Once Upon a Midnight Dreary.

I wrote a new story! Well, it is more a “story”. I have been tinkering with it this week. Below is my first draft. It is nothing special, but it is something I wrote! And despite the multitude of photos I’ve posted the last few months, this is after all a writing blog.

It is kind of dark, but that is just where it went; I promise my spirits are pretty good right now.

As you read it, imagine that you are turning the pages of a book and that each gallery is on its own page.

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The Impossible Museum.

The Impossible Museum

By James Bezerra

Gallery 1 contains the hat check, the coat check, the weapons check, and the mandatory blood donation center.

Galleries 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 contain variously incorrect maps of the museum.

Gallery 13 contains a complete, fully-functional scale model of the universe.

Gallery 28 contains anti-Semitism.

Gallery 33 Contains Edgar Allen Poe, who sits on a white wooden chair inside of a sound-proof and bullet-proof clear lexan box. He is very much alive and can see you. His situation has never been explained to him.

Gallery 42 Contains a vibrantly alive cancer cell. Surely it is not hubris to exhibit such a thing.

Gallery 68 contains approximately a chest-high quantity of warm, liquid, fresh human blood. Rubber waders are complimentary, but limited in supply.

Gallery 79 contains two cancer cells.

Gallery 87 contains all of your existential fear: the quiet, bottomless disappointments of your life. The stuff of your midnight anxiety. That you have wasted your brief time on the planet. That you have lived your best moments, none of which were even remarkable. That you will die and never be thought of again. That your loved ones find your tiresome. That you will fail at everything.

Gallery 96 contains four cancer cells.

Gallery 121 contains more that thirty-seven million panes of window glass removed from murder scenes.

Gallery 158 contains a conveyor belt delivering an endless supply of Schrodeinger Boxes for visitors to open. Dead cats may be left in the ever-growing pile or retained as souvenirs. Live cats are to be left to scrounge off the pile.

Gallery 186 contains sixteen cancer cells.

Gallery 202 contains the bullet that actually killed JFK.

Gallery 235 contains professional black & white headshots of the people your lovers have thought about while having sex with you.

Gallery 296 contains seventy-three million swatches of carpet removed from rooms where suicides have occurred.

Gallery 331 contains a large, fully-functional scale model of the left ventricle of your mother’s heart.

Gallery 444 contains a sealed cube on a borrowed, plastic green patio table, which contains approximately 4,000 baby panda eyeballs.

Gallery 501 contains 256 cancer cells.

Gallery 505 contains a perfect replica of Edgar Allan Poe’s white chair and nothing else but an oppressive sense of foreboding. This gallery has no exit.

Gallery 616 contains 65,536 cancer cells.

Gallery 738 contains over 300 million individual strands of human hair left behind on the pillows of abandoned lovers.

Gallery 819 contains Yoko Ono.

Gallery 916 contains a 6-inch bench vise, a zinc nail, a hammer, a bullet, and a sloth.

Gallery 1004 contains a green-winged teal duck and a rhesus monkey that has been electro-shock conditioned to want to ride the duck. The monkey has not been trained to ride the duck.

Gallery 1228 contains a single, possibly decaying atom, a vial of sarin gas, and a docent with a Geiger counter who will break open the vial should the atom decay during your visit.

Gallery 2034 is a lightless, soundless, airless, floorless, and wall-less black cube with no apparent entrances, exits, hope, or time.

Gallery 3891 contains 700 speakers playing an endless audio loop of every I-Love-You ever uttered by your current lover to someone else.

Gallery 4000 contains 4,294,967,296 cancer cells.

Gallery 4408 contains a more than adequate amount of burn victim pornography.

Gallery 5562 contains a tall, aging pile of nosebleed tissues of cocaine-addicted former Presidents of the United States, and also Bolivia.

Gallery 6119 contains the souls of masturbation sperm never allowed to grow, age, live, love, exist, thrive, cry, fear, cure, laugh, or die.

Gallery 7288 contains used, faulty mountaineering gear.

Gallery 8138 contains 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 cancer cells.

Gallery 9787 contains the revelation that most clothing is donated to secondhand stores following the death of a loved one.

