Lady Gaga

I have been hypnotically revisiting the images in the Lady Gaga videos, over and over again, like a needle-skipping record left on the turntable as a family goes away on vacation, rushing out the door, lights on, dishes in the sink, barely packed, and strains of "Alejandro", "Poker Face", and "Bad Romance" echoing through a shag carpeted living room. Beds burn, the same incendiary autoimmolation striking the same assertive man wearing the same chin prosthetic, on infinite repeat, like the cosmos of the collapsing universe, a time stream somehow bent back upon itself, cause leading to effect leading to second cause. Again and again, I see the magnificent, goggle-clad face lasciviously pull on her black lips with a talonlike fingernail, the suggestive drills of her bodyguard, clad in Calvin Klein briefs and Prince Valiant haircuts, as they obligingly commit acts of nun rape and war crimes in one context, and submit to animal slavery in another. My one point five year old has inherited my obsessive, megalomaniacal disposition, and today I negotiated a brief respite, to show her videos of Fred Astaire, Hansel und Gretyl, Madonna, which she grudgingly tolerated, an early attempt to explain the concept of sharing. The fact of the matter is that the images are burned in her consciousness forever, and she will always desire to writhe and prance around in fancy underwear from now on, to dance with a coterie of latex clad mutants in a white room, to be bluffin' with her muffin, when the time reveals itself, though for now she is content to roll theatrically on the kitchen floor with her monkey, Alex, the same stuffed monkey who borrows my car keys and takes off for the night, to god knows where. I suppose I am being prepared for something, am I not? She will have Lady Gaga the same way I had the Honeycomb Hideout, the Trix Rabbit, the Ishmael who was Captain Crunch, their microscopic dramas played out ad infinitum across a six color canvas, to the extent that I can still remember the specious dictum that "Trix are for Kids". I wonder if her hypothalamus is putting down her first long-term memories, of a heroine in a bearskin casting a room into flames, of tiny pink tutus and the first attempts at dance steps. Hopefully, the same hypothalamus is putting down a few memories of endless afternoons in the park, of sandwiches shared on the grass, of turing over rocks to gather pillbugs to show with Mama, and a strange pastiche they will make. Rock, Pond, River, Mice, Milk, Scissors, Grahm Crackers, KISS, Sid and Marty Croft, GI Joe, Dinosaurs, Pengins, Dolls, Explosives, Peanut Butter, Grass Huts, Fear, Milk, Survival. We have barely left the savanna.