Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

A Caution When Using Props in the Chub

When filled with fabric, wood, or an ice Thompson, a woman’s chub danger is deactivated, but the resulting fabric waste, spoiled wood, or mouth water, all known as “heart chaff”—marinated in the overflow of feelings, and bearing the impress of a woman’s mouth and every consonant-bearing word (crack) she has ever uttered — becomes hazardous and should be disposed of properly.

What Do I Do with Heart Cha f When I Am Done with It?

Landfills for heart chaff have turned into a kind of American behavior graveyard. Female looters, scavengers, and behavior instructors have stormed these chaff sites and walked off with barrels of used fabric and chewed wood, still soaked with the behavior juices of the former owners, a dumping site of Identity Medicine that is far too dangerous to inexperienced women. This kind of American behavior transfer — chaotic and outside the eye of the government — will most certainly lead to diluted strains of female identities and an absolute detour from name-based behavior ventures and Null Heart attainment strategies. To prevent collective behavior sharing, several safer methods are available for the disposal of chaff, or any cloth that has been deeply chewed by a woman. These methods include:

Weaving children’s clothing from heart chaff and donating it to the misbehaved young people of this country, who might wear the new suits of clothing — often brown and roughly textured, like a woven graham cracker— and thus relearn some of the basic life actions.

Creating flags and flying them outside of women’s houses to advertise the favored behaviors and feelings of the family within.

Building elaborate behavior-free shade zones in open fields by creating tents from the chaff that will shelter those women who no longer know what behavior they would like to exhibit. Resting in the shade of a behavior tent allows women to comfortably plan their next move without the embarrassing pressure of sunlight, widely thought to exacerbate behavior on the surface of the world. Important behavior tends to occur in darkness, or not at all.

What If It’s Too Late?

Let’s say a woman’s chub is not properly stuffed, a worst-case scenario, where her head has defaulted to its status as a prop-free object in the American landscape. Then key life events invade her head and riot into important feelings, a mess of attachments, hopes, and regrets. Is there a way to manipulate the female head after these emotions have begun, a sort of morning-after treatment when the woman is on the verge of feeling something?

Absolutely.

Because residue of an emotion apparently does remain in the mouth (except in deaf individuals of America, whose emotional activity is stored on their skin, in the form of behavior oil), coats the tongue, and probably does something quite unbecoming to the teeth and lips and gums, it can still be absorbed by the appropriate rag — that is, cloth that has “heard” the secret speech of the woman in question.

The Thought Rag

When women in the American territory speak careful sentences into a handkerchief, they are creating, whether they know so or not, an important item called “a thought rag.” Once confided to, the cloth becomes a listening towel, or “priest,” regularly privileged to whatever a woman chooses to say. The cloth may be tied smartly to a skirt or blouse, or used as a scarf or bandit rag; sometimes an adventurous woman employs it as a wind sock (if she needs to handicap her actions, lest her skills intimidate her acquaintances). Regardless of how it is worn, it stores a tonal material in its surface and can begin to contain what is crucial of the women who use it — a record of those female citizens who feel comfortable storing their basic life messages (I’m sorry, Go away, It hurts, I’ll take it) in a portable medium such as a swatch of stylish fabric. Even a carpet sample can be used, although rough cloth can chafe the face and mouth of the woman, leading to facial weaknesses, like weeping.

Everything a woman feels or suspects is to be confided to the thought rag, as with a diary. This takes all the noise of the “inner life,” the so-called dialogue with oneself formerly thought to be so crucial to sophisticated living (though primarily a device of “men” to justify and complicate long periods of inarticulate confusion), and exports it to an object that can fit smartly into a woman’s handbag. It is a far safer way to store the fundamentals of a female identity, and the head becomes devalued since it no longer stores a woman’s mystery.

These swatches of cloth can be exchanged between people when a shortcut to intimacy is desired. Indeed cloth-swapping salons and thought-rag sharing allow a woman to keep abreast of the personalities of her friends and acquaintances without the troubling ambiguity of speech and imprecise self-representation. A thought rag cannot lie; it won’t fail to impart the key data of the person who has used it. If I were to meet you, I would rather spend several hours sniffing and mouthing your thought rag than with you personally. You would no doubt try to impress me or somehow manipulate my experience of your person, concealing your fears and doubts, foregrounding some unbearable fiction of what a person should be. Your thought rag would give me the whole story in an hour or so and I could then decide if a meeting between us would be worthwhile.

Yet swap meets of this kind are also how a thought rag can become lost or stolen, and a woman’s identity can be “chewed” by another woman. In such cases, a thought rag can be assigned a password, generally keyed in with a gnashing sequence of the teeth.

Is the Head Itself Still Essential?

At the time of this writing, the head probably cannot be omitted from the person pursuing the female life project. Radical antiemotionalists have attempted a head-free trajectory in the world, yet these pioneers, while laudably testing the limits of the female life project, have unfortunately defaulted their ability to report on the effects of their experiment. They have gone too far from our world for us to understand them. Perhaps one day this approach will seem heroic, yet a woman without an operative head is still unable to signal her former world; to observers, she is nearly similar to a deceased person — her skin is cold, and she does not respond when prodded or splashed with water.

But a compromise is available for those women looking to limit the role of their heads in their behavioral and identity-development enterprises. This compromise involves cold-treating the female head with an item known as the Zero Hood, or facial cloak, form-fitted to a woman like a ski mask and meant to flash-freeze her face and skull. The head can withstand short periods of deep freezing several times per day, as long as the Thawing Sock is applied directly to the woman in time to prevent memory loss. Husbands and brothers are the best assistants for this sort of technique. Machinery should not be operated by a woman using the Zero Hood, nor should she go near children or animals.

Lastly, if each woman of America carved a wooden version of her own head (rook) and polished it with a personalized cloth, speaking kind words to the head (as one would talk to a plant), whispering in its ears, kissing the mouth, and grooming and oiling its surface, a woman might discover a person-shifting relationship with herself in which her own head becomes less important to her life, a prop to decorate, certainly, but not to be deployed much beyond that. This wooden head could be placed in rooms where a woman’s presence was desired, a kind of surrogate ambassador for her life, during those many moments that would otherwise exhaust or disgust her real head, the one that still suffers from responses and upsetting reactions to the world at large. I am not embarrassed to admit that I see a world one day where many beautiful wooden heads fill a room, while the people these heads represent are able to rest alone in their cabins and still accrue important experiences with other people.