Argumentum Ad Baculum

Have you ever heard of the BACULUM? It’s the perfect holiday gift!It’s all natural, affordable, and sure to spark fun family conversation about the FALL of MAN. It’s also dredges up a bit of abysmal trivia I’ve dropped to no avail in a few unpublished essays over the years—trivia which I share now in video form for your morose delectation. As I continue to empty my pockets of choice research nuggets in the form of failed viral content in the hope of increasing my Instagram following to the extent an agent or publisher might imagine me an entity with an organic following potentially deserving of a lucrative book contract, I hope you will share my shitty content and send any hungry gatekeepers you are acquainted with my way. She always kept a dish of vinegar out to keep the fruit flies off the apples. But that day the ramekin lay empty and overturned. The letter had been lying there a long time. The pages, brittle and yellow, were curled up at the edges and had drained the sentences into dry wordless pools of blue punctuated by the bodies of little dead bugs. “You tend to over privilege the role of language in human experience,” she said once. Yet it was she who told me that day that Eve was created from Adam’s baculum. For her it was a kind of game. She never read the news, just played the crossword puzzles. I don’t know where she read the article, probably it was some kind of joke at the back of a science journal. Supposedly, though, in the Old Testament, the word for rib, tzela, could refer to a hillside, the walls of a temple or wooden planks of doors and walls. It also referred to the trunks of trees. “Biblical Hebrew had no term for dick,” she said. “How would they have referred to you?”May you think fondly of our redeemer in the coming days. Dumpster Fires is a beacon of light in a world of trash and sorrow. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dumpster Fires at dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe