K/Caput

Farewell to a man with a head like a a quivering block of Spam

This short parable was originally written in 2016 as an attempt to parody that which could not, it turned out, be parodied. It turns out, however, to make a fine farewell to one of the worst human beings of our era, a man with an objectively embarrassing haircut, a body like a sack of ground beef, the voice of a microwave full of forks, and nothing resembling a soul. A man whose visage has been hovering in front of us like Big Brother as imagined by Arby’s, wreathed in the sickly green sulfurous vapor of aerosolized tweets and rancid spray tan, for the better part of five years. Whatever follows next—and I think it’s perfectly fair to assume it could range the gamut from a Utopian paradise to the Lake of Fire—no peace-loving person can honestly disagree that come tomorrow at noon, a lingering fart will be swept from the room.

I was fourteen when I saw my first bighead. Of course, we all saw the same bighead. Like millions of students all eye witnesses to the destruction of the Challenger, we all watched his head growing, in real time, on television each day. The President.

For a while it was just a rumor—a sort of nasty remark that circulated among his political opponents—but gradually his appearance began to sow doubt in wider and wider circles, and eventually even deniers began to grow silent, carrying worried looks on their faces and refusing interviews. His head was like a blue ribbon pumpkin in a Midwestern county fair.

I’ll never forget the day the issue finally broke. It was the State of the Union address, and the President wobbled into the room like a man struggling with a trash bag full of water. He staggered to the podium, a veritable moon looming over his sagging shoulders. Seizing the podium with both hands he swayed back and forth a few times before coming to rest, his noggin balanced precariously and blocking from view both the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House. He looked like a golf ball on a navy-blue tee.

And then it happened. Off to his left, someone shouted. Witnesses claim it was something about the price of shampoo, but the audio recording is inconclusive. Whatever it was, it caught the President’s attention and he turned sharply, seeking out the source of the remark. Too sharply. His giant nut swung round like a stricken dirigible and unceremoniously toppled to the floor with the moist thud of a thick cut of meat slammed down on a countertop.

Two aides materialized from nowhere, lifted the head and placed it gently back atop the President’s shoulders. He stood silent for a beat and then began his speech as though nothing had happened.

Illustration: P4ngur

The curious thing, in the wake of the incident, was how quickly the public adjusted. After a brief flurry of concern, the national conversation drifted on to other things. Before long, one began to see other bigheads on television, and eventually among one’s own family, friends, and colleagues. It spread rapidly, and within eighteen months, almost everyone had a giant head.

There were, it should be noted, a small minority which never succumbed to the condition. Perhaps though, because of the way the disorder spread from the Head of State downward, smallheads were quickly ostracized. Bigheadism was digested and integrated by the public with surprising rapidity, closely tracking the rate of its spread. Scientific research into the causes and possible cures of bigheadism began to be criticized as a façade masking a hateful discriminatory impulse from those “afflicted” with smallheadism.

And so it went. Within a few years, people didn’t even talk about the pre-bighead era. It was as though they had forgotten things had ever been any different.

The world changed, and continued to change, but people didn’t discuss it. They just accepted each change as though things had never been otherwise. An entirely new industry grew up around products for supporting very large, very heavy heads. Powered head carts, head chairs, huge hats—these all entered the market within the first decade of the bighead era. War was increasingly automated since it was no longer possible for most people to fit into airplanes or tanks, and infantry found that their head carts didn’t navigate rubble- and crater-strewn battlefields very effectively. So nations bombed each other by remote. New sports had to be developed to account for athletes’ inability to run or jump any longer. Chess would likely have surged, but people didn’t get any smarter, just more cephalomaximal. Egg cartons became a common metaphor for transportation and housing solutions, and pornographers danced around new taboos in which, for instance, Humpty Dumpty rams a _____ into the _____ of every one of the King’s horses and men. [1]

All this was a long time ago, but it did happen. We weren’t always like this, and there are those of us — mostly smallheads such as myself, it is true — who believe it’s important to remember and important to recognize that we are not without choice. While change is inevitably a constant in life, so is human will, and it’s not necessary to simply accept whatever circumstances happen to pertain when one comes into the world, to say nothing of things that happen in the course of living. In the current crisis, for example, it is importunate to recognize there is nothing normal about having a President whose skin is covered in a sort of fur made of tiny penises—dickskin in the popular argot—and there’s no reason to be silent about it, much less to deliberately engage in surgical procedures to replicate the condition for fashion purposes.

Disregard my words at your peril. Sit by silently while you acquire a vestment of phalli, and you too will suffer the shock of discovering there is no bottom to the shame into which you can sink. Dickskin today, panic-dancing syndrome tomorrow. I know. I’ve seen it happen.

[0] Regarding the title of this piece, K/Caput refers to the Latin word “caput,” meaning “head,” and the German word “kaput,” meaning “destroyed.” It’s also intended to evoke Roland Barthe’s S/Z, a book about which I know almost nothing other than that it is a seminal work of post-structuralist criticism describing multiple interweaving codes of meaning in Honoré de Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine.” More importantly, S/Z is a cool-looking title.

[1] As this is a family newsletter, the specific kitchen implement and orifice have been redacted.

[3] Thanks for riding with me through the last third of 2020 and into 2021. If you’ve enjoyed Red Clay Bestiary thus far, please do me a favor and exhort someone to subscribe. Or leave a comment. It’s a small price to pay to keep me from coming to your house and stealing all your comments.