“And I was right. That kid who freed the cure? That kid was Bryce. Fifth member of the Yachts. We inducted him right there on the bike trail. So Charity Party—that’s how we came up with it. And it couldn’t have happened without the Neo-Gratification exercise of the nail through the foot. It couldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been curious to find out if and how a cure with its foot nailed to a tree could right itself. Or if we hadn’t had the desire to honor that curiosity by acting on it. Not that all, or even most of the Neo-Gratification exercises have proven fruitful, but I think you’ve got to break a few eggs, right? It’s the art of being an artist, I think. The art of being revolutionary. The willingness to break as many eggs as it takes.
“Anyway, that’s how I see it. And I think I’ve been pretty successful so far. I don’t know that I’ve necessarily come up with anything as revolutionary as fisting, but I think that, at the very least, I’ve come close. And what I’ve come up with has definitely caught on. Kids are into it. You saw them out there. But still, a couple months ago, I started having this feeling like: it isn’t enough. Like: all those kids, they’re doing what I do—what the Yachts do—and they’re loving it, sure, and spreading it around, teaching others. Charity Party and Flick&Look especially—those are getting really popular. But still, no one except for me and the Yachts is trying to come up with revolutionary thrills and pleasures on their own. And I want them to. That’s the next step. When I come up with something that’ll inspire others to innovate—that’s when I’ll know I’ve done something lasting. Something important. And that’s why, well—that’s why I made A Fistful, right? Because what I realized was that after I read that paper about fisting, I wasn’t just inspired to innovate interactions with Curios, I was inspired about the thought of inspiring others to innovate interactions with Curios—Fon’s making a face. Come on, Fon. Come on. Give me some room. I know you think I sound cheesy, but come on.”
Fon horse-laughed briefly and ruffled Trip’s hair. “Go ahead,” she said.
“Fon thinks I’m about to say some real going-up-my-own-ass-to-ponder-type stuff, but I’m not. I’ve done so in the past, for sure. But not this time. That’s not what I’m doing. So inspiration. Okay? I’m serious here. When I first read the paper on fisting, I thought, ‘It’s crazy that it took almost the entire history of humanity to come up with fisting,’ but it wasn’t til I came up with my own revolutionary fisting-like innovations that I considered the inverse of that. Or the converse? No, the…inverse. It wasn’t til I came up with my own innovations that I thought, ‘What’s even crazier than how long it took humanity to come up with fisting is that, after the entire history of humanity had failed to come up with fisting, some guy—some genius…did.’
“How, though, right? How?
“And I thought: Maybe he was just bored, and he looked down at his fist one day, and said to himself, ‘Where haven’t I put this? I want to put this somewhere new, just to see what it’s like.’ Or maybe it was nothing like that at all. Maybe the genius who came up with fisting wasn’t even really the first guy to fist, or even the first guy to get fisted, but the first guy to get fisted and like it, or the first guy to get fisted and imagine he could like it. What I mean is, like, maybe there were guys, all throughout history, or even prehistory—like cavemen, even—who fisted people as a kind of war crime or torture or medical thing, and the twentieth-century revolutionary genius I’m talking about was actually like the millionth guy to be fisted, but the first one to think, ‘In a different context, this might actually be pleasant.’ And then he tested the hypothesis.
“Or maybe he wasn’t the first guy to think that—maybe he was the tenth, the hundredth, the thousandth, whatever—maybe he wasn’t the first guy to think it, but the first guy who’d thought it who was also able to successfully imagine what the different context might be. And maybe his success had to do with where he came from, or who he was, or both. Like, maybe he was an oil baron or a leader or financial minister of a country that did a lot of whaling or coconut or olive harvesting, and so he was rich in blubber or petroleum or coconut or olive oil, and so he had just barrels and barrels of natural lubricant at his disposal, so many barrels that, I don’t know, he couldn’t sell them fast enough, so he spent a lot of his time thinking about new applications for all that excess natural lubricant, and almost anything he saw or thought about, he’d go, ‘I wonder if natural lubricant might improve this,’ so when he had the passing thought about fisting possibly being pleasant in a non-torture, non-war-crime context: eureka.
“Or it even could have been a kind of disability that he had. Or a disease. A disorder. Like, maybe he had this problem where he produced way too much saliva, and he went to sleep one night, thinking about the possibility of fisting being a pleasure, and the very next morning, as he was waking up, the hand he’d been resting his cheek on was glistening wrist-to-fingertips with drool, and maybe, too, this same disorder or disease or whatever caused him to have particularly tiny hands, maybe not. Or maybe he didn’t even go to bed thinking about fisting, but he had that extra-saliva disorder, and when he woke up with his hand all covered in drool, his hand was cold. It was really, really cold, and he was lonely, people thought he was a freak because of his tiny hands and how he drooled, and he just wanted to put his cold, slick hand somewhere, to heat it up, and to show people that him being a freak was not all bad, could maybe even be useful, thrilling, new and revolutionary…I don’t know. No one does. And I keep saying guy—it could’ve been a woman. Could’ve been a little kid. But no one knows and no one’s ever gonna know. No one’s ever gonna know who came up with fisting, or the story of how they came up with it, I thought, and that was a serious bummer, I thought. For society. I still think that. More than ever.
“Because I thought that if someone could explain the inspiration behind how fisting got invented or discovered or whatever, then other people, when they heard the explanation, would be inspired. They’d be more likely to come up with new, revolutionary fisting-type thrills themselves. Like the way I did.
“And that’s what I’m getting at about A Fistful. That’s why I started making A Fistful: to document the inspirations for Ulysses and Flick&Look and Charity Party and the Neo-Gratification exercises and any of my other innovations. Because all the clips in the collage: they were really inspiring to me, you know? See, I’ve been collecting clips for years. I have thousands of clips. Clips of weird and funny and sad and joyful and gross and upsetting moments in Curio history, moments that were important, and moments that were meaningless but should have been important, and moments that seemed important but were actually meaningless, and moments that definitely would have been important if more people knew about them. There’s boring ones, too. Hundreds of boring ones. But all of the clips—even the more boring ones—watching them made me even more fascinated by cures than I already was. And the clips in the collage—I don’t mean the ones that I’m in, but the rest of them—those clips are the best of the thousands. Those are the ones I’ve watched the most, or remember most often. You see what I’m saying? They’re as responsible for what I’ve been able to achieve as the paper about Foucault’s thing on fisting. Like, learning about Foucault’s thing on fisting inspired me to want to revolutionarily innovate in general, but it was these video clips that inspired me to revolutionarily innovate Curio interactions specifically.