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.
Say you’re a buffalo. Well, OK, say you’re an anthropomorphized buffalo with the power of speech living in a world populated primarily by anthropomorphized buffalo. Not all anthropomorphized buffalo are created equal; nor, it seems, are they all the herd-devoted bovines we might imagine. Take you for example.
Owing to your lack of focus on the herd as a whole, your semi-nefarious nature, and perhaps most of all your employment on buffalo Wall Street, you committed various financial crimes for which you were charged, tried, and convicted. Yes, apparently, the buffalo justice system functions a bit more reliably than ours does. Having bid a tearful goodbye to your twenty-five(!) calves, you show up at the doors of buffalo prison ready to pay your debt to buffalo society. What happens next?
Are you hoof-printed? Forced to wear stripes? Forced to wear solids? What are the gangs like in buffalo prison, anyway? Sure, this is buffalo white-collar prison but there must still be gangs, right? How about the guards? What are they like? I mean, you know they’re not “nice,” they’re prison guards, but what species are they? Or are they, too, buffalo?
Go wild on this. You know you’ve been cooped up as an anthropomorphized buffalo WAY TOO LONG. Actually, you’re going to be cooped up a lot longer, but you get the idea. Bonus credit for a description of visitors’ day. I mean…twenty-five calves? Do they visit in shifts?
I’m quite severely claustrophobic, so assuming I’m still me but just in buffalo form, I would be having a real hard time with idea of a windowless cell. I would know I couldn’t do it. I’m a buffalo, after all, and everyone knows we’ve got to roam.
Since I really hate money (almost as much as Finance bros), I would be arrested as a covert agent, trying to take the beast of Wall Street down from the inside. My crimes would involve hacktivism and espionage, real dangerous, technical stuff. I was able to do this work remotely from my hometown on the plains. When they found me, I knew they’d never let me surrender myself; I’d be taken directly to some secret government facility designed specifically to torture those suspected of the most heinous crime any animal could commit—robbing the rich.
I’d never get the chance to say goodbye to my calves. But revolution requires sacrifice. Some Feds would be driving me across broad expanse of prairie and I would be calm, whistling some Bing Crosby, watching as the grass fade into sand as we’d approach the secret detention center hidden deep in the desert wilderness. These captors would grossly misunderestimate me, partly because of human exceptionalism and partly because I’m a woman.
At the right time, I would use all of the secret strength within me and overpower them, taking control of the vehicle, and I would chase the sun as it fell behind the earth. I would accelerate as we reached the canyon’s precipice, à la Thelma and Louise, and embrace the red sunless sky, shouting, “Don’t fence me in!”
Why are the colors of house paint given such extravagant names like, y’know, Butternut Biscuit Beige and Pearl-Lustered Tangerine? Is it simply to sell more paint by appealing to the whimsy of the apparently quite whimsical paint-buying public? Are the name-givers frustrated artists or, still worse, frustrated marketing MBAs? Or is there something even deeper and darker than art and MBAs at play here? What’s your theory?
In most cases, these names are the product of some sad market research, where the input comes from tradwives, teenagers, and the unemployed. That said, there is the possibility that someone akin to those ‘celebrity baby namers’ is at work for more luxury brands. Someone who charges $10k per name, armed with a thesaurus and a trove of influencer accounts to mine for the latest trends.
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)
A mare’s nest snarled around a single hair, hidden inside like a nucleus. It was a blond Mariana morgana, minute and sparkling and damp. Delicate as spun sugar. She pulled it out, tied it around an Adirondack Blue Tuber in a bow. It reminded him of his last birthday where she got him in VHS of a Daniel Day Lewis movie. She left the gift on the counter and when he walked up, she jumped out from behind the couch, screaming “Land Shark!” When he flinched, she laughed and laughed. It amplified in his memory. He tore off the wrapping and she screamed again, her hands clamped around him with fingers like teeth. And she laughed and laughed.
Now, he stared at the potato on the counter and asked, “What is it?” and she laughed, “It’s chaos!”
There’d be no startling him this year. He had long divided the need to be filled with some notion of want. The ritual now felt hollow. It was as if some AI had generated her creativity. The prompt read: UNCANNY. The next prompt read: MORE UNCANNY.
“If it has no meaning, what’s the point?”
You could talk to each other without realizing the other knows nothing of the real world.
“Everything is a scene of constant chaos.” She turned her back to him. “The winner is the one who controls the chaos, both his own and his enemies.”
“I’m not loving it,” he mumbled, his hands stained purple.
What are you thinking?
Apropos of nothing in particular, I am thinking a lot about the French Revolution lately. I’m thinking of the sans-culottes and Marat and suffrage and the Third Estate and La Marseillaise and the role of the Church and the press and the power of hunger. How the taxes were paid mainly by the poor while the rich sat in their mansions, eating cake. And I think often of how it was a crusade of women marching on Versailles that chased the King out of his kingdom.
