This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic. I was reviewing Six and Six, an album by Jandek. This is one of those infamous RYM style reviews which doesn't even mention the album in question. RateYourMusic has a noble tradition of people leaving interesting but ostensibly irrelevant pieces of writing as reviews for things. A lot of people hate it, I think it's great. Sometimes the pieces of writing are not explicitly about the music itself, but the simple act of taking two totally disconnected pieces of art and confidently claiming that one is a description of the other is an act which endows some new meaning upon both distinct pieces. This piece here was written, and then I thought for a while about which album the specific combination of comedy and queasy dread it would suit. I decided it would be a Six and Six review after the fact.
My neighbour’s roof is in a sorry state. So many of the tiles are missing that in various places there are holes straight into their attic. Just now (which is to say, the just now of me writing this, then, and not the just now of you reading it right now) I was on my roof watching a particularly fat fluffy bumblebee buzz about, as I am wont to do. For some reason it flew directly into the hole in their roof, and after sitting and staring intently at the opening for several minutes I didn’t see it re-emerge. I have seen this happen before, at least three times in fact, and I have never seen the bees re-emerge. Perhaps they are leaving via a different hole without me noticing, or perhaps they end up travelling deeper into the house. If I am correct about the layout of their house, I expect that the children often find that bumblebees spill out of the damp holes in their ceiling, and so they may grow up to be serial killers.
I was mulling this over and wondering if I could blame their shitty landlord for whatever deaths inevitably result from his negligence. I realised that sitting on the roof and staring into a dark hole, waiting for the emergence of bees, is not the sort of behaviour that I should be exhibiting if I'm to be rightfully concerned about lasting psychological damage to other people's children. Perhaps I'm the serial killer? No, I told myself. You have to have killed people to count as one of those.