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  • The Paris Review

    The Code of Hammurabi

    by Jenny Slate Nov 05, 2019 12 minutes

    The Code of Hammurabi, ca. 1771 B.C.. Photo: Louvre Museum (CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)), via Wikimedia Commons.

    I am sitting in the room in my house where I’ve put the television in a big wicker cabinet so that I don’t ever have to see the television. I enjoy watching the TV, but also I think that it is an ugly object. I cringe when I see the TV loitering like a dumbass, incorrect in its placement next to my books and tender hanging plants and thoughtfully chosen textiles. But here I am, sitting in front of it. I am watching a documentary that anyone can find and watch. I have not dug deep into a subculture to find it. It was right here when I turned on the thing and clicked on the other thing.

    And the world is certainly scary because suddenly everything is computer and computers and internet stuff, but there is still some good to extract from it, like this documentary I am watching.

    I have Thai food that is so spicy that I start to sweat and breathe in and out like how ladies do Lamaze breathing while having a baby in a movie in the 1980s. I ordered it with the vague notion that it might be really nice to just blow my colon out once and for all. It might be nice to live life as a big empty whistling network of inner caves. But now I see that I am just bloating myself with salt and fusing my insides together with oils that I am not genetically inclined to process.

    I think, If my ancient dog gets even a lick of this curry, his hair-fur will fall off of his body like when you blow on a dandelion. And then he will throw up a small trickle of yellow. And then he will die. And then I will have nobody at all including the many different When what I really mean is

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