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 would be a terrible supervillain, because I lack the requisite decisiveness and confidence in my decisions. There would always be a voice in the back of my head asking if building the Quantum Death Ray was *really* the best use of my henchmen’s time and the noticeably-dwindling reserves of gold I’d stolen from Fort Knox years ago, and then once I’d built it, I’d probably just talk myself out of using it to wipe entire cities off the map because there might be a really cool indie bookstore there, and I really want to help indie bookstores thrive, not zap them with quantums or whatever.
I would, however, be good at accumulating nemeses, because as a supervillain I would not be able to stop feuding on Twitter, let alone be able to actually delete my account. I would fume about losing flamewars to these 4channing nemeses and would then dispatch my Evil Winged Capybaras of the Night to flush them out so I could zap them with the aforementioned ray. That would take most of the day, because while capybaras are loyal creatures who don’t ask too many questions, they are also quite slow, so by the late afternoon it would feel like the moment had passed, and the zapping would have to wait until tomorrow. Then I’d have a Campari and soda or two and mellow out enough to let bygones be bygones. Then it would all start again in the morning.
My protagonist in The Shitbird, Coast Guard Seaman Apprentice Colin McAllister, is also very good at accumulating nemeses. He’s bad at his job, he runs his mouth too often and to the wrong people, smokes pot surreptitiously (but not surreptitiously enough) and generally gets on everyone’s nerves without even trying. This, of course, does not make *him* a supervillain any more than I am. But maybe it does, in the sense that he’s the source of at least most of the chaos that engulfs his life.
My supervillain lair would be a quaint farmhouse in Tuscany, because while I may be a supervillain, I’m not a barbarian.
2. Are concepts like Love and Hate and Good and Evil real? Or are they constructs based on human biochemistry? Explain yourself!
I don’t see why being constructs based on human biochemistry would necessarily have to make them any less real. We experience them, we act on them, we can express them. That seems real enough to me.
Of course, aboard the Coast Guard cutter Stargazer, where McAllister lives and works and just tries to get along and survive, none of these things exist. There is only the watch rotation, the duty roster, the gun shoot for the crew, and the Captain’s Mast. These may or may not be human constructs, but god help anyone who doesn’t think they’re real.
3. Which god is the best? Why?
God Shammgod, who played about 20 games with the Washington Wizards thirty years ago. Then he played pro basketball overseas for another decade or so before becoming a coach. He wasn’t an especially impressive player, though he was good enough to make money at it for several years which is almost unquantifiably better than I’ve ever been at any sport, or at most things generally. But he’s the only God whose existence I have direct evidence of.
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.
Sam Raimi’s Muppet Movie.
5. Is AI good or bad? Why?
AI is a deeply anti-human technology. It’s built on theft and designed solely to further enrich the worst people on Earth (who are already far too rich), not to help humanity. I want nothing to do with it.
6. What happens to us when we die?
We are all ingested into an AI model’s training sequence. That’s where the infamous hallucinations come from: souls who somehow retained a conscious awareness of what has happened to them, and who are trying desperately to warn the rest of us.
Spencer Fleury is the author of The Shitbird (Stanchion Books, forthcoming in 2026), I Blame Myself But Also You (and other stories) (Malarkey Books, 2024) and How I’m Spending My Afterlife (Woodhall Press, 2021). He lives in San Francisco and Portugal.
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.