The Strange Phosophorus of the Life, Nameless Under An Old Misappellation

Hey all. My name is Zack and I’ve been given the opportunity to guest-type on this thing today. I appreciate the opportunity; I’m in law school, where everyone rides unicorns and says things like “such that” and “normative” and professors force me to write about insurance law and child pornography (not, unfortunately, at the same time) . . . so I could use the change of pace.

I wasn't quite sure what to post; I sketched out and ultimately rejected a bunch of stuff. What I finally decided to do was to write a story about music. (If you don't like it, it could be worse: I was originally going to post about how much I love "This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race.") I used to (try) to write fiction fairly regularly, but it's been a while. This is probably the first complete thing I've written in at least two years. It came with surprising ease: this draft, the first and only, took maybe an hour. Quick for me. The idea probably grew out of a rumour I heard a few years ago that Thomas Pynchon was writing a book about Japanese monster movies. If anyone is unfamiliar with the music of John Fahey, I would suggest remedying that posthaste: the catalog's a bit uneven, but the best stuff totally kills. And now, without further ado, a world exclusive:

Godzilla Ponders John Fahey’s Song “God, Time, and Causality,” by Me

Godzilla woke up one morning feeling a little blue. This happened to him occasionally. He got snuck up on by what some people might call loneliness; but to him that didn’t really seem like the right way to think about it. He was the only Godzilla in the world—was that loneliness? It was just the way things were.

Whenever he felt down Godzilla would journey to a favorite meditative spot in order to reflect on his general life-situation. Sometimes he went to the mountains, travelling incognito in sunglasses and an oversized gray poncho. (Godzilla knew it was his fault he was famous, but still: people could be dicks.) Other times he travelled to the desert, and sat for hours among the sand dunes and sidewinders, letting the bright orange sun pound his impenetrable skin. But on the day in question he decided to take to the water.

Godzilla waded out, past schools of darting fish, barrels of toxic sludge, the ghostly barnacled skeletons of crashed airplanes—some of which he himself had swatted unthinkingly from the sky—that littered the shallow ocean floor, until he came to the edge of the continental shelf. He stepped forward, letting himself sink. He sunk for hours. The pressure did not bother him at all: he was an all-but-immortal monster. But light and time faded quickly. He could not orient himself. As always, he was unsure that he would be able to swim back to the surface. Whenever he emerged from one of these watery sojourns—and who could tell how long he had been under?—it seemed as if his inexorable upward movement was due not to his own agency but to that of some Something Else: a larger force that pulled him towards his new destiny. It was easy to let panic set in, so you had to push back against it as hard as you could. He had found that the discipline this effort required made for right thinking.

Godzilla’s eyes were already closed, but in his mind he closed them again. Something shuttled past him in the darkness. The water it passed through felt a few degrees warmer. It’s oddly comforting, thought Godzilla, that even here, at the bottom of the universe, I can be disturbed. And he began to hum a beloved childhood lullabye, softly, to himself but not to himself, sending each note out into the watery world for all those strangers to brush against.