Gallery 10216 contains live feeds of child molestations from around the world. The gallery has been upgraded to now feature sound.

Gallery 11896 contains the end of a tunnel and a switch.

Gallery 20256 contains an innumerable quantity of cancer cells.

Gallery 30000 contains a small amount of hope.

Gallery 30001 contains a blinding white light.

Gallery 30002 contains nothing but cancer cells.

Gallery 30003 contains the museum gift shop and the single, non-functioning parking validation machine.

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Man is a Desiring Machine.

I am sitting here on hold with the state of California and I am going over some of my notes from last week’s Critical Theories of Literature class. The notes themselves are not terribly interesting unless you’re super into Psychoanalytic Criticism. However the bits scrawled in the margins are kind of fun (not all of the lecture is actually useful for studying later, but I like to keep ahold of the tangential bits that are interesting):

- A German saying I learned:

“Love is home-sickness”

- Something that Edgar Allan Poe apparently said:

“Man is a desiring machine.”

- Something my professor said:

“If I had had that experience than I would have an even stranger sense of myself that I do now …”

- You would not believe how much Freudian Psychoanalytic Criticism deals with the notion of castration (male children are afraid their fathers with castrate them, female children believe they have already been castrated, fear of castration is sublimated into the unconscious, “The Uncanny” is just the return in disguise of the repressed “Castration Complex”, etc. etc. etc.) and so in the margin of my notes I apparently wrote: Do I really need shorthand for Castration?! And below that are a few attempts at inventing shorthand symbols.

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The Many Fears of Edgar Allen Poe.

The Many Fears of Edgar Allen Poe
by james bezerra

I bet you didn’t know
that Edgar Allen Poe
was terrified of snow.
When once asked by his paramour
why he chose to live in snowy Baltimore
he said he was too afraid to go
south to sunny Orlando
because he feared the ocean more.



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That super cool picture was politely borrowed from djibent.com

Some Possibly True Facts!

Some of these things are true!


Osama bin Laden’s is believed to be the most recognizable face in the world!

Rob Lowe is a bestselling novelist!

Edgar Allan Poe bred cats in Baltimore with seven toes!

Recent poll finds that for the first time Astronomers now have high rates of suicide than dentists!

Lou Diamond Phillips is the godfather of Jennifer Grey’s son!

Marine biologists have discovered that cats cannot SCUBA dive!

In 1962 the Soviet space program launched an elephant named “Pasha” into space and that she made 26 orbits of the planet Earth!

All Canadians are afraid of the dark!

President James A. Garfield was the model for the famous cartoon cat in the comic strip “Garfield”!

President James Buchanan was the model for the cartoon character of “Jon” in the comic strip “Garfield”!

In parts of Amazonian Peru tarantula eggs are considered a delicacy and eaten on bread!

The band “The Decemberists” are named for a 19th Century Russian military uprising!

The nation of Azerbaijan was named for Dilpallan Azerbaijani, a fourth century Hindu explorer and religious leader!

Opium was discovered by the Mongolians, not the Chinese!

The Palestinian Authority is not allowed to enter teams in the Olympics!

The actual nationality of Christopher Columbus is unknown because as a boy he was orphaned in a shipwreck, of which he was the only survivor!

The 1990’s one-hit-wonder band “White Town” changed its name and became the band “Spoon”!

The band “The Presidents of the United States of America” are working with Sir Mix-A-Lot on a Broadway musical about the rise and fall of the band “The Presidents of the United States of America”!

Kurt Russell was nearly cast in the role of Han Solo in “Star Wars” instead of Harrison Ford!

Dennis Hopper was nearly cast in the role of Tom Hagen in “The Godfather” instead of Robert Duvall!

As a child actress, Calista Flockhart was an extra in one crowd scene the Harrison Ford film “Witness”. Now they are married!

More than 1,800 man-made objects fall out of space every year due to their deteriorating orbits! Most of them burn up on re-entry!

In the 1940s Army and Exxon scientists worked together on a secret project to chemically change water into oil and visa versa!

Historians and psychologists now believe that Civil War Union general William Tecumseh Sherman was actually a diagnosable pyromaniac!

Every year more than 40 people worldwide are killed by ants!



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