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.
1. Would you make a good supervillain? Why or why not? Describe a day in the life of your potential supervillainous self. Also, we need a supervillainous sobriquet (or two) for you. Also, also, a description of your “lair” would be nice.
I am a good supervillain to other species. I am a hypocritical vegetarian. I scoop chicken remnants into my kitten’s bowl daily. The chicken goo is most likely male, most likely from chicks who were sexed, discovered to have tiny penises, thrown into a bag, then dumped on a conveyor belt to fall into a macerator, a fancy name for a shredder. My supervillainous self is keeping a kitten indoors though it is bred to be outside and kill. It’s trapped in a lonely, mostly sterile house, never touching grass, never hunting birds. Ten thousand years of cat-human companionship has led to this delusion that I’m a virtuous person. My sobriquet: Carcerarius Felis. Gato demonio. Veganus hypocrite.
Are concepts like Love and Hate and Good and Evil real? Or are they constructs based on human biochemistry? Explain yourself!
Yes, love and hate are real because they are tattooed on the hands of Harry Powell, the preacher in The Night of the Hunter. Powell interlocks his hands as he explains how good and evil are forever intertwined, “warring and tugging.” Robert Mitchum, as Powell, channels something far beyond human biochemistry. Though he’s long dead, he’s an oracle on our phones.
3. Which god is the best? Why?
The best is the god of good soup, like French onion soup in Mom’s kitchen or minestrone in a small Italian café, or clam chowder out on the Oregon coast. (I lied when I said I was a vegetarian.) This god of soup offers flavors and textures as benevolent as Vishnu and as sensual as Hathor, Ishtar, and Aphrodite.
4. Tell me about your favorite book, film, painting, and/or album that doesn’t exist. You don’t have to be the (future, potential) creator though you could be.
My favorite film would be a composite of all the dreams I had of people I’ve loved who are dead now. It would shift from horror to rom-com: debased to goofy. It would morph into a Bollywood car wash, and I would be the car, wet and waxed, buffed and dried.
5. Is AI good or bad? Why?
It is bad because it defaults to the pronoun I.
6. What happens to us when we die?
All possibilities exist. I saw my dead fiancé, Chris Hartman, at the foot of my bed and he talked to me. This went so far beyond how I was raised, as an Episcopalian, that I lost all “truths.” Every cultural posit from atheists’ beliefs to Zoroastrians’ is as absurd and profound as anything else. See you in hell? Or see you in a parallel universe, where cats rule us.
Alex Behr is the author of Animal Kingdom, Planet Grim, and Grief Stick. Her writing has been published in Tin House, Utne Reader, Salon, Oregon Humanities, The Rumpus, Buckman Journal, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, in anthologies, and others. Her multimedia website and film projects have been supported by grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. She holds a BA in humanities from UC Berkeley and an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. Behr lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is a senior academic designer for a global education company, teaches creative writing workshops, and plays piano and bass guitar. In late 2019, award-winning Portland author Alex Behr reunited with Chris Hartman, a lost love, after thirty years. Their brief, intense romance in San Francisco left behind no photos, and yet they’d never forgotten each other. Chris soon moved to Portland to start a new life with her. Tragically and suddenly, he was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive prion illness, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and died just months after the move. Tender, erotic, and damned, the nineteen stories in Animal Kingdom are inspired by Behr’s grief. It explores desire and searches for meaning from chaos and loss. With piercing humor, the collection explores a couple bonding over alien visitations, the brutal accommodations in a marriage between musicians, sexuality during menopause, and a teen girl’s bruising path to feminism via her Fender guitar. The stories share the theme that humans can’t escape their primal urges and are intelligent animals in the flawed kingdom we all share.
Kurt Baumeister is the author of the novels Pax Americana and Twilight of the Gods, the latter of which was a finalist for the 2025 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. Baumeister’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Salon, Guernica, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, The Brooklyn Rail, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Nervous Breakdown, The Weeklings, and other outlets. A contributing editor at Vol. 1 Brooklyn and 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.