jinx you owe me a coke
HI-HO EVERYBODY, WELCOME TO MY YARD-SALE BRAIN
Who would want this box of used underwear? Who would want a broken Sit-N-Spin? A complete set of those abridged Reader's Digest novels? Stuffed dog with only one eye? My thoughts are all dusty and cast-off today. I feel like I am sitting out here at the yard sale, in one of those plastic-webbing lawn chairs, because my mom is making me, and I am squinting in the hot sun under my fisherman's hat, and scuffing the toes of my Keds in the dirt, and I am reading Harriet The Spy for approximately the five hundredth time, and there is a pile of stained wooden Popsicle sticks next to me. No one is coming to this yard sale. No one is even slowing down.
HERE ARE A FEW OF THE ITEMS FOR SALE
1. I have a feeling I am the only person in Editorial right now who just finished firing off a lengthy e-mail to her friend about certain parts of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire while listening to AC/DC. (Back In Black, if you care to know.) AC/DC songs, at least on this album (I am not familiar with their entire oeuvre), have a weird habit of having these little intros and noodly outros, which is especially odd in a straight-ahead whiskey-and-cigarettes bar band. “Back in Black” even does a fade at the end of the album version. It seems bizarre. Where is the big monumental ending power chord? You guys need to listen to more Beethoven.
And I am certainly the only person in Editorial right now who followed up the Back in Black binge with Le Tigre. Wouldn't it be awesome to have them both play on the same bill at your party? What great crowd dynamics there would be.
2. A while ago I went to buy pita bread at the Muslim butcher shop (get out of here with your grocery-store pita: it's Al Khayam, King of Pita, or nothing), and walked in on a heated argument between the owner and his friend. They were arguing about who were THE WORST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD, shouting angrily in accented English, and as far as I could tell the race for the title of the very worst human beings on this planet was between the Turks and the Syrians. No one asked me my opinion.
3. An awful lot of women at my work wear fur coats. It took below-freezing temperatures,* I guess, to bring out the upscaleness and non-politically-correctness of my workplace. I do not eat animals but my shoes are leather, and I am certainly not any kind of paint-throwing treesitter, but how can you wear a fur coat? It seems so embarrassingly extravagant, just to raise animals and then skin them.**
4. *[the first fake footnote] You know everything is turning to shit in Exhibitionist Self-Indulgent Internet Diary World when you start to talk about the weather, but it is so cold here that Chicago made the front page of the New York Times (at least the Midwest edition), and eighteen people have died thus far. So see, we are not just Midwestern whiners, this is a cold that makes you die. Tomorrow we are supposed to hit thirty degrees Farenheit, which sounds totally like a freaking beach vacation right now, and I am all excited about it.
5. **[the second fake footnote] Wow, am I on a dead animal kick or what. But did you know that hides are tanned with brains? And that you, and in fact every animal, have just enough brains to tan your own hide? There is a moral lesson, and a really funny set of jokes, inside there somewhere, but I am a little drug-addled (caffeine and Tylenol Sinus) right now and am not able to tease them out. I am not able to draw the jokes out of this factoid in the manner that an ancient Egyptian priest would draw the brains out of the cadaver's nostrils, and hey! didn't that analogy go smoothly! I love it when that happens! Anyway, if you have some time to kill, go read about hide tanning and the use of brains for this purpose, and you will find quotations such as this:
Years ago, when I began tanning, I used to smash the brains with my hands and manually rub them into the hide. Then at one point in my hide tanning evolution, I pressed them through a screen to get them a mushy consistency. I've used pumice rock and antler bases to work the brains into and through the hide. I now prefer to use a blender.
While you read, say “braaaaaaaiiiiiinnns” a lot in a zombie voice. Then stagger around slowly with your arms straight out like the horrible flesh-eating undead creature that you are! Then watch the “Thriller” video! Then drink a bunch of tequila sunrises and spill the grenadine on yourself so it looks like fresh sticky blood! Then go sleep in a Dumpster! Presto! Friday night!
6. Why. The fuck. Would you bother.
7. Normally I have very clear skin, somewhat on the dry side, and I say this not because I think you care or because I want you to send me some crazy-ass homemade face remedy where I have to put smashed avocado on myself. (Every single “beauty” magazine I have ever looked at contains at least one thing like this, as if putting together some facial guacamole is a way I want to spend my time.) I mention it because I want to complain, and because I, being who a girl who normally has some trouble with the whole embodiment issue (which I am trying to work on by practicing yoga and having lots of sex), have finally made a connection between the pimple that pops up on my face every single month and my period, meaning that one comes right before the other. (Gasp! I apologize for that terribly indelicate reference to my uterine lining! Run, run, as fast as your cyberlegs will take you, away from me and my menstrual cycle!) Long story short: same zit, different day HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
(Obviously, something needs to be done about me.)
8. I am a title snob. There is this woman who works with me, and we don't really have the same taste in books but we do share what we have read and sometimes share books, her more than me since I am totally all about the library unless something has proven its worthiness. We understand that our tastes do not coincide all that often, so we have made an agreement that we can refuse a loan if it does not look like our thing. Today she comes to me with a book and says, “This was really good.”
I look at the title: All We Know of Heaven.
Me: Eh. No thanks.
Bookish Coworker: Don't you even want to know what it's about?
Me: Not really. I just can't get past that title. It is so bad.
Bookish Coworker: It's from the Emily Dickinson poem.
Me: I know where it's from. It's just…ugh. So icky to title a book like that. It is like eating syrupy fruit cocktail with a side of Serious Literature. It smells of Oprah.
Bookish Coworker: Okay, I get it. Never mind.
9. Male sharks are equipped with a penis called a clasper. In fact they have two – they use one and keep the other as a spare. To mate, they insert their clasper into the anus of the female and release their sperm. I am really angry that I have lived this long without knowing about the double penis of the shark and the fact that they do it in the butt. There needs to be a seminar called “Freaky Shit About Animals” so we could just learn all this stuff at once.What else don't I know? What other facts about the animal kingdom are out there in the universe of knowledge, just waiting to spring themselves on me? It is troubling to think about.
Three and a half hours until beer! Who's in?
—mimi smartypants wears her sunglasses at night.