This Place Looks Like This Thing

by Victoria Johnson and John Wenz

Tunisia, why are you turning your nose up like that at poor Sicily? Who can you possibly think you’re better than? You’re where George Lucas was allowed to have a camera.

You remember that picture where if you looked at it one way it was a haggard old lady and if you looked at it the other way it was a beautiful woman? I just looked at the old lady face in Alaska upside down and it looked like an upside-down old lady.

Armenia looks just like the protagonist of The Paperboy.

Pictured: India, left, cracking open a cold one and drinking Sri Lanka right up. I bet there’s a metaphor here somewhere. Let me read my Economist back issues and get back to you.

Does anyone remember The Mask, with pre-penguin movies Jim Carrey? Pre-fame Cameron Diaz. Also pre-taste 12-year-old me lapping it up out of a trough because it was a comic book movie. Korea, you remind me of the most horrible moments.

Everybody likes to think of the “I am not a crook” as the first time that Richard Nixon had to assert that he was not a crook. In fact, he made a lifelong career out of it. Just look up his Checkers speech. You have to admire someone who made a career out of bald-faced lying for his fuck-ups in public. It was like the Bill Clinton prototype. It was such a controversy when Ford pardoned him, and Nixon basically sulked out of the public life until he died, also creating the prototype for presidents who go into hiding after their presidencies.

I hear Montana is a beautiful place.

I wonder if there’s a border that looks like Gerald Ford.

I’ve been really tryin’, baby / Tryin’ to hold back these feeling for so long / And if you feel, like I feel baby / Then come on, oh come on. (I would like to think that Morocco is the secret freak who kisses on Spain.)

I keep looking for the mouth of Pakistan. In one place, it’s whistling a tune. In another, it’s keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of adversity. In still another, there are robotic planes hovering above.

Victoria Johnson and John Wenz see nothing in the borders of Missouri. In fact, they don’t acknowledge Missouri at all.