An Excellent Autobiography
by Max Huxley
It starts when we meet, a long time ago.
Max is eating his lunch on the bench by the tree. Cat is a young boy then, like we all are, and approaches the tree with long wonderful fingernails to strip its bark. Eli Spalding is nowhere yet to be found, and Max and Cat graciously wait there to meet him.
Eli finally walks up to meet us for the first time.
“Max, you’re hitting the keys all wrong,” he says.
“No, no, it’s my lunch that I’m eating all wrong. And you can’t know my name yet. Not when you first get here. Hello, my name is Max, and don’t tell me how to eat my lunch, Eli.”
“Now you’re all confused. You’re simply hitting the keys all wrong. I’m not here yet. ”
“You aren’t? I am confused. And if I’m confused then the reader must be hopeless.”
“Exactly. Not excellent at all. Hello, you’re eating your lunch all wrong.”
“Oh, here you are. Hello, my name is Max, and don’t tell me how to eat my lunch, Eli.”
“It’s too late. It’s all lost. You’re still doing it wrong. I’ll fix it.”
An Excellent Autobiography
by Eli Spalding
It started when we met, a long time ago.
Eli Spalding saw two young boys sitting by and attacking a tree, respectively. The sitting boy was eating a lunch, incorrectly. The attacking boy was likely damaging his fingertips. Fingernails being worn to the nub can be a painful and sometimes humiliating experience. Eli pitied the boy attacking the tree, but nothing would be happening to him that he didn’t bring entirely on himself.
Self-destruction never achieves anything useful except self-empowerment concerning life outlook. In terms of life outlook it may change only details, rather than the categories of outlook: science and God. These are immutable. Where science is the aggregation of similar abstractions, God is the aggregation of many dissimilar abstractions, which makes it the most human.
“Excuse me, but we’re still waiting,” yelled Mark.
“Be quiet. Hello, you’re eating your lunch all wrong,” Eli yelled back.
“No. You were closer at the time. Now you’re all the way over there.”
Eli scowled. Max was interrupting something very important. It would be another ten years before we would learn the true meaning of trees in our lives. Trees are forever symbolic, and they are conveniently versatile symbols, to the lazy. Growth, rebirth, death, seasons changing, ungrowth, cutting down, minor growth, branching out, branch growth, pinecones, birds, slow growth, cherries, hidden desires, and growth of hidden desires are all represented by trees. So, ten years later we learned that trees are only truly the symbols for degeneration, especially in terms of fingertips, as is expertly foreshadowed here.
Ten years later trees are around Max as he prepares to fight. Eli and Cat are backing him up. We are the best of friends, Max and Cat and Eli.
“Max, if you’re going to interrupt, at least do me the favor of taking my name off of this thing and writing in the correct tense for once.”
THE END
“There, now you have to.”
An Excellent Autobiography
by Max Huxley
Ten years after it started when we met, a long time ago, trees are
“Were,” said Eli.
were around Max as he prepared to fight. Eli and Cat are
“Were,” said Eli.
were backing him up. We are
“If you’re not going to do this right, don’t even include me,” said Eli.
are the best of friends, Max and Cat and Brian.
Max has angered the school bully and at three PM at the flagpole they are going to punch each other. His fingers are decaying from the trees all around him.
“My fingers are fine,” Max whispers to his friends, “but someday this will give my life symbolism, to say that my fingers are decaying.”
“I will remember that,” says Brian, “and use that symbolism as my own some day. I have a story about this, actually, in which a boy defeats a bully. He falls in love. I will tell it, and include decomposing fingers, to inspire you.”
“I never said anything like that,” says Eli. “What stilted dialogue.”
“You asked to be taken out of this story. This is Brian, your replacement, talking. Not you.”
“You can’t make up a character in your own life. This is like the time you and I sat in a small white room, the door locked, limiting our movement as human cognition is limited by the immutable categories of outlook, which I will get to later. We were playing chess, when Cat opens the door, carrying groceries.”
