THE FINAL THOUGHTS
OF TODD BASH

A beautiful young woman is singing some lieder music.  She is naked and wears clown make-up.  German soldiers intrude, goose-stepping across the stage.  A stampede of Labrador retrievers knocks the soldiers to the floor.  A group of Scottish bagpipe players perform excerpts from TheRise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.  Meanwhile, two young boys are watching television late at night.  It is black, except for the glow from the television screen.  Klaus Kinski rants and raves, but his voice has been dubbed by a British actor who sounds more like an octopus.  Kinski presses a knife against a woman’s throat.  (It’s the same woman who had been singing lieder music.)  She’s so frightened she urinates in her panties, and her freckles jump from her face, landing in a glass of milk.  One of the boys drinks the milk, and suddenly becomes very horny.  Meanwhile, several years earlier, somewhere in Spain, Salvador Dali shoves a flower into Garcia Lorca’s crack.  Bunuel watches from afar, concerned his friends are plotting against him.  But a caterpillar on Bunuel’s shoulder assures him that his friends are only rehearsing a scene from the opera Wozzeck.  Relieved by this explanation, Bunuel swallows the caterpillar, before smashing a spider that has crawled onto his shoe.  Meanwhile, eighty years later, a man in his thirties (It’s one of the boys who had been watching television, only now he’s grown up) is driving on the freeway.  Car horns scream and red lights flash.  A memory from the pavement below hops into the man’s pocket, quivering like a snowflake.  It reveals an incident which occurred on that exact spot of the highway ten years before.  The man is moved to tears as he is told a story about a small girl who was molested by her father, a warehouse worker with a fetish for water sprinklers.  The man places the memory gently into a glass, where he keeps it for several years, before eventually setting it free in a lake by the mountains.  Meanwhile, in 1969, Malcolm Mcdowell and three young men - Stanislaw, Octavio, and Tommy - are on a rooftop, firing machine guns at a mob of priests.  A nun appears, removing her breast from her gown. Octavio and Tommy climb down the building and begin taking turns drinking milk from the breast.  Stanislaw, meanwhile, has slid down a drainpipe and crawled into the window of a gymnasium.  Here, he becomes a coach for a children’s basketball team, but is fearful the parents may discover his other life on the rooftop.  Meanwhile, Speed Racer is banging Trixie in the back of a helicopter while Spritle and his pet monkey Chim Chim secretly watch.  Next door, the Three Stooges are destroying the home of an ambassador from Calanda.  Meanwhile, a young man (Stanislaw) is dreaming.  He imagines himself in a public restroom where a number of people are openly dumping in front of one another.  In one corner is a singer from an all girl rock band. In another corner is a movie agent.  Outside is a muddy swamp.  The young man tells the agent about an experience he had a few weeks earlier.  He remembers wandering through a record store, searching for the K section so he could buy an album by King Crimson.  Unfortunately, the records, which were arranged in alphabetical order, jumped from J to L.  After several hours of hunting, he finally came across an album beginning with K, but it was a special record containing nothing but insect sounds.  On the cover of the album was a photograph of a giant, black spider (the same spider Bunuel had smashed with his shoe).  At that moment, the young man awakes from his dream and has a vision:  He sees himself as a little girl, removing the spider from a glass tank.  She holds the spider with a pair of tweezers and examines it closely.  Meanwhile, a swirl of oranges float around a tree while two full moons, also orange, weigh down the sky.  Meanwhile, a young boy (It’s one of the boys who was watching television) stands behind a wagon crying, haunted by a premonition that his mother will die.  Meanwhile, a man (the same man who was driving on the freeway) falls in love with a beautiful opera singer who has the voice of Birgit Nilsson.  He fantasizes about making love to her while she sings the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde.  Unfortunately, the singer has a roommate who also likes the man.  The roommate fantasizes about receiving oral sex from him, before murdering him in a gas chamber while Ride of the Valkyries plays.  Meanwhile, the ocean is now in the sky and the fish have turned into stars.  Meanwhile, Donald Pleasence is boxing a kangaroo.  Meanwhile, a freckle from a young woman’s face (the same woman who acted opposite Klaus Kinski) is hopping from a blade of grass to a stone.  The stone reminisces about a man who had stepped on him many years before.  The man had used a cane and walked sideways like a crab. The cane was made in France by a furniture maker who knew Isidore Ducasse.  Meanwhile, a young boy discovers a secret room under his house, containing an old lawnmower, a typewriter from the 1920s, and a Playboy magazine from 1969.  Meanwhile, an unbelievable explosion lights up the horizon.  It is just the millions of dreams that died that morning the moment their creators woke up.  Meanwhile, a young man (Stanislaw) and his friend are being paid an enormous amount of money to dig for the bones of a famous playwright.  They are in a garden behind a giant house with Spanish tiles on its roof.  It is a cold, windy night.  The young man uncovers some dog bones, as well as an old, rotted book.  The dog bones are transformed into Poochie Puppy, the young man’s pet who had died five years earlier.  He cries at the sight of his longtime companion.  With sadness in her eyes, Poochie walks to her former owner and brushes against his hand.  She then utters the following before disappearing into the night – “Der Floh auf dem Hund ist schwarz. Das Auge ist schwarz. Das Herz ist schwarz. Alles Tod!”


INFORMATION 

The Final Thoughts of Todd Bash was first published by Broken Boulder Press as part of the collection Final Thoughts in 2001.  It has since appeared in numerous periodicals, as well as on dozens of  Internet sites devoted to experimental writing.