Jennifer Howard

Flat Stanley wore his glasses to birthday dinner…

…and his dad told him, “You look like Jodi Arias.” Flat Stanley doesn’t particularly look like Jodi Arias. Neither does this story’s author, who is actually the daughter of the dad in question, except in a basic lady-wearing-glasses way. When compared to a pretty murderess, is a person supposed to latch onto the pretty or the murder? Deciding to dig in to her case, later, Flat Stanley finds no serious longform journalist about Jodi Arias. TV movie, check; three-part- very-loud-Hulu  investigation, sure. Some Bustle checklists. Come on, journalists, investigate this story! That Mormon dude she murdered brutally was obvs a dick, but also the empty gas cans seem to suggest premeditation? This woman’s story is complicated and nobody cares. No judge is telling her, à la Ted Bundy, that she could have been something special if she had turned her talents elsewhere, you handsome thing, you strapping young man, full of promise and charm. If you had made other choices—judges loved to say to Bundy—you could have been my clerk, my successor. Nah. We only know Arias needed to apply powder before facing Nancy Grace. Who wouldn’t?

Flat Stanley discovers from her own website is that Jodi Arias is making art in prison. Some still lifes – grapes, a hand holding a strawberry, several eyeballs close up. And a few celebrity portraits: Lucille Ball, Liz Taylor. Also Steph Curry, question mark. The one that most moves Flat Stanley is her pencil sketch of Rami Malek in his Mr. Robot hoodie. She was watching Mr. Robot in prison, he supposes? I suppose? Fair enough that the Perryville, Arizona, prison subscribes to Amazon Prime. The author watched it, which is to say I watched it.

On the same night they bought wedding rings, the author and her now-long-ex visited an exhibit of Jack Kevorkian’s paintings in a little gallery in Royal Oak, Michigan. Lotta skulls much blood, if she remembers. The grandfather of euthanasia’s first painting was entitled “A Very Still Life.” (So was his first jazz-flute/jazz-organ CD.) Let’s get married!, they said, during and after perusing these paintings. Let’s buy rings.

Mr. Robot doesn’t get good until its third season, but then it gets really good. Flat Stanley stuck with it, though, because beginning in late 2016 he could only watch TV in which somebody—somebody, please be a hero!—was trying to dismantle a broken system. The author’s now-long-ex had been her college professor. Flat Stanley wonders if Jodi Arias was advised to wear glasses at the trial to look less pretty, which is a bad tip because he thinks—geez, everybody thinks—glasses make people prettier. Jodi’s broken systems: the patriarchy, her boyfriend’s dumb church, the difficulty of pretending to want to be tied to a tree and fucked in the ass while simultaneously trying to be Mormon wife material. What if—Mr. Robot thinks, Jodi Arias thinks, even Jack Kevorkian, and the author—what if our art was simply to blow shit up and stop caring if our teachers think we’re smart enough to kiss, and we refuse, destroy, demolish: slash the rest of everything.