“I’ve come back with the milk,” says Cat.
“And a fine time to do so,” says Eli, “you’ve interrupted us right in the middle of adolescence.”
“Don’t tell me you left childhood without me!”
“Our lives can’t wait all day for milk,” says Eli.
“I bet you’ve left me entirely out of it, too. How could you, Eli? Oh, damn, you talked about degenerating fingers, didn’t you?” Cat sets down the groceries and shows Eli his damaged fingertips.
“I was talking about decaying fingers and all their ramifications, but Max,” Eli glares at Max, “cut me off to tell a story, which also had them, yes.”
“Please let me be there for childhood,” says Cat, “I’ll even type.”
“Don’t bother asking, just start if you want to. Please do tell the story, though,” says Max.
“You have my permission,” says Eli, crossing his arms.
An Excellent Autobiography
by Cat Harrington
It started when we met, a long time ago.
Cat was at a tree scraping at the bark with his fingers and risking their destruction.
“Foreshadowing,” said Eli, who had not met Cat yet, or the boy sitting on the bench next to the tree, eating his lunch.
“All wrong,” said Eli.
“What?” said Cat.
“He’s eating his lunch all wrong. Put that in,” said Eli.
“But you haven’t walked over to say it yet.”
“Never mind that. It’s a fact that he’s eating it wrong. It’s true, so just put it.”
“The boy is me, right?” asked Max, who was eating his lunch all wrong.
“Yes,” said Cat, whose fingers hurt. He was talking about all sorts of things, but Max and Eli were not listening; they never did. Cat was afraid to talk to Max. Later there was a boy who he liked very much but was afraid to talk to. Cat wrote stories about not talking to him and about being rejected to come to terms with it. Cat never talked to him because his love would be rejected. In the story he went by
a different name, and so did the boy.
All of the Places Where Alex Tried to Be
by Cat Harrington
Alex groans. He wants five more minutes of sleep, but his desk is uncomfortable. His arm is more asleep than he is, and so he moves awake. He looks up and opens his window. He can see into Max’s room. Max is reading on the chair in front of the crucifix on his wall.
Alex picks up the story he was writing before he fell asleep. It’s a fantasy story about him and Max. He has written it to feel better, but the story is an escape. He can never talk to Max. Pretending that he can will never help him therapeutically. Despite this, he picks up his pen to write, “Tomorrow I will talk to Max” when the wind blasts through the window and steals the paper away. He picks up another piece of paper but the wind takes that too, and all the paper on his desk. All the drawers open and all the paper goes out the window, and all the pencils and all the pens.
Max watches the paper fall to the lawn between his house and Alex’s. He raises one eyebrow at Alex. Alex is going to talk to him, but sees the crucifix again and cringes back into his room. He cannot.
He goes outside to gather his paper.
“The symbolism of the cross combines with the ‘X’ in both names. He was afraid only of himself and of Max. Excellent,” says Max.
“A dues ex machina should never be appreciated. Let’s move on,” says Eli.
“Why was the boy named Max?” asks Max.
“I changed the names,” says Cat,” it wasn’t you.”
“Hello, you’re eating your lunch all wrong,” said Eli.
“Hello, my name is Max, and don’t tell me how to eat my lunch, Eli.”
“What is the correct way to eat a lunch?” asked Cat.
“You know,” said Max, “Your story reminds me of something I wrote about a boy I liked who I was afraid to talk to. I changed the names. It was about the two of
us together being happy. I eventually talked to him and he said he loved me.”
Brad, Graciously, and Cat
by Max Huxley
Brad grips his gun to his chest and looks at Cat, who is asleep. Brad has had Cat’s back since they were enlisted, and is waiting for him to wake up. The world is quiet when it’s nighttime in Vietnam.
