journal of the ridiculous
by Aaron Burch
I looked at Kellie like, what the fuck are you talking about?
“When you were still sleeping,” she said. “I heard a guy outside say to someone, ‘Five days to the next dance fest!’”
I’d heard her the first time, but it sounded funny. It was that phrase—dance fest—but something else, too. Or maybe it was just the phrase.
Kellie was on her couch, under a blanket. From my angle, the sun through the windows made the TV a mirror. A little wobbly, all lens flares and sunlight gradient, but Monk was walking onto a tour bus.
“It’s KoЯn!” Kellie said.
An off-kilter kind of joy to wake up to. I hadn’t needed to be told. I recognized them. And also we’d seen this episode already, a few months before. Still. It’s hard to explain why, but the band on the tour bus being KoЯn was perfect. Maybe it was Kellie’s enthusiasm, the way she’d exclaimed it, that made me believe so. I could feel my heart shimmer and sparkle with electricity pumping into it, glowing it bright. Edison was right, efficiency be damned, Tesla’s alternating current wasn’t what this felt like.
“I’m surprised I fell asleep,” I said. Kellie was sprawled out and I was sitting perfectly upright, model of good posture.“I’m not. It’s what you always do.”
A gift. What a joy—another!—to be able to fall asleep so easily, so quickly. Still. I’d slept well the night before, hadn’t felt tired, it was the middle of the day. What wasn’t surprising to one person could be to another.
“What about…” I started, trying to think it through out loud. “Something about… being a sleep instructor? Or a trainer? Or… you know. I don’t know. Something about how good I am at sleeping?”
I laughed at myself. At how I’d put it. How good I am at sleeping? Kellie knew what I meant.
“Pretty sure we already have that,” she said.
I grabbed my notebook off the end table next to me, flipped through the pages. Sure enough, two months before, almost to the day:
• Sleep Instructor? Trainer?
I laughed at myself again. I’m predictable. I wondered if she’d been pretty sure, like she’d said, or sure sure. I wondered if saying it like that, couching declaration in uncertainty, was something she’d picked up from me.
“Oh!” Kellie said, and got excited anew. “That reminds me! I had an idea while you were still sleeping.”
That was it! The still. ‘While you were still sleeping,’ she’d said. It was weird.
“An ice cream place with flavors like cheeseburger, pizza, coney island—”
“Savory ice cream?” I asked. I’d wanted to point out the tic of that still, but she’d jumped right over it, same as she had my confirmation that we did indeed already have “Sleep Instructor,” and then I followed her jump, part confirming I understood her idea and part because I like the word. Savory. I wanted to hear myself say it out loud. And then we both just kept moving forward. I tried to make a mental note to circle back, knowing I’d forget.
“Exactly!” Kellie said. “Well, savory flavors. Still ice cream though. Sugar, cream. Still dessert.”
“I love it!” Which. I did and I didn’t. I didn’t actually have any desire to eat pizza-flavored ice cream, and wasn’t sure who might, but that didn’t matter. It was a fun idea, that was what I loved.
It was all quantity, volume. A numbers game. To brainstorm as many ideas as possible that might one day make us rich. Most were ridiculous, most made no sense at all, business or otherwise, truth be told. It was all more like a game than any kind of actual business- or life-plan brainstorm.
Our only rule: we weren’t allowed to say anything was a bad idea. Even something as small as scoffing or questioning logistics or plausibility was off limits. That was the whole idea—write down every idea. Ideas give birth to more ideas. And, more than anything, entertain ourselves. That was part of the fun. The trick of it. It wasn’t about plausibility. It had nothing to do with making good business sense, or even being possible.
That was one of my ideas or theories or hypotheses or whatever about most of life, in fact: never rule anything out just because it might seem ridiculous.
We’d both been taught the entirety of existence had been created in 6 days and now we were supposed to move on and forget about an idea just because someone might not want savory ice cream? Everything beautiful was unbelievable!
Under “Sleep Instructor? Trainer?” I wrote the date in the margin, and then added:
• savory ice cream
I looked over my handwriting, read back our last few ideas:
• 1-900 number for trade naming athletes back and forth
• craft store/bar
• umbrellas for the snow
• foldable skis (to fit inside backpack?)
• paintball skeet shooting
• “Bin there, dump that” dumpster company
• bench house
I wasn’t sure what that last one meant. Had already forgotten the conversation it had come from. That was an unexpected side effect of the project, the game, whatever you want to call it—it had become something of a diary, the only I’d ever been able to keep up. Our “journal of ideas,” we’d started calling it, and then, embracing the absurd, our “journal of the ridiculous.”
I went back, added a parenthetical as reminder:
• savory ice cream (cheeseburger, pizza, coney island)
“Oh yeah!” I said, remembering an idea I’d had a day or two or seven before. One of those ideas I’d had when by myself and, instead of making a note or some other reminder to tell Kellie later, I’d made a promise to myself that I knew I was likely unable to keep, to just remember it. But here it was! Resurrected from the graveyard of forgotten ideas!
I watched Kellie watch me. She lit up, responding, I presumed, to my own lighting up.
“Your heart?” she asked.
It was true. A series of bleeps and screeches and chimes and pings was shooting out from my heart, vibrating through my veins, my entire circulatory system. Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch*ding*ding*ding!
My heart was always doing that, being everything other than a heart. This was another of our games, the way I’d describe my heart to Kellie, trying to make her smile.
“What was the idea?” Kellie asked.
Oh! I’d nearly forgotten amidst my heart dialing up.
“Right!” I said, back on track. “Hole digging partner for hire!”
Kellie’s turn to look confused.
