CONCUSSION
STIMULANT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 022 // NOV 23, 2024
Goddamn it. Mary mother of fuck, blessed art thou among fucks. Holy nightmare of scrotums.
I either need to live off unemployment or kill myself, be reincarnated, and have it better next time. I either need to find coworkers who won’t lob cans of beans at my head, or find a genie who can find this kind of coworker for me. This cannot be too much to ask when I have exchanged many of life’s pleasures for sleeping on the floor. I am wasting the gift of literacy by not writing the bastard up—the bastard who, of course, lobbed a can of beans at my head.
By the grace of God I was let off work on tragedy leave. I could have been a chess prodigy before all those brain cells disintegrated, but as a compromise I have been let off work to sleep this nightmare away. I punched out with bean-throwing force and took to Maisonneuve, where the sun could not be more painful.
I am wearing my coffee-stained apron and my jizz-stained pants on Maisonneuve, squinting like a pepper-sprayed pervert. God is righteous for letting me see all these shrimp colors and propping up such an irritating sun. It is a blessing to watch a blurry guy in a waistcoat serve oysters to influencers.
I could make Goatee Jerry go missing, but I won’t. Karma will strike him like a cartoon piano. Someone will shave his weird little goatee in the night and he’ll wake up screaming, covered in crumbs and pee. The idiot. Someone really should write him up for this. My head hurts so bad it’s like someone threw a can of beans at it.
What a sunny day. It is a blessing to see one of my hookups from my illustrious stroke game season (fall of 2021) pass me on the sidewalk and to only recognize her when she is inches away. Second to this stunning headache is the feeling of guilt when I remember how I made her walk home at night in the cold because I didn’t want her anywhere near my bathroom while I was rehearsing for food poisoning. I think I see her scowling when she walks past, but anything is possible when you get off work early so maybe she will forgive me.
Maybe when I’m home I will cut a tiny hole in a piece of black construction paper and watch Wizards of Waverly Place through it. Maybe I will turn all the lights off and eat salami in bed. Maybe anything is possible today because I got off work early.
Maybe Katrina is skidding into my path and stopping me at the light. She is wearing something that is certainly orange and crossing her arms like a snot-nosed toddler.
“Eli,” she growls.
“You know I don’t jaywalk,” I say, “so you better let me catch this light.”
I feel something wet against my leg—not piss this time. It is one of her weird, incestuous beagles. Or at least the shape of one.
“You couldn’t sell all of them, jagoff,” Katrina says.
She is trying to remind me of sins I committed before this concussion made me holy. I haven’t even seen her in two years and now she is prodding me with her weird beagle and stopping me from sleeping for three days like a vampire.
“You really shouldn’t say ‘jagoff,’ Katrina, it doesn’t suit you.”
“Why are you squinting like that?”
“Can of beans. I can’t see you very well, but you smell so good.”
Katrina softens, like an expired boner. “Same perfume as always.”
Katrina and I dated for a year and I spent most of it sniffing her neck like a creep. Her family was Westmount rich and got her fancy perfumes and let her in on their beagle-breeding business, which was a neat gig to be a groupie for. I can’t even describe how mad they were when I started dognapping the beagles and selling them to childless couples in the Plateau. Yeah, when they found out it was splitsville for me and Katrina.
But she lets me go. Wobbling like a geriatric, I step past Katrina and make my way across the intersection. But then, just my luck, Samantha Pap Smear appears out of nowhere like a toe wart. I can only see her because she’s right up in my face like she’s trying to mug me in an alleyway, because, after my bean injury and in this treacherous sunlight, I can’t see a goddamn thing.
“Hello, Eli,” Samantha Pap Smear says like a movie villain, her lips curling devilishly.
This girl is fucking addicted to pap smears. Hence the nickname.
“Hi, Samantha Pap Smear,” I reply, and she stomps on my foot. “Coming from your gyno appointment?”
“Oh, now you care! You never cared when I asked you to go with me to them.”
“I don’t have that kind of time. I’m employed.”
Goatee Jerry jumpscares my thoughts. I nearly shudder. I, like, can’t see.
“Whatever. Your friends didn’t have to make up that nickname for me in any case. And you don’t have to keep using it.”