Cat is an engineer; he fixes the radio. Brad is there to make sure he can fix the radio. Brad lies down next to Cat in the mud. Trampled plants surround him. They breathe deeply. Brad gathers his coat around him and he is warm. It begins to rain and they are both warm. He strokes Cat’s cheek. Cat wakes up and looks at Brad. He unzips Brad’s jacket and runs a finger down his chest as the two reach for each other and kiss. Brad wraps one leg around Cat and they get as close as they can as their fingers decay due to the trees around them. They are happy forever.
“The part about the fingers you put in just now,” says Eli.
“Well, yeah. This story didn’t have any symbolism, though, so I had to add some.”
“The boy’s name was Cat,” says Cat.
“The names were changed,” says Max. “It wasn’t you.”
“Oh,” says Cat. “Can we continue, Eli? Where were we? Oh, yes, what is the correct way to eat a lunch?”
“No, hold on,” says Max.
An Excellent Autobiography
by Max Huxley
Fifteen years after it started when we met, a long time ago, Max, Cat, and Brian were sharing stories they’d written and coming to terms with them.
“What? I’ve never come to terms with anything in my life,” protested Eli.
“This isn’t you, it’s Brian.”
“Well, put me back in. And don’t begin in the middle, that’s not where it begins.”
“You’re not in this part, anyway,” said Max.
Brian became Eli and left the room.
Max and Cat had written stories about liking people named Cat and Max. These people weren’t each other, but they may as well have been. They had been talking to each other for years.
Cat admitted, “Max, although it’s hard for me to say, may I please have permission to love you?”
Max said, “Yes, you may.”
“I take offense,” said Cat. “I would not ask permission to love somebody.”
“I think it’s very much something you would do,” said Mark.
“Please don’t make me say that,” said Cat.
“Max, although it’s hard for me to say, I love you,” said Cat, “that’s better.”
Max and Cat pulled each other very close and kissed. Their fingers decayed like mad.
“There were no trees there,” said Cat.
“Oh, whoops,” said Max, “I’ve done it wrong.”
Cat sighed and looked at his bloody fingers. “Symbolism. Now we have to begin again.”
In the other room Eli was drinking the milk Cat had brought and writing a story about the future. He was writing it so that he could practice coming to terms
with it, since he wondered what that was like.
A Meaningful Death
by Eli Spalding
When he was six, Eli Spalding wore water wings in the pool. When he was ten, he refused to jump off of rocks. He didn’t get a driver’s license until he was twenty-two. He never took an airplane, and he would visit the doctor for every ailment until that ailment was cancer, which is what puts him in front of James right now, a large tumor in Eli’s neck. Right now is of course the future; Eli does not currently have cancer. Excuse the improper tense, but the future is too tedious to bother with. Clearly inferior.
“I am no longer afraid of death,” he says, and dies. James writes that down.
Now that is something to come to terms with.
James takes this time to consider the nature of worldly outlook. By looking abstractly at a million different deaths, as is his job, a job which so few have, he is able to aggregate into a scientific view. But if he observes many different phenomena abstractly and aggregates them, Cat walks into the room. Eli shakes off his death and considers visiting a doctor right away to set up some foreshadowing.
“Excuse me, Eli, but we’re starting over again,” says Cat.
“Good. Is there finger decay this time?”
Cat hopes not.
An Excellent Autobiography
by Max Huxley
It started when we met, a long time ago.
Max was sitting on the bench next to a tree, and he had not yet met Cat, who was tearing the bark off of a tree. They were waiting to meet Eli, who walked over to them.
“Hello,” said Eli, “you’re eating your lunch all wrong.”
“Hello, my name is Max, and don’t tell me how to eat my lunch, Eli.”
“What is the correct way to eat a lunch?” asked Cat.
“With your mouth,” said Eli.
“Sorry, but my mouth is busy right now,” said Max, who was kissing Cat.
“This isn’t what happened,” said Eli.
“Foreshadowing,” said Max.
The two were busy and left Eli to do the writing by himself. Eli was much better at foreshadowing, anyway. He took Max’s lunch and showed him how to eat it correctly. Eli choked on an olive pit and spit it out, so that he could go to see the doctor.
