a great circuit around the city and the residents travel through them all day every day to unknowable ends. The city is divided into those who can still remember the purpose for which they set off on the road and those who have forgotten and only travel upon the roads for lack of understanding of what else to do. 

Travelers are constantly broadcasting their complicated routes to other travelers and describing the parts of the city they have heard about– the beaches, the gardens, the tar pits, the elevated street taco place that’s still authentic– they are all constantly explaining these plans and meticulously broadcasting them to other travelers who are making and explaining their own plans. The travelers all take to the airwaves to talk about their routes and then appear on other travelers’ broadcasts to have the same conversation.

Somewhere nestled in the mountains through ribbons of road there is a large, flat, bowl. The sun sparkles on it before setting into a picturesque scene, like a softboiled egg nestled in a purple broth. And yet, the bowl is empty. Travelers discuss games that take place there, they relay explanations of complex plays and detailed descriptions of violent tackles, but no one can verify them since they are not there. They have played an infinite number of games, each one altered by a traveler who has not seen it but has heard of it, the games warp in the retelling and become another game. In some accounts these games turn into perverse spectacle and others turn into farcical comedy, impossible comebacks, the endless, recursive return of onside kicks into touchdowns.

No one has seen the games because no one is there. The travelers of Angelina are circling the stadium in loops simultaneously arriving and departing until it is impossible to determine which is which. It all blurs into the same road.

Cities and waterfowl 1: Eugenia

The citizens of Eugenia complain of neck pain because they are always looking up. Their necks stick that way. Older residents are no longer able to see their own shoes and need to have them placed on by children with more pliant, flexible necks. Toddlers crawl and call out obstacles on the ground to older relatives, an imperfect system since they do not have a keen eye to discern obstacles, but they have been deputized for this important job by being lowest to the ground.

The residents of Eugenia must keep their heads up at all times because the city has a duck. Every day, the man-sized duck flies across the city on a nest of zip lines. The tallest buildings have been repurposed into zip line towers, and this duck zooms around, low to the ground, its webbed feet constantly clattering into unaware heads as distracted citizens are knocked into creeks and merchant stalls filled with fresh fish. Before the Eugenians adopted their signature pose, the duck was knocking scores of people to the ground every day as it zips around toward a purpose that no one has discovered.

Every day, the Eugenia go about their business to the din of the zipline and enter their low-ceilinged buildings where they read and write on their own ceilings and hang their belongings so they do not trip on them. Doctors say it takes five years for outsiders to be able to look up vigilantly enough to avoid the duck and unaware visitors expect to get kicked or belly bumped by a ziplining duck at least three times each day, depending on the duck’s activities.

The people of Eugenia like their duck and are horrified at any suggestion that the duck should be harmed or stopped from maniacally ziplining into the populace. You should get out of its way, they say to anyone who protests. This is simply what the duck does in this city. You should not carry large bundles of eggs or panes of glass. 

The duck is whimsical. Every small joy of looking forward or bending over to smell flowers or even to avoid stepping into a pothole or pile of animal waste is subsumed to the enjoyable spectacle of a duck flying around, hopping from line to line, expertly lining up in front of a baker carrying an enormous layer cake unaware of the duck’s whereabouts. 

No one needs to bicker or spread gossip. The only acceptable topic of conversation in Eugenia is what the duck is up to or speculation about where the duck might be going next or even talking to each other as if they were the duck him or herself even though the duck’s own thoughts are entirely inscrutable. People come to Eugenia with hopes and dreams and fears but they happily subsume them to hopes and dreams and fears about the duck in an annihilating relief.

The duck also has a motorcycle.