condoms of riverside park #1

the world's relentless crappiness (SoberLife day 5)

whined about it

fact is, I mean everything I say

Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall by Ken Sparling
(Mud Luscious Press re-release, 2012)
166 pages

I was super stoked when I found out Mud Luscious was re-releasing Ken Sparling’s Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (originally published by Knopf in 1996) not only because Ken Sparling is the shit but because I already own a first edition of the book that I found more than a decade ago. Might sound like a douchey way of saying “ha ha already bought it, y'all small press ain’t getting no more of my PayPal funds!” but what I mean is that when a press like Mud Luscious puts out a book like this, it validates what I’ve thought for a long time: that the book is brilliantly unique (also I’m sure Mud Luscious will get more of my Monopoly money, don't worry). One of my English teachers must have been real cool because I remember being recommended Dad Says in high school and stumbling across a pristine copy soon after in the dollar bin at a library book sale and being like this cover art is dope or ill or whatever lame preppy gangsters said in 2001. I don’t remember any of the inside of the book though, just looking up and being like this is fucking weird over and over in a good way. Re-reading it now, I do the same. Everyone’s a flash fiction writer now and even though his book is a pretty much a non-linear novel, Ken Sparling feels like some awesome pale Canadian godfather of flash in being able to make the smallest moments like third trimester pregnant, revealing in a phrase a complex fear we all share but might not have known we had and what would have taken most people 200 pages to get right. An exercise in brevity and accumulation. Dad Says is comprised of the underlying and overlying fragments of a librarian’s life – not a particularly exciting one, wife and a kid, suburban condo – made unflinchingly and cleverly fascinating by the negative space, by what’s not said but can’t not be thought. A spiral of unraveling and uneasy memories, the need to matter and the futility of giving a shit, fleeting mundane self-slaps of modernity exposed with the dry wit we all wish we had to face them. The deceptively simple language that will make you yearn for a childish innocence but will crush your soul if you let it. Don’t forget about the sprinklings of doubt and extreme tenderness. There’s self-contained third-person vignettes thrown in for some good fun. Oh and jobs can be pretty stupid. God knows how depressing this might have been if it was not written during a time of relative peace and prosperity (were the 90s tight in Canada too?), and the title would have been Dad Says He Saw You on Amazon, but it’s stupid to keep talking about it you should probably just buy it (see, I’m supporting the small press community!). Anyways here are some good parts and by good I mean pretty much like how all of it is:

He lifts his face and there are marks on his face that were not there before. No one says anything. The angle of his head shears off the possibility of speech.

I think it’s the sound of it, “fish cakes,” and the way dinner comes along every night relentlessly, like a bomb.

They’ve drained all the swamps in Florida, just so you can sit by a pool and look at other people’s towels. On the way home it rains. We have to drive through Ohio. I hate Ohio.

It breaks my heart to think about my father. So I don’t think about my father. I think about my mother. It breaks my heart to think about my mother, too.

I died. I went to heaven. After a couple of weeks, I was given an apartment.

And there’s a part about Batman pogs that I highlighted in orange highlighter in 2001 that pretty much makes the whole thing worthwhile. Thanks Mud Luscious, for bringing this back to life.