Letter's to Wendy's

September 27, 996

If we think of the future as the Pritty Titty Bah-B-Q, and the past as a Motion-Excreting Machine (excreting through the pores), we get a much clearer picture of the present. Will the present is forever beginning to be a buffet, it is always already eaten away to the point of shimmering. This shimmering should not be confused with what is actually edible.

Wendy's restaurant comment cards beg customers to "Tell us about your visit," and Wenderoth writes a year-long diary this way.

They call it fiction but I was reading it like a long thick burger of prose poems: am I wrong. There are no characters but the speaker. There is no plot but the calendar.

If there are themes to the entries (each one no longer than a medium-length paragraph of five or six sentences, and some shorter than that), they are pornography, American plastic culture, a sort of existential philosophy tethered by junk food and anonymity, solipsistic desire-fulfillment. But it's funnier than all that, sad, too, sometimes, in a sentimental way.

In fact, the Wendy's setting provides the intellectual space for an almost infinite deconstructive exercise.

November 25, 1996

This idiotic notion that one should love the other customers. Love here really only means: agree, for the time being, not to attack. People pretend, though, that each customer is an irreplaceable piece of some priceless puzzle -- like the death of each customer is significant for every other customer. It's just not true; one cannot love what one does not know, and -- unfortunately -- one knows very little.'

November 27, 1996

The Virgin Mother appeared to me today. She was holding two baked potatoes with sour cream and chives. "The're delicious," she said, and she smiled, emanating a great white light. I took one from her. It was warm and inviting. I cut into it with my plastic fork and plastic knife and I took a bite. It was, as usual, very dry. She held out the other potato to me. "You try it," I said, "it's dry as fuck."

December 11, 1996

Thinking presses on one, demands that being admit its foundation in sense. Faith relieves this pressure. Its strange babbling is learned intuitively, like a way of laughing. The most stupefying faith there has ever been is the faith in "heaven." Such a faith proposes the abrupt and complete end of sense. This proposal cannot even conceivably be accepted, however much one cries, "I accept, I accept."