The guiding principle of Six Ridiculous Questions is that life is filled with ridiculousness. And questions. That only by giving in to these truths may we hope to slip the surly bonds of reality and attain the higher consciousness we all crave. (Eh, not really, but it sounded good there for a minute.) It’s just. Who knows? The ridiculousness and question bits, I guess. Why six? Assonance, baby, assonance.
You find yourself in the year 2125 but haven’t aged a day. How did you get here? What do you see? Buildings? Modes of transportation? Other humans? Please describe it in detail.
I’ve finally decided it is time to land. I’ve been riding around Santa-style, high about the crumbling earth, for a century. Of course, my sleigh is dog-drawn by a bunch of scrappy mutts who love nothing better than to sniff and run and eat and poop and pee their way through eternity. Somehow, I have an endless supply of water and food for them up here in my sleigh. Me? I live off air. The dogs are miffed that I want to touchdown. But once we’re down there, I have a feeling things are going to be better for them than me. But wasn’t that always the case on Earth?
What do I see? I see green, which is shocking. But believe it or not, in the last thirty years or so of relentless circling, I’ve seen sprouts and then more sprouts and then trees. And get this: there are oceans again too.
Buildings? Who cares? Transportation? Dude, I’ve got this sleigh, so all the rest is gravy. Other humans? I’m a bit ambivalent. They were so disappointing when I took off a hundred years ago. I haven’t seen any yet, but if I do, I hope they like dogs. And know how to give a good foot massage.
How can I get the insipid people sitting beside me in this café to cease their chatter long enough for me to compose five more seriously ridiculous questions? (I guess this leaves four more.) Additional color from actual conversation:
Person 1: I don’t think Tom likes me.
Person 2: No, wow, I am literally shaken to my very core by that.
Person 1: He like never says, “Hi,” to me in the mornings.
Person 2: Wow. You just need to tell him he’s being a total silly goose and leave it at that.
Well, it’s probably too late to offer this advice, as at least two weeks have passed since you sent me these questions. But if you’re still sitting in that same café and those people are also still there I’d say you all have more serious problems than insipidness. But here’s a thought: use those verbatim quotes to craft a quick flash fiction piece, go sit with those folks and read it to them out loud with lots of dramatic flair. You’ll either impress the hell out of them or never be allowed back in that café again.
Please solve the following unrelated set of simultaneous equations using only sentences:
(Entropy – Mount Everest) / (Blue + Potato) = (Milan Kundera x Land Shark)2
Vanity + (Hunger / Love) = Turing Test – (Napoleon / Big Mac)
Kurt! WTF! Don’t you know I have terrible ‘math anxiety’? That my formal education ended in 9th grade, and I barely passed algebra? I haven’t got the foggiest idea what you’re asking here. Though, as someone who just wrote a graphic memoir called Alice’s Big Book of Mistakes (yes, blatant self-promotion, with link provided HERE), I should probably take a stab and suffer the consequences.
On second thought…nah.
Is the novel dead? If it is, when did it die? If it’s not, why do people hate it so much they keep talking about its death?
The novel is not dead. At least not to me. At least not in me. My brain is a novel, your brain is a novel, hell everyone’s brain is a novel. Our thoughts hold multiple plot lines, tangential sentences and random musings. Some move the story of our lives along, others serve as self-defeating or self-protecting distractions. Some are just musings; sweet and comforting. Benign. All of it adds to the endless War and Peace of our lives. I’m sure if I had an implanted Maxwell Perkins or Gordon Lish in my prefrontal cortex my life and thoughts would form a more efficient novel. But the cool thing about novels, like thoughts, is that some are big, messy and unbearable, while others are perfect distillations of the human condition.
I’m a short story writer at my core and the slowest reader on the planet, but I’m still a fan of those big honking tomes created from someone else’s imagination that exist in words on paper.
Critics are restless and bored and always need something to pick on. I say, go pick your nose if you want to pick on something. Leave the novel alone.
What would the world be like if money didn’t exist?
Ahhh. It would be like a global clothing swap/flea market/bartering/trading post free for all. And to me that sounds pretty cool. Maybe a bit chaotic? You’d have to vet your trades, check for bed bugs and other hidden snafus. Maybe that Limoges teacup you just swapped your Dustbuster for is actually a fake. But, money? I wish I could say it is so yesteryear. Money still makes the world go round, but not with a clinking clanking sound. Now money is an app that lives in our smartphones. So maybe it already doesn’t exist.
Choosing between the croissant, the theory of gravity, and the invention of the air guitar, which has made the greatest contribution to society? Why?
The croissant is a thing of beauty. The crescent shape, the buttery lightness, the dependability, the tradition. A real croissant, that is, from France, or baked by a state- side pâtissier committed to perfection. The ones wrapped in plastic or folded and baked after extruding out of a Pop N’ Fresh tube don’t count.
To quote Cole Arthur Riley from her book Black Liturgies, “Beauty is our origin and our anchor”.
So, I’d say, particularly in these extremely fucked up and turbulent times, the beautiful croissant is the clear winner.
Alice Kaltman is the author of two story collections and three novels. Most recently, she’s published a graphic memoir entitled, Alice’s Big Book of Mistakes. Her historical fiction novella, Mother and Daughter Sit for a Portrait, will be published by WTAW Press in 2025. Alice’s work has been nominated for Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fiction, the Pushcart Prize, and was a Wigleaf Top 50 in 2024. Alice splits her time between Brooklyn and Montauk, NY where she lives, surfs, and swims with her husband the sculptor Daniel Wiener and Ollie the Wonder Dog.
Kurt Baumeister is the author of the novels Pax Americana and the forthcoming Twilight of the Gods. His writing has appeared in Salon, Guernica, Electric Literature, Rain Taxi, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Nervous Breakdown, The Weeklings, and other outlets. An acquisitions editor with 7.13 Books, Baumeister holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College, and is a member of The National Book Critics Circle and The Authors Guild. Find him at kurtbaumeister.com.
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