Surfing through old literary magazines is fun. You can find all sorts of great stuff. Some old stuff by writers you know or just casually discover something exciting at every corner. You can read opinion pieces on then-current events that were definitely overblown, you can read reviews of the books you will probably never read (unless they're on Eclipse or Ubu or Archive.org) and then you can stumble upon something that will make feel stuck in the moment long past.
It happened with me some time ago. I've found this:
It is a piece by Ronald Johnson as presented in Poor Old Tired Horse magazine Issue 19. Both pieces are parts of bigger sequences but for reason they stood out.
And it is ridiculous. It's just two pictures with typographic rendintion of "Moo" AKA onomatopoeiac depiction of sound that cows usually express. Nothing special. It's just another "Moo", think about it for a moment and get over it. If only things were that simple. My mind took it a bit further.
Let me describe what happened then in a form of a poem:
MOO
o
o
Just don't imagine
cover of Pink Floyd album "Atom Heart Mother",
OK?
...
Please Please Please
- Brown
J. (damn...)
"Thank You"
Swans...
Filth...
Something like that. After that i experience a sudden surgence of the void inside of me. These two "Moo"'s made think too much. I caught glimpses of "Got Milk?" adverts (mainly because i was writing an article about it last month) and Herasym the mute protagonist from the Moo-Moo novel (it is a sad-sad tale in genre "people can really suck" that explains why you can't have nice things).
And then (as a devout Fallout fan) - I thought of random encounters with Brahmin Herds coupled with closed captions of their endless discordant choir of "Moo" (and explosions sometimes). I had a glitch once that disabled the switch of the maps so that every time my character moved to another location he happened to stay in the Brahmin Herd map. It was a nightmarish. Happens.
But then i thought about one particular episode from my youth.
I was sitting near the supermarket and there was a man in a cow suit. He was advertising some milk products. Nothing special. He was confronted by a pre-school kid who asked him why he talks like a human instead of doing the cowspeak. In some way it was a logical thing to ask. The guy was so puzzled with that question that he tried to get away from the kid. He was zigzagging around as if he running away from a crocodile not a kid who was curious about one simple detail of his performance. No matter how hard the guy tried to avoid the kid - it was futile. The kid insisted - he exclaimed "please, explain it to me! I don't understand" and the guy said "gimme a break!" and then shrieked "MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!".
It was that kind of a shriek that would not be out of place in some black metal composition (especially together with a cow suit - it is fun to think about it). Kid got scared and ran away. Some time later he came back with his mother. She asked the guy why did he scared her kid and he said that the kid was quite irritating and asked him to do the Moo and he did it. And then kid said that that "Moo" was more like howling of the wolf and definitely unlike anything the cow would do. And then the guy responded by saying that cows also leave shit and asked the kid if he wants to see him leaving a shit because "thats what the cows do". In response kid's mother said that the guy should be ashamed of himself, slapped his cow's head and went away in disgust. To make matters worse - guy in a cow suit cried out of spite "fucking bitch". That attracted a police officer who took the poor man away into the supermarket, probably in attempt to reason the man in a manner he deserves.
Funny story. I wonder what happened with that kid. I guess he became an investigator of some sorts and now exposes conspiracies of cognitive dissonance.
But that is not the end of the post.
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