An Abridged Version of Jonathan Franzen's "The Correctiions"

1.

Today, huddling in the wrinkled chore of my churchy entertainment-console-roomy-kitchen-w/- convection-oven-&- ice-cube- dispenser-church-clothes, I was listening to worship rock and roll, as we all do, in our Priuses which are rising per quarter lb cost of higher education, in the coffeeshop where a wife is putting cardboard over her side of the TV, in the warm, ironed church clothes of our Home Depot rehabbed tenements.  I, intertamed, was listening to rock and roll, worshipping, and I, entertained, besotted with sod-lawn barefoot-comfort bethought to my own and no one else’s self that I was living, in deed, inside the indubitable sinking-for-praise, Titan-like and Titanic get-down party of America, her bartendress’ pussy now an overseasoned, tastelessly general dead father’s baseball glove, was a bat mitzvah and a wedding. 

Somehow I thought I no longer intended to live in a different world, maybe breasts didn’t matter, maybe I could simply cut out the opening theoretical monologue in its entirety like a malignant breast rightfully discarded from around the benign tumor.

2.

Even if I were not racked by the pain of last nite's loss in religion and billiards, even if my optometrist had told me the problem was money in pleated pants, I would always want to be, steal still, the man who ripped everyone off, like a wrapper from a gourmet wheel of cheese, when their backs were turned, like my and your SUV hemorrhaging asphalt-pared fingernails, to torment.  I read half in love as halve in love.  I swallow the all-natural licorice, a calve in love.  My clothes are old-home generators stinking in the rain.  Through the glass outer door on the 5^th floor, I see nothing but lights like socks soaked with wet, sweatbonded jackets of cows fairly well put together but which unhappily exist and are, moreso than a correction, certainly unpleasant. 

Around the corner, the crowd-sized elevator of knocking-on-glass just wanted to be a man with manikin-like dignity in this world, and I remembered, vividly as any indignity of life now available (thxxx James Cameron!) in 3D free-stream HD, that I had been meaning to move, soberly as a gingerly gloved heart transplanter, towards a more unsoberly-Sake-bomb-style of ethical hilarity and decided, then and there amidst the raw, electrically eel-like reimbursement of my rage, to visit the 39 year old, slim quim bartendress of  By Comparison, the bar on West 5^th which looked like it drank a beer at a Montana politician’s bedtime, slept in faded Faded Glory sleeveless Tops pouch tobacco and trading cards, and had her omphalos pierced with the oracular light centered, usually, in the endless promenaded commentary of and surrounding The-Most-Obvious-Place-To-Look.  I’m trying really hard to be mean about averages, medians, happy mediums, and justifying ends.  But the happy mediums, with their normal, average psychic inabilities are, usually, on average, just conning the public, justifying their meanly false means by claiming that their ends, in the end, are a healthy closure service, helping griefstricken widows “connect” with their ex-husbands again and air out the dirty laundry that’s been stinking up the skeletal-trauma in their walk-in shoe-closets for years.

I am writing this letter to tell you that I am still, despite all your odds, enjoying the cheap drive-thru tacos I am eating.  Since I haven’t felt like going anywhere at all today, I have been driving for 6 hours, writing this letter to you when I am stuck in traffic or paused at a red light.  Each word, though I’ve never been in the mafia as you fucking well know, is being taken care of.

When Chip Chipper, in a momentary lucky spell of monetarily-momentary crisis, came looking, cuff and 3G linked, for the personal assistant job, General Chamomile, practically climaxing with employerly-practical hidden enthusiasm, was on the leather sofa by the shamefaced windows with a hot mess of crayons and a sheaf of paper.  Chamomile, seeing Chip enter, picked up the skillet where he had melted down his crayons to form a psychedelic giant crayon pancake and waved the skillet at Chip, saying, “Dear Boy, I just found out I ain’t got the cancer.  Took em four days but it’s just an ole case uh tha cat scratch fevuhr.”  Chip extended a baby-cheeked hand and said, “Sir Venerably General General Chamomile, Cancer is underrated! Gives you something to live for and it grows better, without watering or precious commodified attention, than any organic garden I've ever had the privilege to see or be seen stealing genetically pure but unAmericanly small produce from!”

“Shit son! Sit Sit! Shit!” Chamomile pinkly exhorted as he retreated, still tickling himself, to his birch-laminate desk.  The wind-bellied window behind him was ultrasound-lubed with rain.  There was Pilsner-colored fog squatting a rumpus over the black, haute Hudson.  Blackish smudges suggestive of New Jersey and Springsteen-desperation dervished in the fog.  Chamomile’s trophies, on the walls, were glossy images of the cultures he had done so much to make happen, the first self-replicating kebab yogurt, the first vat-grown nanotech pacemaker, the first cellphone ever grown from the stem cells of a Bonobo-and-low-level-Nokia-employee.

I don’t wanna hear the end of any sentences.