Asking for clarification wasn’t the same as doubting logistics or plausibility, but we had both grown careful in our responses. There was some gray area. I saved her and explained.
“Guys love digging holes. I don’t know why, but—”
“Sure, I get it,” Kellie said. “I mean, I don’t get it get it. But I know it’s a thing.”
“And—” and this addition of a second element had only just occurred to me as I’d said the first part out loud, “—guys don’t really know how to make friends. Once they get older, I mean. After high school, college.”
“Girls, too,” Kellie said. “I think it’s more just being an adult than a dude thing.”
I smiled. A dude thing was the kind of phrase I would have used. It felt like she’d probably said it to tease me, but also to make me smile. Which: accomplished.
“Fair,” I said. “So. Guys… dudes, we like to dig holes, and most probably wish they had more adult dude friends. What if they could hire someone—what if they could hire me—to come over and just help them dig in their backyard? Not fence post holes, not burying a pet—” I’d dug a hole in my old backyard when my dog died, years ago; I rarely mentioned it, because it was with my ex and because it made me sad, but it came up every now and then, “—just a random hole. Call me over, have a couple beers together, we could chat but we don’t have to, and we just dig a hole together.”
Katie nodded, kept nodding. “That’s actually a weirdly great idea.”
We weren’t supposed to doubt or question bad ideas, which came with a kind of implied equal-but-opposite presumption that we shouldn’t compliment good ideas either. They all got added to the journal, no qualitative commentary. But sometimes we couldn’t help ourselves.
“Thanks, babe.”
Kellie got up from her couch, came over and joined me on mine. She took both of her hands and wrapped them around one of my biceps.
“Bet all that hole-digging would give you some pretty sexy muscles.”
I flexed my bicep into her grip, even though there wasn’t much there to flex.
Kellie moved her hands down to my leg, similarly wrapped her hands around my calf muscle. I flexed that and, unlike my arm, the muscle got hard, tightened into definition.
“Ooooh,” Kellie said, in this way that was like a joking impersonation of being turned on, but true, too.
Before we met, I’d spent two frustrating, depressing years on the job market, looking to upgrade my life. Met with nothing but disappointment, I gave up, made the determined decision to appreciate the job and life I had. I redirected job search energy into learning one new thing every year. I learned how to play guitar. I’d always wanted to, regretted not when I was younger. I didn’t get good, but I learned the basics. It counted! After that, with each new year, I got into pottery and then homebrewing, woodwork, cooking, golf, something or other I’ve already forgotten. I’d already mostly forgotten how to play guitar, hadn’t picked mine up in a year or two, but I still thought and talked fondly of that year. We had a couple of chairs upstairs I’d made that weren’t that comfortable but I still went up and sat in every now and then, just to admire that I’d made them. This year, I’d gotten into bicycling. Splurged on a brand new bike, spent more than I knew a bike could cost, but loved it. My calves had transformed into those of a high school soccer player’s. Kellie had been more impressed and turned on by them than I knew was possible, making me curious what else I might be able to do to my body. Going to the gym didn’t interest me like my other annual projects. Maybe digging holes was next year’s project!
Kellie’s hand moved up my leg, calf to knee to thigh. She petted her hand over my growing erection, instinctively flexing itself into her like I had purposefully with my muscles a moment before, and then, before I’d even realized, she had my belt unbuckled, my pants unzipped. She had my dick in her hand and was stroking; she knew her power over me, her ability to turn me into an excited and dumb teenager over something so simple as a handjob. She stroked and I closed my eyes and she kept stroking and I readjusted my body and slumped back into the couch and got comfortable and she kept going. She asked how it felt and I told her how good it felt and she told me how hot it would be, her big, strong hole-digging dude for hire, and her telling me how much I turned her on pushed me over the edge. I leaned back a little further and grabbed my shirt and pulled it up and she kept stroking me while I came all over my stomach.
We stayed like that, like frozen in time, for a minute, two, five, and then she finally said, “How did that feel.”
“Like my heart is a pinata full of confetti, and you smashed it open, candy everywhere.”
I opened my eyes and Kellie was smiling, with her mouth, but also with her eyes, her whole face. But shaking her head at me, too.
“You’re trying too hard,” she said.
Dammit. She was right. That wasn’t really what I felt like. I’d just liked the sound of it.
I thought about my arms growing muscles I’d never had, making new friends who just wanted me to help them dig holes, our journal of the ridiculous and unbelievable.
I tried again.
“You make my heart feel like the very last thing God created on the 6th day, the final culmination of everything he’d been experimenting with and trying out and working toward,” I said. “Like the last thing he did before kicking back and having… I don’t know. Something refreshing. A shandy, maybe?”
Kellie shook her head at me again, and I knew, if I had been trying too hard before I was only trying harder this time. She let out this big, dumb, snorting laugh that was among my favorite of all her reactions. I’d tried too hard, it was true, but it was worth it.
I thought about it again. I remembered waking up, I remembered the dance fest.
“It feels like my heart is a… disco ball?” I tried.
Kellie smiled. “Sure,” she said. “Because of the ‘dance fest’?”
I liked that she’d remembered, too. That she knew where I’d got the idea.
I closed my eyes and tried to picture a dance fest. Was that different from a… normal dance? A concert? A dance party? What constituted a ‘fest’? I pictured a shimmering, spinning disco ball, grabbing all the light shot at it and refracting it out into a world of sparkling, dancing, joyful delight. What a beautiful thing for a heart to be.
Aaron Burch's first novel, Year of the Buffalo, is out now! Recent short work (fiction and non, and even a poem!) have appeared or are forthcoming in Rejection Letters, Menagerie Magazine, Nurture, Complete Sentence, and Ligeia.