Savage Tales

injects itself daily into our existence they (these jokes) say nay, not so, we will have it another way.
    So this guy walks into a bar because that's what guys do and it doesn't matter who or where or even why for we have painted the scenario to preamble and represent all the many corners of reality and the who is you and me and all of us, forever walking into bars and waiting unbeknownst (but also knownst because we are the ones telling the joke) for the humor to unravel all the serious tension of this bar at the end of time. Within are a band of shady characters – perhaps a preacher, a Jew, a prostitute, a black man, a businessman. Everyone has a stereotyped texture infiltrating every pore and passing them off as faceless ghosts that hover behind an invisible uniform, these fellows, so totally unaware that they don't have anything underneath, they are that uniform, they are both dead and eternal.
    There is a vast mirror behind the bar. The bartender, a middling generic man of indeterminate age and lacking a name, has glanced in that mirror 9037 times in the course of his career, though even he is unaware of this. He only knows he has seen himself a great deal of times, and that nearly every time he has noted with disappointment his hair's lackluster inability to cover his head in a fulfilling manner. But all of this goes unspoken.
    "Double or nothing" someone yells over the 1964 song playing tinnily over the speakers igniting the brown carpet floor and who puts carpet in a bar, these things are never mentioned.
    "Why are you saying that?" I ask, unsure who I'm speaking to.
    "You want to start something," he asks.
    "I think we already have," I say. "In the idiom of the territory there is no room for irrelevancies, abstract theorizing, uncertainties, ostentatious ornamentation. Every syllable should bring us closer to a conclusion."
    "What are you talking about?" the man says.
    "You want I should lump him one over the head?" the bartender suddenly asks from behind me, far more uncouth than I should have suspected had he remained silent, and I'm unsure if he's asking the question of me or my unruly co-conversant. I step away from the bar, just to be safe.
    I realize that I have stepped too far away, too far inside, that the joke is forever lost, and that there's no way out of it.
    "You see, fellows, it's like this: We've fallen into –"
    "Shut up! Talk talk talk!"
    I chuckle lightly, attempting to classify this last exchange as a deflated punchline and end the whole business, but it doesn't work, it goes on, it goes on.
    Adam, from the earth, the dirt, the first man, resurrected by God for his first attempt at narrative and humor, a dismal failure by modern standards, but not bad for a first try. Did God ever have Adam walk into a bar? Perhaps not, through sheer lack of such things at the time. But he did have the fellow run into a snake coiled upon a slithy branch much like a denizen in the wallpaper of the bar or the bartender himself, and it was only a matter of time before such locales materialized to better situate our joke vibrations into the scenery. The rope was tight against the man but he played his card as he always had!
    Instead of responding to the serpent in the tree, I reached up to take it in my arms. It flinched at first, never knowing cuddling in its tentative and limited existence, but then I had it and it hadn't yet learned to bite into the flesh of another being (vegetarianism being the norm in the Edenic era) and we were fast friends, me petting and he purring almost cat-like, unaware of these felines also and uncaring of how he might sound for embarrassment and shame had also not been discovered. These things needed an audience to function.
    And when the snake had let his guard down and almost released his hold on consciousness, I reached around his neck (near the head since a snake is nearly all neck!!!) and slowly squeezed and the slippery fellow must have known it was more than a deep-tissue massage for he started squirming and struggling but it did not matter for I had him he was mine and I squeezed tighter and tighter until the serpent screamed, coughed, let out his final splintering wheeze of air. I was not proud of what I had done. I imagined God looking down on me with a frown and shaking his hairy white finger. But I also hoped that he might have a small grain of approval for what I had done. For after all, I only wanted to spice things up. I only wanted to carve out a joke in the