“How many times do I have to tell you, Samantha,” I say. “No one in my circle is discussing your cervix. You got that nickname because of your grandfather’s cream cheese business.”
“Pap’s Smears?” Samantha scoffs. “Fat chance.”
“Samantha, you have five thousand eyes right now.”
“Just because I have glasses—”
“I gotta go.”
I move past the freak. Freedom is soon to be mine, since there is no way, after seeing a hookup and two of my exes within the span of five minutes, I will see a fourth ill-advised entanglement of mine. If I do, it’s God regretting not having killed me with the bean can and essentially putting the revolver in my hands. Or in Samantha Pap Smear’s or whatever.
So imagine my surprise when I see a Tallulah-shaped thing shaking me by the arms and squealing like a schoolgirl, saying, “Eli, it’s been so long!”
“Tallulah,” I laugh, and my heart is beating at orgasmic speeds. “Back so soon?”
I never thought she’d return from London. If I knew, I wouldn’t have told everyone I could make her cum and told her sometimes I just shower instead of buying toilet paper—the brown showers, I call them.
She cuts straight to the chase. “Why did you never write?” Tallulah asks.
“Um.” I scratch my head, right where the beans hit it. “Forgot how. Say, do you have any fancy British cigarettes I could bum?”
Talullah shakes her head no.
“Do you at least have an Advil?” I ask.
I am so fucking faded right now and wearing this gay ass apron.
Tallulah, in a really nice dress, says, “You didn’t even tell me you were visiting London when you were there in May.”
“I know,” I say, with a headache. “I guess I was scared that things would be too different.”
Her face falls like the grandmas in those Life Alert commercials. Sometimes I think I should have spent the money on a postage stamp.
***
So basically Tallulah is subletting some Concordia art student’s 3 ½ for two days and basically I’m there and I’m fucking her from the side and—God willing—I won’t cry during sex like Katrina tells everyone I do. But I’m spending most of my energy trying not to tell her I love her when I cum, so basically a tear is grouping on my waterline.
I can’t see for shit. I think she’s smiling at me. Tallulah has a gap between her front teeth and sometimes when we were together I would shove my folded up transit fare between them before she could stop me and then she would bitch at me and wash her mouth out with soap like she had said the f-word to her mom.
My head hurts so bad I wish I could donate my skull to science Right Now. The trouble is, they wouldn’t want it after all the galaxy gas I did in high school. Tallulah wanted me for a time, though. I haven’t told her about the beans, so she doesn’t know I’m probably stupid now.
“I forgot how good of a kisser you are,” Tallulah tells me, but I’m just doing what I’m told.
She likes to fuck with the overhead lights on. I’m squinting like a motherfucker.
GIF from Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging
CONCUSSION was edited by Amalia Mairet and Charlie Zacks.
maxwell norman’s album of the week
Ugly Casanova - Sharpen Your Teeth (2002)
This side project from Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock takes that band’s folkiest edges and makes them a centerpiece, a ramshackle pins-and-string delight with the same wit and character that Modest Mouse is known for. With only the barest hint of electricity, this album seals itself hermetically into a world of cum-stained pianos, cars with rusted engines, and sleeping forests. From the blasting trumpets of “Parasites” to the eerie pedal steel of “Cat Faces”, with a particular focus on wearied breakup laments like “Barnacles” and “Diggin Holes”, this record strips down the caveman bashing of early Mouse to its barest and prettiest essentials. It’s snowing where I live, in a way where it mixes with rain and turns to pale slush on the street. Perfect for these tunes. Sharpen Your Teeth feels like a warm cup of tea with spices, cozy and cockeyed, the gentle ramblings of a dear friend.
get hip
THIS WILL SAVE YOU LAUNCH PARTY NOVEMBER 29
THIS WILL SAVE YOU Stockholm launch Dec 10 @ Nord Books. Info soon.
Big Bruiser Dope Boy’s BBDB Reader #1, featuring poetry and prose written over the last 16 years, is available for purchase now. The cover and interior were designed and formatted by Charlie Zacks.
Poems by Maxwell Norman on Jesus Land Daily.
The Veg will be hosting a party for their fall publication on Nov 27.
Headlight Anthology submissions close November 29.
IʼM WORKING LAATE by BABY LOTUS PONEY RANCH (Poems in Swedish and English).