Because nobody likes goat porn

My dad has five laptops. Four of them have goat porn on them. The other is brand new, and is now being used to write about said bestial extravaganzas. He can’t write invoices because of all the goat porn on his computer. He can’t send e-mails because five midgets and a donkey covered in fat free ranch dressing run continually across the screen. Everything is full of viruses: little naked pregnant women running around inside your hard drive. Nobody likes goat porn. It comes to me, as four different men of various races run across the screens, unseen, that this is not the way that people do business. At least, not people in the landscaping business.

There’s no reason for it. The frustration begins there. Like goat porn, there’s no reason for the complications inherent in having five machines on which to do business, when the man doing the business is suffering for petit mal seizures and a fair to middling psychotic break brought on by pressures internal and external and for the most part inexplicable and unintelligible. Though a non-believer in a random universe, random acts of madness, entropy, and violence tend to wrap themselves around my father like a tightening maelstrom, or a shroud. It seems to me that no one likes goat porn precisely because of this.

I do believe in randomness: in chance and entropy and mystery, and the things that I find mysterious are often human. My dad came home one day to find my brother and sister arguing in the kitchen. At least, that was his perception. His response was to get on his riding lawn mower, which is dwarfed by his six-foot-four-inch two-hundred and thirty pound frame to such an extent that he appears clown-like, and destroy his lawn furniture and one of his barbeques. His response to this, when questioned later was: “Well, I’ve got two. What’s the big deal?” My siblings, it turned out, were not fighting, just talking and chasing each other around the house screaming, attempting to beat one another with various pieces of furniture and gardening implements.

About three times a week I hear stories, or witness myself, acts of humanity and madness that, like snowflakes in southeast Tennessee, often fail to materialize. One day my dad flipped a 12,000 dollar trailer full of mulch over with a 300,000 dollar front end loader. The next day he striped the ignition on said frontend loader, and after letting it run for about an hour, systematically cit every wire leading from the dash until the engine turned off, turning the equipment into a 15,000 pound paper weight. Edward Abbey on his best day couldn’t do a better job. He and his business partners scream at each other for no reason, then keep working. He chased down a bus driver in rush hour traffic after she hit his three-quarter ton truck and didn’t stop. He was driving on the sidewalk and through red lights, on the phone with his brother the whole time. Even madness can’t stop him from multitasking.

If these events seem jumbled, they are. His affliction is such that the past is all of one plane: immediate, five minutes ago, if he remembers it at all. So every trial and every conflict is as raw as if it had just ended, or it is as if it never occurred, but there is no in between. We now live in a world of extremes, like the propaganda of Kundera’s Czechleslovakia, where things are pure, or they are not, where everything and nothing butt heads, with no buffer, with no matter or situation in between.