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the latest waddle:

good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03

elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01

building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19

ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09

my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04


2006-02-08 ... 10:58 a.m.

There are days when I really wish everything looked like this.

Dispatches from "Your Produce Man," which read kind of like David Letterman on Percodan, and no you cannot have these. These are mine. These are for me. I am going to bring them to an open mic night and do a dramatic reading.

Well most of you...can you smell this already? When you peel an Orange, everybody in the room can smell that Orange. Right? "Heh, who's peeling the Orange?" Right? That's what everybody thinks. You're at the school, and you're in the cafeteria. "Heh, who's peeling the Orange?" You can smell it.

FUCKING GENIUS.

This is a story from BusinessWeek about legislation that could make it harder for people to have pet monkeys. Here is my favorite part:

Some people are seeing the conflict over primate ownership as something larger than monkey business -- a question of government power. Taking a libertarian view, Joseph Kirkland doesn't think he should be punished for the perceived mistakes of other monkey owners. A National Rifle Association member, he channels that group's resentment toward people who want to legislate his life. "Just like my gun," he says, "They're going to have to pry my monkey from my cold, dead hand."

A man who owns a monkey AND a gun is a very special man indeed. And the parallels between monkey and gun ownership make me think that perhaps the "well-regulated militia" part of the Second Amendment could be loosely interpreted to mean "trained monkey armies ready to fling feces at, and bite the ever-living shit out of, al-Qaeda." I am a peace-loving person and generally not given to jingoistic revenge fantasies but there is something immensely satisfying about picturing terrorists screaming in panic as swarms of baboons overtake them.

I am quite fond of the "cold, dead hand" (or "fingers") clich�. We should institute Cold Dead Fingers Day---a wildcat-strike sort of day during which simple requests for any object will be responded to in a cold-dead-fingers manner. Please pass the salt? You'll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers. Did you finish that spreadsheet? Yes, and you'll have it when you pry it from etc etc. This will be an especially great day for those who work in the service industry! Venti half-caf vanilla latte? COLD DEAD FINGERS, SIR!

Good morning! I am drinking coffee, just like a regular American! Normally I only drink the jittery brew at the Hooker Diner or the floofy flavored nonsense at the Starbucks Of Great White Mommy Entitlement, but today I am having regular old cafeteria coffee because I am out of my fancy Earl Grey, this office is ignorant of anything but Lipton (yeccch), and my bosses frown on using the break room's hotplate to extract the faux-meth from Sudafed. Hey, coffee-drinkers: do your mouths taste all retro like this all the time? Do your mouths always taste like college? This taste is making me want a cigarette, and a beer in a can, and a bonghit, and a big poster of Elvis Costello and another of Susan B. Anthony, and an asymmetrical haircut, and a romanticized view of the working class, and a secret All My Children addiction that, embarrassingly, actually influences how I schedule classes.

SPEAKING OF EMBARRASSING

1. Last Friday I spent some after-work time at a new wine bar near the office. The good thing about this place is that they serve a quarter-liter of house red for four dollars, and the quality is kind of ehhhhh but you won't care after the first one. The bad things about this place are that (a) it is lit like a goddamn hospital, and I prefer to do my drinking in semi-darkness; (b) the crowd is fancy and shiny and all the girls have serious handbags and all the boys probably think it's okay to wear those plastic shower sandals out in public in the summertime; and (c) it has the most interactive bathroom I have ever seen. I only went twice, because the bathroom was up the stairs and around a corner and so very socially exhausting (more on this in a minute) that after that it was easier to just head home to pee, to just throw down a probably-inadequate-but-I'm-too-tired-figure-it-out amount of cash on the table and get out of there. In this bathroom, the shiny handbag girls were all about making the small talk, about shoes and the quality of the soap and do I know of any other cool bars around here, and the only kind of chat I will tolerate in the bathroom is the kind that quickly leads to sleazy lesbotronic makeout, and that was so not going to happen in this upscale River North venue. The other horrifyingly interactive thing about the wine bar bathroom is that it has a bathroom attendant. Do restaurant owners/managers not think critically about things like bathroom attendants? Do they not even have a tiny flash of the awful awkward implications of a bathroom attendant? Do they really think it is a lovely little touch of class to pay crap wages to a woman of color (invariably) who will sit in the bathroom for the entirety of her shift mutely handing towels to hair-tossing white girls with expensive degrees in "Communications"? It is possible that I am overly sensitive to these things, given that I cannot even let a pop-cult reference to The Brady Bunch slide without going off about how that whole bourgeois family suckled at the teat of Alice's proletariat labor, who then was "allowed" to date another proletariat, in a strangely chaste manner, as a reward. But still. Bathroom attendants.

2. Equally horrifying, Nora's school recently celebrated a "Multicultural Potluck," with dishes from the student body's "diverse ethnic backgrounds." And lion dancing, for Chinese New Year. And some kind of indigenous Guatemalan music, because---well, we're not really sure! Because Guatemala, I guess! And a drum circle, to represent those whose ethnic background is "whitebread hippie!" Of course we did not attend---nothing makes me more ill than squashed-together "ethnic" celebrations like this, and in the few lucid moments when I can think about it without extreme nausea or a full-body cringe I sometimes consider getting myself on whatever committee or board comes up with such nonsense, just so I can scream NO NO NO and then hold a mandatory teach-in (which the authorities might call a "hostage situation," come to think of it) about tokenism and hegemony and the evil of drum circles.

SHORT SHORT FICTION AWARD

Nora has been telling us stories lately. Her stories always feature the phrase "he/she/it walked and walked." Characters get around under their own power in Nora's stories, and they do it at length. She ends everything with "the end," of course, and she sometimes follows it up with the comment "true story," which is totally my fault since I used to do that for my own amusement whenever I read to her, especially when the story was of the fantastic variety. The other day I asked for a story and she said, "There was a town and a monster. The monster made some problems for the town, so after a while the town said GO AWAY MONSTER. Then the town said OKAY? DID YOU HEAR ME? And the monster did not say anything. And then the town went to bed. And then when everyone woke up the monster was gone."

Then she paused and said, "It had resolved itself." And then I died because she is the awesomest.

LT thinks she may have actually said, "It [meaning the monster] had dissolved itself," which gives more of a sci-fi and less of a Raymond Carver flavor to the story, but either way I am eagerly waiting the next installment.

---does mimi smartypants look infected to you?

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