One revolution can lead to many revolutions, just like how the French Revolution in many ways birthed the American one. It has to be that way. Life is learning and life is fighting. If we fight and we learn, we can move forward. It can be frustrating because it seems like it’s the same lesson over and over again, across decades or the entirety of human existence. We have to, though, because there are always new people who still need to learn. And there have been, currently are, and always will be people who can never be satiated. People who would burn down the world before they gave away any of the power or wealth they’ve accumulated. Avarice, the sin which begets all others.
Rousseau said that it was against the laws of nature “that a handful of people gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities.” I am thinking about men against nature, who live in gold-plated towers, and how we might shift the world so that they fall back into the ground.
You’re sad because yesterday you lost your job as a first-year barista. However, owing to the kind ministrations of techno-capitalism, you’re already been contacted by an executive recruitment firm tasked with finding a new Thanos for the Marvel universe. No, I don’t mean a new thespian to play Thanos. Josh Brolin, all his body paint, prosthetics, CGI and whatever are safe. I’m talking about the real Thanos.
Negatives: If you get this role, you’ll be forced to become a two-dimensional being in more ways than one.
Positives: The compensation and benefits package is simply incredible, otherworldly if you will.
Verdict: You want this job. Nay, you NEED this job.
At the end of a battery of interviews, personality and intelligence testing, and other borderline Orwellian processes you sit down with the firm’s CEO for a final interview. This CEO, let’s call her Z, is so well regarded in the field of executive recruitment that if the interview goes well enough, you’ll get the job. You will be Thanos.
A grueling six-hour interview ensues in which you are refused everything from water to Kleenex to a phone call. You feel like a prisoner. You, in fact, feel so much like a prisoner that you say to Z, “I’m really starting to feel like a prisoner here.” Z assures you you’re not a prisoner, that you can get up and leave any time, but leaving will impact your eligibility for this coveted role as 2 D supervillain. You get up to leave anyway. You’ve really had it with this Z’s bullshit at this point. However, she raises a hand to cut you off before you can go. “Just kidding,” she says. “There’s only one more question, and if you ace the answer, you’ve got the job.”
You sit back down. “What is it?” you ask.
“Instead of being able to blink half the beings in reality out of existence, the Infinity Gauntlet allows you to select one famous dessert to blink out of existence. You most choose the famous desert the absence of which from our timeline would have the most far-reaching negative effects on reality. Which dessert do you choose? Please describe the effects corresponding to its nonexistence in detail.” Please be comprehensive and convincing. Your future career as a wealthy, famous two-dimensional supervillain is on the line.
“Thank you for that question, Z – how interesting. Please give me a moment to gather my thoughts. Well, you know, first off, I’d have to evaluate any ideas my colleagues or predecessors might wish to enact. I’d want to know if anything has been put in a parking lot or outlined in previous proposals. It’s important to consider the wishes of your team when making these important decisions. I’d also want to know if anything in particular resonates with Marvel’s strategic goals. What metrics are we using to measure success? And, of course, I’d want to do a thorough market analysis to understand better where certain desserts fall on the scale in relation to other products.
However, without that basis, and going just off the top of my head, I would have to say… marshmallows. Or, you know what? No, I’d say something broader, I’d say any gelatin-based foodstuff. And I’ll tell you why. Marshmallows and gelatin aren’t superstars; they’re not chocolate, they’re not ice cream. They’re not ‘in your face’. Eliminating gelatin-based food would more insidious, more.. unexpected. When you consider marshmallows, with the current egg price crisis, we could save a ton of money on any product using albumen as aerators, which is a fair percentage of them, I believe. In many ways, marshmallows would be a quick win, because they are low-hanging fruit, not necessarily integrated into every dessert but present enough that it would interrupt after dinner enjoyment as well as snack time and even some breakfast meals. We could move the needle on discontent, a low-level unpleasantness that builds and builds, ‘death by a thousand pin pricks’, that’s what they say, right? Not an all-out crisis that chocolate would entail, rather many everyday annoyances, that gather and fester into a horrible crescendo. An everyday American walking down the grocery aisle, ‘Where’s my yogurt, where’s my gummy bears, where’s my sausage links?’ Yes, there’s often gelatin in there, too! If COVID taught us anything, it’s that people don’t like to be inconvenienced, right? They’d rather kill someone than miss their Thursday night out at Chili’s? So, there he is, Mr. Everyman, red-faced and screaming in the middle of the Great American, ‘Where’s my goddamned Rocky Road!?’
Gelatin. It’s not the bleeding edge, but it’ll push a lot of people over.”
Is God real?
Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” I think G-d might be the same. Living things can manifest a larger Something through our thoughts and actions. Everything we do creates one, immense movement. When we participate in that, when we contribute to the motion of everything, a wave of change, we come closer to understanding creation and that’s where I find something holy.
Jesi Bender is an artist from Upstate New York. She is the author of the novels Child of Light (forthcoming August 2025) and The Book of the Last Word, the play Kinderkrankenhaus, and the chapbook Dangerous Women. Her shorter work can be seen in FENCE, Denver Quarterly, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Sleepingfish, among others. She also helms KERNPUNKT Press, a home for experimental writing. www.jesibender.com
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.